As part of my preparation for the conversation, I highlighted a few quotes that I found helpful. They are as follows:
Chapter 1:
p 2, 5 "There is a feeling of not enough: too little influence, too few people, too fragile belief...The solution is [more]: the right balance of resource management and effective innovation, which makes our church grow sustainably."
But p. 6 "The problem is wicked, meaning there is no actual solution, in which case we need to despair. Or those books misdiagnose the problem."
Pages 9-12 give overview of the 3 types of secular. While I think they're important to know to frame the conversation, I found the way they were written to set up a mildly annoying (and false) tension around how the secular age is the problem, so that the authors could come in and say well, actually not, and surprise look how God works in and through it. He uses more helpful language on page 13. "In this book, we want to reimagine the church within the secular age. We believe God continues to act in the world, and because God acts in the world, we believe it is possible for the church [+ ministry] to flourish."
p 14 "Because the secular age separates the secular and the sacred, making belief private and the immanent the agreed-upon public reality, the church has a hard time imagining what a public faith that witnesses to the transcendent looks like." I'd argue that our institutions suffer similar difficulties in not knowing what to do with religion/spirituality.
p15 speaking on a personal level "We obsess over work-life balance... Efficiency is often the solution... We think we can do more than we actually can...The busyness we experience comes from the feeling that we need to accelerate every part of our lives."
p 16 "Our diagnosis is that the opposite of acceleration isn't dead or slow. The opposite is more resonance.... Resonance is all about connecting with the world, with the people in our lives, and finding a meaning that is greater than what we can see and explain. Resonance is about the sacred, the public, and the transcendent."
Chapter 2:
p21 In our origin/hero stories, "it is inevitable that they will triumph. This triumphalism fits well with the secular story we live in: more is better." This might explain why it feels like we can't be honest about the complicated reality but can only tell success stories.
p 23-4. "The real origin story starts in Acts 1 [not the triumphal version of Acts 2] with waiting for God to act. God is the hero, and the church waits.... Waiting, as practiced by the disciples and advocated by us, is not inactive.It is responsive. God acts and we respond. What we are saying, though, is that the secular age blinds us to God's action, and so all we are left with is our action.... We have no way of imagining what it would look like for God to act in our lives.... If we are to take our own origin story seriously, we need to see that God's people only act in response to God's act."
Diagnosis (again) of the problem: p 29, 31: "We run and run and run, exhausting ourselves and those around us in the process.... Busyness dominates us. Acceleration causes fatigue, filling our lives till there is no room left, even if the thing we want to add could be valuable. We don't blame church leaders for this. They are moving fast, not so that they can get ahead but simply so that they don't fall behind... Acceleration, the busyness we feel, is a symptom of our frustrated search for meaning."
p 32 "You can't wait when you are busy, caught up in your own project... when we are not waiting in a ready stance, we can miss the important things."
p 35 In Genesis, "[Sarah's] imagination can't see what God is doing because what God is doing is so far out there."
p 36 "Whether we cannot see God because the secular age has malformed our imaginations or because it has made us so busy that we cannot see God, when we try to talk about the experience of seeing God, language fails.... We are so used to doing that having an encounter with God surprises us."
