Adaptation

I first heard about the 7 P's during my Wilderness First Responder training.
It goes a little something like this:
Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
Simply put, have a plan of action ahead of time.
We'll get back to this in a moment...

I believe that many people in the North American Church are experiencing what can only be described as climate change of the soul. The oasis places where we once were nourished are drying up and they no longer carry meaning for us like it once did. This drying up of the soul is permeating all other avenues of our lives and there are no signs that it is going to get better. Let's be clear, this time will not be about death… it will be about life. It will reinvigorate our atrophied souls. It was over ten years ago that I wrote the following:

"A time is coming when the North American Church will begin experiencing that which feels more like death than life. Attempts to cover over this period will only further mitigate our sense of aliveness. This aliveness in Jesus will look very different than North American Christianity, which is full of emptiness and fear. This aliveness will look more like indigenous and even non-Christian traditions, which we are beginning to understand are more rooted in the church than North American Christianity attempts to be. The church will need to be reconstructed in order to better understand who God is and who we are. In the time shortly after, it will be forced into a wilderness period even as she refuses to do so."  (Taken from a July 2003 journal entry)

What we are experiencing isn't something new. If the interior is beginning to look less like a temperate rainforest and more like the American southwest, then it's my belief that the wilderness/desert period has already begun.

As our faith landscapes are changing then it becomes crucial to understand how this affects the ecology of the soul. The more we are beginning to understand about place-based spirituality, the more we are discovering how important our ties to the land really affect our spiritual well-being and formation. To borrow from the language of evolutionary biology, it's all about how well we've learned to adapt. If we've grown accustomed to living only in one bio-region, then we may not be as prepared to live in another, much different one, especially if the terrain is harsher. The same can be said for our spiritual development. 

This is where I come back to my prior point of the North American Church experiencing climate change of the soul. It's also where we must apply the 7 P's to our faith formation as the church struggles to move ahead. In order to make the kinds of discoveries this wilderness/desert journey entails, it will start with the church needing to practice self-abandonment; something (least historically) hasn't done very well. If the church hasn't exactly taken the lead on this, then where do we turn to once this faith landscape moves from an agrarian spirituality to a desert spirituality?

We have a template...
We have elders...
It was the folks who walked away from empirical Christianity in the beginning of the 4th century CE. and we refer to them today as the Desert Fathers and Mothers.  I think it's time we get reacquainted with these elders who believed in "their time" that the church had become overly comfortable. It's time that we adapt our way of being to the wilderness/desert spirituality. Up to this point we've only talked about it... now the time has come for us to begin living it.