[Music] I'm grateful in one way that I get to speak to you from my living room because I get to show you something that's on the wall in my living room these three frames each of them given to me by a different friend at a different time but all of them tell a single story it's a story of one of the most dramatic cultural transformations of the last several centuries it starts with the top frame which reproduces a diary entry from the British safe zone William Wilberforce in 1787 and in it he wr
ites God Almighty has placed before me two great objects the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of manners what verse wrote this as a young man beginning his career in Parliament it took the his entire life before the act for the abolition of the slave trade actually was passed and what happened next is the story of the next frame it's a painting of a British naval ship pursuing a slave ship guns blazing as this ship which is part of what was called the preventive squadron of the
Royal Navy attempts to actually stamp out that which Parliament had made illegal because after Parliament passed the act for the abolition of the slave trade it took 50 years to actually end the slave trade across the Atlantic 50 years a third of the Royal Navy at the height of the preventive squadron and and seventeen thousand lives of officers and sailors incredibly slow difficult unbelievably dangerous work that actually enacted Wilberforce's dream and then the third frame has a photograph f
rom our own time of two young young folks maybe 12 or 13 years old and they're from a country which has outlawed slavery for many many decades but in this country it's still the case that many people are functionally enslaved held by force not free to leave not compensated for their labor often as children and when this practice is discovered and when the legal system is brought to bear on it the legal system gives the people who have been functionally enslaved these certificates of manumission
that certify that there's no debt there's no obligation that can possibly keep them that they are free to go and these two children are holding the certificates their families have received because they're now free this is 300 plus years after Wilberforce wrote his words and his great object is perhaps only now close to being realized this is how culture changes I got thinking about this in a new way when I read a book a couple years ago by the Mennonite historian Alan Crider it's called the pat
ient ferment of the early church the patient ferment of the early church Crider picks up on a question raised by the sociologists of religion Riley stark in his book the rise of Christianity which is also a terrific book and in that book stark observes that the early church grew between the years 100 AD and 400 AD by about 30 percent per decade decade after decade for 300 years incredible quite fast in some ways exponential growth to the point that when Constantine converts perhaps 40 to 45 perc
ent of the Empire or Christian believers and stark asked a question that Crider picks out how did this happen but Crider focuses the question a bit more he says how did this happen without any attempt to evangelize the Roman world because in fact there is no instruction given to the Christians of the first centuries in evangelizing their neighbors no bishop or priest in the in the early church gave any sermons or teachings about evangelism if you'd ask them well what about the Great Commission g
o into all the world baptizing and making disciples they would have said yes the Great Commission was given to the twelve and were the the 11 and they went out James went to Spain and Thomas went to India and they would have said that the Apostles did what Jesus told them they went into all the world and so check it's done they actually didn't pick up on that text as a man date for every day Christian's activity the crater observes that there was a topic that every bishop around the Mediterranea
n rim made sure that his people were taught we have treatises kind of in-depth teaching documents on this topic not on evangelism but on a different topic and the topic was patience patience was something every early Christian Bishop thought it was essential to teach his people the people under his care and to form in them and the story that Ellen Crider tells is the story of what he calls patient ferment because patients led to fermentation slow often invisible organic and relentless growth the
early church grew through patient ferment I want us to think about what this means for our dreams are great objects and our vision of cultural transformation in our time and our time is complicated by the fact that we no longer primarily think about fermentation because it's been replaced by something else even in just when you look at the beverages we consume the beverages we consume now benefit from another process a modern process an industrial process called carbonation carbonation is a way
of injecting into a liquid these little bubbles of dissolved carbon dioxide that when you open the soda can or the bottle they start to bubble out and you get that wonderful effervescence that in the ancient world only happens through the activity of the yeast turning sugars into alcohol with carbon dioxide as a by-product but we now know how to just directly inject through a very in a sense simple I mean complex to us but simple to engineers process it allows us to have carbonated beverages wh
enever we want to have that fizz whenever we want and to get it without anything fermenting now if you don't drink alcohol for one reason another this is good news but I think it's dangerous if our metaphor for life becomes carbonation rather than fermentation carbonation quick industrial reliable predictable scales really well fermentation slow ganic mysterious often invisible takes a long time which is our picture of cultural change a lot hinges on whether we have a carbonation picture of how
