It’s a new cultural epoch

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

A new cultural epoch means new ways of doing things. “We’re living in the fourth cultural epoch, or cultural period, the first having been the Agrarian Age and then the Industrial Age followed by the Information Age and now what I refer to as the Inventive Age,” says Doug Pagitt. “My suggestion is that in each of these periods there’s a way that people think, what they value, the esthetics they appreciate and the tools that they use. When a culture changes in all four of those areas, then we tend to describe that as being in a new cultural situation.”

Churches have been created inside the Agrarian situation, and that’s typically the parish model churches.
Some went through some significant adjustments with the dawning of the Industrial Age. Churches established at that period of time tend to be the main-line denominational churches, and they represent and reflect the Industrial Age in the same way that the Catholic and Episcopal would have reflected the Agrarian. So you have middle managers. You have a headquarters somewhere. Clergy are forced to have to represent their brand in relationship to the churches on the other street corners.
The rise of the Information Age focused the attention on schools as the centres of education, knowledge and teaching.
With the coming of the Inventive Age there will be many churches but they will have some common characteristics. They’ll tend to be built around abundance rather than scarcity. They’ll tend to be built around meaning-making rather than hierarchies.