Reflection On The Big Picture

In this reflection on the current metamorphosis of institutional Christianity, we are naming a seismic shift—one that goes beyond mere reform and gestures toward a deep reimagining of faith, structure, and spiritual identity. Here are some additional thoughts.

A Great Unraveling & Reorientation

The "massive shaking" we name isn’t just cultural; it’s tectonic in spiritual terms. We are witnessing the breakdown of long-standing frameworks—escapist eschatologies, sacred/secular dichotomies, and ecclesial systems rooted in colonial power dynamics. The cracks reveal a yearning for a faith that is real, embodied, just, and faithful to the radical teachings of Jesus. This is not deconstruction for deconstruction’s sake. It’s prophetic. It’s a call to abandon the empire-forged faith and return to the subversive margins where Christ always dwelled.

The ‘Spiritual Underground’

The image of a “spiritual underground” evokes the early church under Empire, the hush of mystics in the desert, and the creativity of oppressed communities that birthed liberative theologies. This isn’t just a hiding place; it’s a laboratory. A sanctuary. A forge where liturgy becomes protest, theology becomes poetry, worship becomes resistance, community becomes revolution.

A Crisis of Imagination

The existing “operating system” cannot deliver the renewal it promises. To quote Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The call for a new theological imagination is not just theoretical—it’s existential. This generation doesn’t want a “better Empire.” It wants no Empire—just the Kin-dom of God: a radically inclusive, justice-seeking, Spirit-filled community shaped not by supremacy but by solidarity, servanthood, and sacrificial love.

Diverging Roads: The Cross and the Flag

The elephant in the room is the the violent doubling down of White Christian Nationalism. What we’re seeing is not just a distortion of the gospel—it’s a wholesale replacement of Jesus with Caesar. It's the worship of power under the guise of piety. The cross has been weaponized. The flag raised as idol. And yet, that very contrast clarifies the moment: those moving into the underground aren’t opting out of faith—they’re rejecting a counterfeit. They’re choosing the narrow way, the Jesus way.

Art as Theological Prophecy

The role of artists, poets, songwriters, and storytellers in this moment is crucial. Theology is not just constructed in seminaries—it is sung in protest, painted in lament, filmed in testimony. The underground is bubbling with a new canon—raw, real, and rooted in the Spirit.

Grabbing Hold of the Future

The idea of “grabbing the future and dragging it into the present” is eschatological in the best sense. It’s incarnational. These voices—though scattered and often silenced—are prophetic midwives of a different world. They don’t seek to make Christianity relevant again; they seek to make it real.