Chapter 2: You Are Here
To know where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve been. Understanding the premise of pilgrimage that Wilson introduced int he previous chapter, he begins to elaborate on the idea a bit more before jumping into the four dimensions.
Although we all find ourselves within the shared “sphere” of experience and reality (what Wilson calls a collective religious history), and many of us find ourselves working toward the center, we all start at a different point and travel different paths within the sphere. So although we share the experience of pilgrimage, we each begin our pilgrimage with unique baggage and understandings of religion.
Wilson starts with the macro picture of the pilgrimage of Christianity as a whole…how it has progressed throughout history and changed. He then looks specifically at the flux Christianity has gone through in the 20th century alone and how this influences us today and our starting points, so to speak. This leads to his classifying of modern Christianity into four quadrants (each a section of the whole): liturgical, social justice, evangelical, renewalist/pentacostal. While in recent years many have experienced a crossing over or overlapping of some of the quadrants (and have benefitted deeply by what they have to offer each other), there remains today those who choose to dwell in the most remote corners of their quadrant, safe from borders and blending with the other quadrants.
So we take this macro story and blend it with our personal micro stories: family backgrounds and what we’ve added along the way via our lives and decisions and experiences. All of this makes up our pilgrimage, and by looking back we can see the path that we’ve travelled.
As I said above, the quadrants of Modern Christianity are melding and bleeding together, helped along by technology and mass media, the internet, increased mobility and loosening social ties. Given all of this change, Wilson says that
to be a corner dweller, you really have to work at it; you have to intentionally create and sustain a group-think ethos through social control mechanisms, contempt for others, and a defensive mentality. Even then, your child is only a mouse click away from the rest of the world.
He concludes the chapter by saying that the thrust of history, not to mention the Spirit, is not to keep holed up in the corners…but to move toward the interior borders and center. As this happens, new connections are taking place betwee people, new information is being exchanged, and new expressions of faith are emerging. The center, not the quadrant, is the point…and the center is God as revealed through Jesus.
The center is and always has been a place beyond all places. The center is not ultimately Rome or Geneva or Canterbury or Constantinople, not Azusa Street or Colorado Springs. Nor is it even Jerusalem. The journey home is from and through these and other places, wherever it is we find ourselves.
The center, if such exists, is a place we cannot find but is finding us…a city where the streets have no name, whose memory, tucked away in all our hearts, makes of every other place the “not yet” place, because a pilgrim is one who says, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
