Where's the ground beneath my feet?

Two of my heroes came to mind this morning as I witnessed a parable or two in motion. During World War Two, as the church in Germany seemed ill equipped to challenge Nazism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about there being 'no ground left beneath their feet.'

Surely, he said, 'there has never been a generation in the course of human history with so little ground under its feet as our own. Every conceivable alternative seems equally intoler­able. We try to escape from the present by looking en­tirely to the past or the future for our inspiration, and yet, without indulging in fanciful dreams, we are able to wait for the success of our cause in quietness and confi­dence. It may be however that the responsible, thinking people of earlier generations who stood at a turning-point of history felt just as we do, for the very reason that some­thing new was being born which was not discernible in the alternatives of the present.

I thought of that this morning as I watched my 18month old daughter try to walk in the snow.
Given that she's only been walking at all for a few months now snow was going to be a challenge. You could see that puzzled look as she slipped around 'what's happening ... this ground used to stay where it was ... now its moving around?' Her look resembled that of many a merchant banker last year when they discovered that their employers had no money. Their world too had changed forever. The ground had gone from under them. Who knew ( knows) what may yet be born from our financial crises. But my daughter wasn't worried about things like that:

There she was, just trying to stay upright ...
in her slipping and sliding there was surely something of a parable of the difficulty faced by the Church as our world and culture changes so quickly around us, and we look around in panic around desperate to get a grip on anything.

And yet what she discovered was another parable I believe.
She stuck to what she knew ... to all she had learnt in the last few months about putting one foot after the other and quickly adjusted to the new environment and once that was done she repeated it over and over until she was sure she'd sussed out her new context. And i thought to my self, for all the books I've read on post modern society, emerging church and cultural engagement mostly it comes down to remembering what we've learnt in the past, being steadfast in prayer and scripture, loving God and loving others, walking justly and with mercy ... sticking to what he know and doing it over and over in a new context, until it works there too.

All that put me in mind of George MacLeod, who in 1938 saw the big changes afoot in society and wrote ‘Is the truth not that the old cultus has splendidly served its day and generation; it is our modern environment that has rendered it outmoded. It is not the old Reformation timbers that are in criticism, it is that they survive from a day of wooden houses. It is not the building of the old channels that has rendered them faulty, but the shifting of the subsoil of this evolving world’.