wow, you used both bold and italics... i'm intimidated... :^) so many questions. one of them seems to be specifically an "in the church" type of question and the other seems to be a "society in general" question. the church question is affected by society, but not so much the other direction right now. let's look at the "society in general" question first--> it seems like every major cultural shift has both a reactive (antithesis) part and a conservative (thesis) part, i.e., the enlightenment reacted against medieval christianity's moral and mystical elements but worked off the principles of order and rationality to extend humankind's understanding of the natural world (the synthesis). That's the theory anyway. So "postmodernism" would be somewhat of an extention of modernism and somewhat of a refutation of it. And of course, there'd be eddies of counter-movements, the last vestages of modernism and (more rarely) medievalism, etc. but that's all theory. it seems in practice, that we are definitely more "feely" over all than society used to be. in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World he definitely (and prophetically) identifies a move toward a more feelings-and-entertainment-based society and the death of objective knowledge, values beyond the importance of the individual's needs, etc. seems he was at least partially right. and this definitely doesn't seem to be just the movement of a few. now the question about the church.... that's much more complex because the scope is more limited and applied. as one of my grad school professors used to remind us, every model (and when we are talking about generalizations, we're talking models) has three dichotomous components--applicability (widely or narrowly), explication (simple or complex), and reality (real or imaginary). each model then can maintain two optimum levels, but not all three (you can have widely applicable, simple model--but it's not very real; a real and simple model--but its not very widely applicable; etc.) So the church seems to contain elements that make the model have to shift its focus. people like Leonard Sweet have tried to explain the intrusion of postmodernism into the christian world, but i think he does it in a sort of flippant way. that Stanley Grentz book i talked about a few weeks ago seems to be much more fair and thourough. but, in regards to your concerns about the benefits of a smaller, more tightly bound community that strives for authenticity and integration of age groups, etc.--i totally agree with you. and yet, it seems like a real challenge getting anyone who can actually do something about it structurally to actually act. it's almost like the woman who needs to be needed so she maintains things the unhelpful way so that she's still there and important.....