Discipleship in a Secular Age

An introduction to our new sermon series

You wake up. Your hand reaches for your phone. 

Doom scroll. 

You check your appointments and to-do lists. You see that you are on the roster to do morning tea at church on Sunday. You sigh and get up. 

You then move through the day in a kind of forward lean, always slightly behind, always reaching for the next thing. Then Sunday comes, and you sit down in church, and your head is still running.

Most of us know that feeling. What we rarely notice is that it is affecting our faith. Life for Christians wasn’t always like this. This is the secular age. The water we are swimming in.

Our new sermon series starting Sunday is called Discipleship in a Secular Age, and before we begin, I want to put an important idea in front of you: we are all immersed in the secular age, whether we believe in God or not, and it is shaping us far more deeply than we realise.

I have been a minister long enough now to have watched this up close. Over the years, I have seen people at Merri Creek struggle with what I believe are the effects of the secular age. For many of them, I suspect it slowly wore their faith down until, one day, they let it go. My ongoing concern is that there are people active in our church right now who, in ten years, will no longer call themselves Christian. 

I don't want that to be you.

This is not a hunch I have arrived at on my own. For the past five years or so I have been studying the Secular Age, I have presented on it to other pastors, and last year I travelled to Michigan to sit under the teaching of the scholar Andrew Root, who has thought about it as carefully as anyone. The same currents are pulling at congregations everywhere. I want us to understand them, so that we can stand in them together.

What "secular" really means

When we hear the word secular, most of us picture empty pews and the rise of atheism. We imagine the church in decline and assume the problem is out there, among the people who have stopped coming.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor helps us see something larger and stranger. He asks a haunting question: why, in the West, was it almost impossible not to believe in the Christian God in the year 1500, while in our own time belief in God has become just one option among many, and for many people, not even the obvious one? Something huge has changed, and it runs much deeper than attendance figures.

A secular age, in Taylor's sense, is a whole way of imagining the world. It reshapes how we think about meaning, time, identity, community, and even God. And the surprising part is that it does this to all of us, churchgoers included. We breathe the same air as everyone around us. We are formed by the same screens, the same hurry, the same unspoken assumption that the real world is the one we can touch and the meaning is something we have to make for ourselves.

There is a version of this that many of us know from our own friendships. Perhaps you have a friend who is kind, thoughtful, and generous, and who finds your faith strange or even harmful. Perhaps your children are growing up among people who pray to a different God, or to no God at all, and who seem no less decent for it. Their nearness does something subtle to us. Faith stops feeling like the obvious shape of the world and starts to feel like a position we have chosen and might just as easily not have. Taylor's point is gentle but unsettling: belief becomes fragile less through argument than through closeness to good people who believe otherwise.

The stadium with the roof closed

Taylor has an image for the world we now inhabit. He calls it the "immanent frame," and you can picture it as a great football stadium.

For most of human history, we lived in that stadium with the roof open. We looked up and saw the stars, and beyond the stars we imagined heaven, and we took it for granted that we were part of a cosmos far larger than ourselves, where God was near and the spiritual world pressed in on the ordinary one. Then, slowly, the roof slid shut. Now the only world we can easily see is the one inside the stadium: the field, the lights, the crowd, the things we can measure and manage. Many of our neighbours live as though there is nothing above the roof at all.

In a secular age, you can easily believe the roof is open and still spend most of your week functioning as though it were closed: functioning as if there is no God, no spiritual realm, no heaven or hell. The secular age is not simply around us but inside us. It shapes our expectations of what faith should feel like, what prayer should produce, and how quickly we should be changed.

A self with the doors shut

Taylor describes another shift that helps explain why faith can feel so fragile now.

For most of human history, people understood themselves as porous. The boundary between a person and the world was more like a screen door than a sealed vault. In other words, power, and presence moved through it. A holy place could change you. Bread and wine could carry the very life of God. Even your moods might be more than your own: a wave of dread, a flood of joy, the sense of grace arriving from somewhere beyond you. You were vulnerable, but you were never alone, and goodness was something woven into the world that you could lean into rather than something you had to generate by yourself.

We have become something different. Taylor calls the modern self buffered. We have built walls. Meaning no longer arrives from outside; we generate it within. When something goes wrong, we reach for the language of chemistry and circumstance rather than grace or judgement. There is real freedom in this. We manage our inner lives with care and effort, and much of that is a genuine gift.