culture changes or a fermentation picture and of course Jesus taught a lot about this and he always used fermentation as his his picture of how the kingdom grows he used organic metaphors agricultural metaphors yeast worked into a loaf wine that expands inside a wine skin very slowly or not fermentation directly of an organic metaphor the small seed that grows until suddenly it's a it's a bush big enough for tree big enough for birds to nest this is not the way we think about culture but it is t
he way culture actually grows at its best I wrote a book called culture making a number of years ago now and when I started writing I thought I would write about creativity and creation because I was really interested in cultural creatives the kinds of people who bring new things into being in the world and I still think that's an image bearing thing to do but my mind was changed about culture as I sat down to ask what does the Bible itself say about the essence of good culture and when I read t
he Bible through a cultural lens I actually found that I was reading about not creation primarily not total innovation and brand-new things but something else that I came to call cultivation the patient tending of the world the Lord God put the man in the garden to tell it and to keep it to tend it and keep it to cultivate it God in the biblical story is the creator of all things human beings are placed within God's creation to tend it and keep it and when you start thinking about the very best
things in our world the things that culture has given us that are the treasures of human achievement in a way the treasures of human beings tending and keeping the world they have this quality of patience all of our greatest agricultural Heritage's the olive groves of the Middle East the vineyards of southern Europe and the Mediterranean the architecture of much of the world all these forms of culture actually grew very slowly many of the greatest buildings in the world took multiple generations
to complete an olive tree doesn't even start bearing a single olive for about eight years and then it can bear for hundreds of years so you have to learn how to pass on that olive grove from generation to generation culture is most of all about cultivation now we think well but some things happen in culture very quickly and of course that's true but most of the things that happen quickly in culture within the span of a single generation or even in the span of a couple days happen most of the th
ings that happen quickly actually are damaging things detrimental things the only thing you can really do with Rome in a day what can you do with Rome in a day you can burn it it can burn it in roughly a day how long does it take for notre-dame Cathedral which took generations to build to be nearly destroyed one overnight fire and people sometimes ask me well you know what's how do you change culture how do you change the world and one answer is it's pretty simple it only takes 21 men for plans
and one morning and you can change the course of history but then you realize oh what you're really asking is how do I change the world for the better how do I bring about a beneficial change in the world and that you can't do quickly you can change things for the worse really fast but you cannot change things for the better except patiently when you look at human attempts to quickly create to create out of nothing to create X Neill oh you actually find human human culture and its most nihilisti
c the attempts of the modernist composers of the 20th century to cast aside generations of tradition about how music made sense and sound and just create new forms serialism and totalism that actually are just brutal to listen to and not appealing and haven't really lasted or found audiences in the long run we look at the buildings that architects designed when they decide to scrap everything human beings had ever known to scrap reverence and respect for the past to scrap patience and just build
quickly and they built brutally our metaphors for power if they come from coercion and violence show us how powerful things can be done quickly but if our metaphors come from creation and cultivation they actually show us how good things take a lot of time and so part of what we have to learn if we're going to really be part of cultural transformation is patience kovat 19 has required a great deal of patience we've been stuck we've been stuck at home we've been stuck within limits of what we ca
n do and cannot do and we've had to discover how bad we are at patience this is a word patience that comes from the Latin verb that means to suffer and I suppose that the essence of patience is bearing with difficulty over time it's it's the duration of time that makes patience hard and I certainly feel that to this day under a stay at home order and my own state and feeling this incredible stretch of my ability to bear with the difficulty of this knowing how long it is and in the scale of human
lifetime not that long we've found out how bad we are at this and yet this is the secret of cultural change its patience this is why the early church had to teach it because it doesn't come naturally but for people who do become patient things become possible culturally and personally that we're not possible before so what becomes possible as you become a person of patience well you yourself begin to change do you want truth and love together do you want truth and love together you will not get
that through carbonation it's not just going to be infused mechanically quickly reliably into your life because the deepest truth I have to wrestle with is isn't some ways the truth about me the truth about myself the truth about my own impatience the truth about my desire for control the truth about my desire to escape suffering rather than Barrett and discovering that truth about myself and without truth about myself how can i how can I propose or pretend to tell anyone else the truth about t
he world that takes patient formation of myself and what happens in formation of the person at least when it happens well when it happens in a way that actually benefits us as we discover that even the worst truth about us is held known and overcome by love that we are loved in spite of the truth about ourselves and that allows us to turn to the world until it tell the world the truth about the brokenness and distorted damage of the world but to do it in a way that that spreads and exudes love t
