There is suspicion towards authoritative answers and absolute truths with a new creed: "I feel, therefore I am." This post modern approach to life is hungry for experience, is always concerned about how people feel and whether something works. In the context of modernity the church had to deal with the notion that "Christianity is not true." Now in the relativism of post-modernism the attack focuses differently -- "Christians are claiming to have the only truth."

Ancient Medieval Reformation Modern Postmodern

Mystery Institutional Word Reason Mystery

Community Systematic Community

Symbol Analytical Symbol

Verbal Individualistic

(Fig. 2 [Paradigms of Church History, (Webber 1999, 34)])

However dispassionately we may describe these changing eras, there seems to be an ominously fast build-up of pressures. Leonard Sweet has graphically likened them to a massive tidal wave -- "a flood tide of a revolution is cutting its swath across our world and is gathering prodigious momentum" (1999, 17). Different generations are caught in its currents -- Boomers (born 1927-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-64), Generation X (1965-1981) and Millennials born since 1981. Boomers, identified with modernity, are often in current church leadership with their emphasis on rationality and excellence. Generation X is a 'hinge generation' born into modernity yet overwhelmed by post-modernity and it tends to be much more experiential, interactive and pragmatic in outlook. It tends to stress issues of relevance, genuineness and authenticity. For Millennials there has been no other experience except that of post-modernity and this generation presents a new dynamic which Howe and Strauss view optimistically in The Millennials: the next great generation (2000).

Underneath, powering this tsunami, is a radical philosophical shift which is especially focused on how we understand language and meaning. If the 'Enlightenment project' summed up Modernism, then 'deconstructionism' is centerpiece to Postmodernity. Associated with Jacques Derrida in the 1970's, this is a destructive theory about language and the phenomenon of understanding itself which claims that words have no objective content. The only 'reality' words have is what they create in our minds as we use them. So, deconstructionists can argue that God can have no existence independent of language. Words express opinions each of which has equal validity.

How we understand and use language is critically bound up with culture, and though there are philosophical complexities and humankind itself has a "multimedia character", Schultz is right to claim that "in every area of life, the human word drives culture" (2000, 41).

Communication Shifts

Inextricably caught up within culture change are paradigm shifts in communication. It is generally agreed that there are three main eras of communication in the history of the world with only two periods of transition caused first by the invention of the alphabet and printing, and second by the advent of electronics. Today we are living through only the second major transition in the entire story of communication which accompanies the paradigm shift from Modernity to Postmodernity. When Marshal McLuhan declared that "the medium is the message" he argued that society has always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which people communicate than by the content of the communication itself (1964). Our senses and ways of thinking are profoundly affected, even reconstructed, by the media.