Christians must become members of the tribe of Issachar, a tribe which had an "understanding of the times to know what ... to do."

Edward L. Shirley, of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at St. Edward's University, has collected over the years actual, bona fide newspaper headlines.

- Something went wrong in jet crash, experts say
- Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers
- Safety experts say school bus passengers should be belted
- Drunk gets nine months in violin case
- Iraqi head seeks arms
- Teacher strikes idle kids
- Reagan wins on budget, but more lies ahead
- Killer sentenced to die for second time in 10 years

Shirley's collection of noteworthy news is both silly and startling. They let us conjure up ridiculous images in our mind's eye, but they are also filled with the violence and indifference that is a constant part of our daily lives. They are, in their own right, "signs of the times."

Ignoring the approach of a tornado doesn't offer any protection from its winds. You will fly just as high into the air with your eyes closed as with them open. Few can testify to the power of shifting winds more effectively than those who were ousted from public office in the fall '94 elections. Many politicians suddenly found themselves the latest victims of what I call a worldwide Devolution Revolution.

It was the same devolution revolution that helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union and that continues to gnaw at the foundation of all "big government" and "big institution" enterprises. Nature once experimented with grand-scale bigness, too but the results of those trials are found now only in our collections of fossilized dinosaur bones. If you can't adapt, if you can't read the signs of the times, you face certain extinction.

The Greek version of Jesus' diatribe against the crowd in this week's gospel text is perhaps the experience of the Greek philosopher Thales. He ventured outside one night with a knowledgeable, elderly woman who had promised to teach him about the stars. In the darkness, he fell into a ditch and started screaming for help. The old woman responded dryly, "You want to know all about the heavens, but you can't see what's right under your feet" (From Diogenes, Laertius 1:34, cited in Frederick W. Denker, Jesus and the New Age [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988], 258).

- British left waffles on Falkland Islands
- Enraged cow injures farmer with ax
- Plane too close to ground, crash probe told

Big governments and big institutions made long-range planning (and its "goals and objectives") their darling. Is there anyone out there who doesn't plan every single day? Is there anyone out there who has ever had even one day go exactly according to plan? Yet nothing is more comforting (albeit futile) than carefully plotting out exactly what you're going to be doing two, five, or even 10 years into the future. Isn't it remarkable that long-range plans almost never predict that the stock market will plunge, or assets will devalue, or products will become obsolete, or expectations will radically alter, or scandal will rear its head, or people will demand better. Little wonder that there is a new book out by Henry Mintzberg called The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners (New York: Free Press, 1994). In the words of the old adage, "If you want God to laugh, tell God your plans."

We cannot live life based on the models of control and predictability that the myth of long-range planning assumes. The world is not predictable or controllable. Only now, with the rise of "scenario thinking" pioneered by Peter Schwartz (The Art of the Long View [New York: Doubleday, 1991]) and the Global Business Network, are businesses slowly moving from planning to preparedness.

Unfortunately, one of the slowest and most awkward of these behemoths is the church itself. The "mainline" denominations have found themselves relegated to a "sideline" position in postmodern life because they have adopted dreams like those of any other "big institution." The church increasingly seems irrelevant because it has lost sight of the signs of the times or chosen to ignore them.

God will not be without a witness. It is God's mission, not the church's mission. So God will be there in this emerging new world. If we would resuscitate the church, make it a vital active force for Christ in this new world, then it must relinquish its identity as a dignified "institution" and "organized religion" and claim a new name for itself as a tribe.

Specifically, the church must try to mold itself into the tribe of Issachar (1 Chronicles 12:32). The tribe of Issachar, we are told, "had an understanding of the times, to know what ... to do." When David became king, each of the tribes of Israel paraded before David and presented him with a special gift. It was the unique gift of the tribe of Issachar that they knew "what ... to do" (v.32).

- Miners refuse to work after death
- Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
- War dims hope for peace

What is keeping us from becoming a tribe of Issachar? What signs of the times are we ignoring or misreading in a futile attempt to safeguard our institutional assumptions?

Sign 1: Cultural Confusion

In his book There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Doubleday, 1991), Alex Kotlowitz recounts the experiences of black children, Pharaoh and LafayetteRivers, living in the Henry Horner Homes housing project in Chicago. One boy recalls the conversation about futures he had with his friend Lafayette: "And then I asked Lafayette what he wanted to be. 'If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver,' he told me. If, not when. At the age of 10, Lafayette wasn't sure he'd make it to adulthood."

In the face of this sign of the times, too many churches continue to offer these old/young children nothing more than 19th-century Sunday school pablum. We let them color pictures of men in bathrobes herding sheep when what they are seeing every day are children cruising the streets in luxury cars, firing automatic weapons at each other.

When is the church going to claim busters (those born between 1964 and 1984) for Christ? Busters are the first electronic generation, the first generation to be light-trained (screens) rather than print-trained (book pages). When is the church going to leave the Industrial Age (nuts and bolts) and join the Information Age (bits and bytes)? Busters have no idea what we are talking about when we say "she has a screw loose." Busters do, however, know what it means when "he has a bad chip."

Sign 2: Moral Malaise

According to Time magazine's report of a Daily Express survey, 84 percent of those polled did not think that Prince Charles' TV confession that he had committed adultery sullied his reputation (Ginia Bellafonte, "People," Time, 18 July 1994, 61).

The church as an organized institution has become too comfortable, too at home with the standards and values of the world. Our silence in the face of such signs of the times suggests that moral failure is really no more serious than rolling through a stop sign at a deserted intersection. The truth is, moral muck-ups are a symptom of a very serious condition heart failure. It is a sign that the central pump of our being is sick and faltering a sign of despair.

Sign 3: Apathetic Attitude

In 1993, the total attendance at worship services in the United States came to 5.6 billion. The total attendance for all pro-basketball, baseball and football games combined was only 103 million, less than 2 percent of the number who attended worship ("To Verify: Statistics for Christian Communicators," Leadership 15 [Fall 1994], 50).

We complain about a shrinking church membership when the numbers actually point to a shrinking sense of excitement and exuberance for Christ's sake. In the name of sports, those 103 million get stadiums built, get team franchises moved, give local economies a boost and get whole regions of the country stand-up-and-shout excited. In the name of Christ, how much more could 5.6 billion accomplish in this country in the world if they were as "on fire" as the sports fans?

What "signs of the times" are we facing as a congregation? And is our congregation facing them? Will we become a member of the tribe of Issachar? Or will we join the dinosaurs?