o others and then having been personally formed in this way of truth and love we're then able to actually build you could say truthful loving institutions institutions are cultural patterns that last sociologists think of institutions not just as like the bank down the street or the university down the street but as any cultural pattern that endures over time and I think the minimum amount of time for an institution to last is three generations you really don't have culture you don't really have
cultural change until it's been handed on not just from parents to children but from children to grandchildren's that the children's children are the real test of whether we've built something that actually changes culture anything shorter than that is just fashion it's it comes it goes it's it's as relevant as you know 20 years ago as fashion the stuff you find in the back of your granddad's closet but there are other kinds of culture that actually do endure it they last they they actually res
hape horizons of possibility long after the people who originated them or first began to imagine them are gone and those are things we call institutions and changing and building institutions especially beneficial ones ones that actually lead to human flourishing the kinds of things that become the glory of human culture like agriculture like the best of architecture or music or literature this is the work of generations to build they require patience what kind of people are needed to patiently
cultivate the world the scary answer to this question is very simple what we need are Saints what we need to be and become are Saints Saints to find if you're Catholic this may mean for you a specific group of people the church singles out for their holiness but as if you read the New Testament it's actually a term that is meant at least to apply to every person who gets inducted into the way of Jesus and what forms Saints is it carbonation is it quick it's not quick how am i doing on my path to
becoming so completely transformed that whenever I speak it's true and whenever I speak it's with love I'm 15 percent of the way there 20 percent of the way there what would it look like for my life to have this great object of becoming so transformed that everywhere I go in the world truth is spoken and love is felt this is the work of formation this is the work of patience and it's really a fermenting kind of work and it happened among the first Christians it happened because they took this d
eadly seriously they were so serious about the formation of patients they examined one another they pressed one another on to become a different kind of people than the world around them the world of the Roman Empire was not patient it had its own speed and machinery and efficiency and the first Christians lived a totally different way they had far less influence on their society than you and I did far less agency far less recognition and they had far more confidence that the gospel was real and
that it meant they had to completely their lives become completely reformed by the slow work of the Holy Spirit in their community and in one another and how would that lead to 30% growth decade after decade well you live in a big apartment building there are no windows there is no such thing as glass you hear everything that goes on and in most rooms and from most little apartments you hear violence you hear impatience you hear curses you hear exploitation you hear abuse and then there's one a
partment where you hear people speaking kindly to one another husbands and wives treating each other with dignity even the slaves who were the members of those households being treated as brother and sister who would you like to get to know better who would you ask could you take me to church who would you want to shape the future of your culture the patient people to great objects suppression of the slave trade easy to say a lifetime even to begin the Reformation of manners the matter of many g
enerations in some ways Wilberforce and his children their children's children saw dramatic changes in the culture of England in other ways we look then and now and realize how much time will elapse before that might ever actually happen what are the great objects that are set before you are they big enough to require patience are they big enough to require fermentation and the kind of love and trust that waits for change to happen there is a Japanese theologian named Kosuke ku Yama who wrote a
book called three miles an hour the speed of God let me read you a little bit of what he said this is koyama I find he writes the God goes slowly in his educational process of man forty years in the wilderness points to his basic educational philosophy three generations of the United Monarchy nineteen kings of Israel 20 kings of Judah the host of the prophets and priests the experience of exile and restoration and then Koriyama says isn't this rather a slow and costly way for God to let his peop
le know the Covenant relationship between God and man and then he writes this God walks slowly because God is love if he is not love he would have gone much faster love has its speed it goes on in the depth of life whether we notice or not at 3 miles an hour it is the speed we walk three miles an hour and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks in this season we've been forced to live without big and fast we've had to live small and slow and this is actually what matters in the kingdom w
hat matters for culture because small and slow are the speed and scale of love and I think they're also the speed and scale of truth when it is really heard and received as truth so our task is to pursue great objects bigger than our lifetimes slower than we would like requiring us first of all to become Saints and let our children's children somehow remember us as people who against all the odds contributed to the patient ferment of God's kingdom [Music]
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