The cost is one you have probably felt. The buffered self is lonely. Holding your faith up by yourself, inside the closed stadium, is exhausting work. And every so often, something slips past the walls anyway: a piece of music that makes you weep, the melancholic silence of the congregation before a funeral, a landscape that feels like more than rock and light. Taylor says the closed frame keeps cracking open. So we are buffered selves, in the closed stadium, but we are haunted by the memory of porousness, and the memory of the open roof, still half-expecting God to break through.

The treadmill and the ache

There is another current we are caught in, that helps us to understand the secular age, and the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa names it well: “acceleration”. He describes modern life as a treadmill that keeps speeding up, so that we have to run faster and faster simply to stay in place. We upskill or we fall behind. We optimise our mornings, our diets, our children's calendars. We pull the whole world into our pockets and call it freedom.

Rosa's warning is that this endless reaching for more access and more control leads somewhere we never intended. He calls it “alienation”. We begin to meet the world in combat mode, treating each day as a list of problems to solve, and slowly, the world goes quiet on us. We can win the things we wanted, the grades and the job and the followers, and still feel, in his stark phrase, empty and silent inside. It is one reason so many people, especially the young, describe a life that looks full and feels hollow.

When faith becomes smooth

There is one more feature of our world worth naming, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it smoothness [Check out my earlier post on smoothness]. Think of the polished glass of your phone, the frictionless swipe, the entertainment that never makes you wait, the app designed so that nothing ever catches or resists. Everything is built to be easy, instant, and comfortable.

Now imagine that same expectation as you walk into church on a Sunday. We start to want our faith as smooth as everything else. We hope the worship will move us without our having to give anything. We want the sermon to comfort without ever confronting. We grow impatient with the awkward conversation at morning tea, the person in our small group who interrupts, the prayer that has gone unanswered for years. We don’t want to be told what Bible passage or theme to study in our community group, we want to choose. When discipleship asks something difficult of us, something in us recoils, because we have been trained to expect a life without friction.

Yet the central image of our faith is a cross, which is rough and splintered and costly. Jesus says, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). The rough edges are not faults in the design. They are the very places where something real is happening, the way calluses form on the hands of someone who actually works.

What is this doing to us?

Put these currents together, and you can feel the pressure. Belief no longer feels obvious; it feels like a choice we have to keep defending, even to ourselves. God can seem distant, as though speaking from somewhere above a closed roof. We are too hurried to be still, too buffered to be reached, and too accustomed to smoothness to stay with anything that costs us.

The apostle Paul saw the heart of this long before Charles Taylor gave it a name. "Do not conform to the pattern of this world," he wrote, "but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2). The pattern of our particular world is fast, closed, and smooth. It presses us into its shape gently, constantly, mostly without our consent. Discipleship is what it looks like to be transformed into a different shape instead.

Why this series, and why now?

The temptation, when we, the church, feel the pressure of the secular age, is to think the sollution is more relevance. If we just become louder, slicker, faster, more atractive like the culture around us, we’ll overcome. But you cannot answer acceleration with more speed, or smoothness with more polish. 

So over these weeks we will turn our attention to the practices that form us as followers of Jesus in this particular moment: stillness in a world that never stops, presence in a world of distraction, covenant community in a world of frictionless connection, attention to the sacred hidden inside the ordinary. Think of these as ways of leaving the roof open, rather than techniques for a more successful Christian life. They are how a buffered people slowly become porous again to the grace of God.

The prophet Elijah, exhausted and afraid, went looking for God in a great wind, and an earthquake, and a fire, and God was in none of them. "And after the fire came a gentle whisper" (1 Kings 19:12). We live in an age of wind and earthquake and fire, of noise and speed and spectacle. Learning to hear the gentle whisper again, together, is the work in front of us.

An invitation

I am inviting you to see the secular water that we are swimming in, not to feel guilty about it, and certainly not to grow nostalgic for an earlier time none of us has ever lived in. Clarity is the beginning of freedom.

Our calling in this secular age is to dig a deeper well, rather than to build a bigger, faster ship to outrun the tide. While the culture around us grows more hurried and more hollow, we have the chance to become a people marked by stillness, by presence, by a love that endures the rough edges, by a faith that does not flinch from the cross. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10) is among the most countercultural sentences you will hear all week.

Come and be still with us over these six weeks. The God who made the world above the roof has not, for one moment, abandoned the world beneath it.