Leonard Sweet 

1) How would you define the "postmodern movement" as it relates to the church.

When Thomas Kuhn introduced the language of "paradigm change" in The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, I wish he had used another phrase for "paradigm:" metaphor change. 

They mean the same thing. Paradigm is another word for "root metaphors." When the root metaphors change, so does everything else. The imaginative architecture of the modern world has collapsed, is in ruins, and a new imaginative architecture is emerging.

The root metaphors of the modern world have burned out. The emergence of new metaphors on which to build life and prepare for eternity are what I call the "postmodern movement." Claude Levi-Strauss, in his masterpiece The Raw and the Cooked, put it like this: "metaphors are based on an intuitive sense of the logical relations between one realm and other realms . . . Metaphor, far from being a decoration that is added to language, purifies it and restores it to its original nature" (I, 339). This is what a true reformation does: purifies and restores, as Peter Matheson's wonderful The Imaginative World of the Reformation (2000) points out.

The "postmodern movement" is an extended, multiplicitous metaphor for the quest for connectedness with the divine.

 
2) When you speak of a postmodern generation as being a "de" as opposed to a "re" generation, what do you mean?

Before there can be a new synthesis around images that connect and produce, first there needs to be a clearing away and cleaning up of the rubble. Go back to the Protestant Reformation, which was enormously deconstructive. Deconstruction precedes reconstruction. The "de" words are either the front end of the process by which the mind changes as it acquires new information/metaphors, or the back end of what issues from the process called disintermediation.

Another way of talking about the "de" words is as Mike Slaughter does in The Unlearning Church (Group, 2001). I used to be a "learned" professor.  Up until 1987 I functioned as an academic in a "learned" profession. Then God knocked me off my high Gutenberg horse, roughed me up a bit, halted my "learnedness" and made me into a perpetual "learner."

 
3) How do you see the "old line" denominations changing to reach a new generation?

I don't, at least very much. That's why the emergence of something totally unique in USAmerican religious history: church "consultants" that are doing for churches what denominational staff should have been doing. It's amusing (and amazing) to me that every major "oldline" has a protest movement within it that wants to start a new "denomination" precisely at a time and in a world where denominational structures are proving unusable or unstable. In the mid-90s, we passed a Rubicon: more Christians in USAmerica were affiliated with non-denominational churches (ndc's) than with denominations.

By the way, I am not a big fan of generational cultures analysis ala Strauss and Howe. It may have had some usefulness for discussing two generations - "boosters and boomers" - but something more profound is going on out there than the rise of "new generations." Besides, divisions by age group, as someone has said, is the most debased form of solidarity. The French have a term for it: soixante-huitard.

 
4) How do you feel higher education can help develop leaders for a postmodern community of faith?

By adjusting to a postmodern epistemology, and by refocusing education from consumerism--"how to make a living" to citizenship--"how to make a life."  A postmodern epistemology is not based on "accessing information" or pouring information into mental containers (information which is soon outdated anyway). Instead of "access," education needs to facilitate how to process and assess knowledge.

 
5) What would you say were the five most important features of a postmodern community of faith?

I have four. It's called "EPIC," an acronym for Experiential/Relational, Participatory, Image-rich, Connective.

 
6) Denominations will change, we know this, how do you believe they will change to meet the needs of the people they serve?

I'm not sure they will change, at least willingly. Many are quite content being Williamsburg colonies for 1950s middle-class culture. There are some not many, but some - (have you walked the streets of Williamsburg?) people who like living in museums. But if denominations are to have a vital future, it will be because they stopped focusing on regulating their churches and started resourcing them.

After Nine-Eleven, the war going on in the world right now is between open systems and closed systems. It's the same war
that is going on in every denomination.

 
7) Do you believe it is possible for a church to move from the modern to the pomo, and what are some of the problems you envision?

Not only possible, but impossible NOT to. Don't the Scriptures say, "Even the gates of hell shall not prevail" against the church? God's church will be in this future. Whether my church or your church will is another matter. But God will be there.