The following is from A Is for Abductive (119-123) and should help in beginning the process of understanding EPIC.

The Holy Grail of the emerging culture.

People today are experience gatherers. They don’t know when they see it; they know it when they experience it an enact it. In the words of the Chicago Tribune reviewing a Blue Ma Group show, “THE PERFECT ENTERTAINMENT … So much fun must be experienced to be believed.” Experience is the major currency in this “experience economy.”(22) Experience (which; includes reason and more) trumps reason alone.

Companies have abandoned promoting their product and instead are giving people an experience around provocative images that raise awareness, provoke discussion, an chart the future. Don’t believe there is such a thing as the “experience economy”? Ask Dennis Tito, who spent $20 million for a space vacation at the International Space Station Can’t come up with a story to surround and experientialize product? Manufacture one. Hence “The Ernest Hemingway Collection,” five categories of furniture being made b Thomasville Furniture to match the five homes that Hemingway worked out of: Paris, Havana, Key West, Ketchum (ID), and Kenya.”(23)

Postmoderns define the meaning of life in terms of the integrity of relationships and the intensity of experiences. For them, intensity, not clarity, is the dominant concern.

Moderns were “seekers.” Postmoderns are finders who are open to new discoveries and new experiences. For better a worse, they often become putty in the hands of anything that draws them deeper into the experience-whatever that experience may be. The facts are not as important as the feelings and postmoderns tend to “feel after him” (Acts 17:27 KJV).(24)

“The Old Paradigm taught that if you have the right teaching, you will experience God. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will have the right teaching.”
—Pastor/NAE President Leith Anderson (26).

Whereas moderns were greedy about accumulating money and things, postmoderns are greedy about accumulating experiences and relationships. And this greed is self-fueling: The more you have, the more you hunger for more. (Note: Spiritual postmoderns can be equally greedy for pleasant spiritual experiences, which may in fact be a deterrent to authentic disciple making.)

The current quest for identity through experience is creating a culture and cult of sensation. Modernity made sensible synonymous with rational. Postmodern worship must become “sensible” again in the original meaning of the word-both “perceiving or feeling” as well as “that which can be felt or perceived, perceptible by the senses .”(26)

But with the promise of “sensible” worship comes the great peril of postmodern worship: the inversion of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Remember Hans Christian Andersen’s fable about the emperor who was deluded into thinking he was wearing new clothes when in fact he was buck naked and everyone was afraid to tell him? In the postmodern inversion of that story, we have churches whose worship is fully adorned in the latest fashion-robes outfitted with all the buttons and bells, smells and electronic whistles-but without any Emperor: no Lord of Lords and King of Kings.

So we must remember: Faith cannot be reduced to experience in fact, “experiencing God”-if by it we mean attaining certain pleasant feeling-may become an idol, a narcotic, an a substitute for serving God, obeying God, or experiential obedience to God. How is God most glorified? Ask the prophet like Amos or Micah. Does it happen through our worship, through our obedience and service?(27) What God wants most a living sacrifice, not praise songs or provocative dramas PowerPoint sermons (Matt. 28:9; Rev. 4:10).

A parable: One day after dinner, while finishing dessert father sent his boy out to cut the lawn. Smiling broadly, the s said, “No, Father, l just want to stay here experiencing your presence, expressing my love for you, my dear Father.” The father frowned and said, more firmly this time, “Actually, Son, I would rather you go out and cut the lawn.” But the boy acted as if didn’t even hear his father, and he replied, “Dad! Guess what just wrote a song expressing my love for you!” The son began sing, his eyes closed in sincerity and intense emotion, and t father left the table to go watch TV. The boy didn’t notice, bi kept singing, with tears streaming down his face.

At that point the father wanted the boy to experience obedience (which may entail heat, sweat, thirst, sunburn, strain muscles, hunger, endurance, and fatigue) even more than warmth of his presence.
Apprised of the danger of seeing experience as a narcotic postmodern Christian leaders nevertheless realize that human beings abhor boredom as nature abhors a vacuum, so they seek to transform boring experiences into learning experiences. For this reason, postmodern Christian leaders must become students of experiential learning, as opposed to that odd modern creation, “classroom learning”-a model of learning with limited value, based on the assembly line and factory model of human manufacturing. Someday we may look back on modern children’s classrooms with the same regret with which we now look back on child labor in high-Industrial-Age factories or chimneys or mines.

Footnotes
22. James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine, The Experience Economy (Cambri MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 1999).
23. See www.thomosville.com/hemingway for more. Accessed 17 September 2
24. This is one reason for the phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism. See Ha Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religon in the Twenty-first Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), and David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).
25. Leith Anderson, A Church for the 21st Century (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1992), 21.
26. Two excellent resources for this are Tex Sample, The Spectacle of Worship in a Wired World: Electronic Culture and the Gathered People of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), and Kim Miller and Ginghamsburg Church Worship Team, Handbook for MultisensoryWorship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), supplemented with The Handbook for Multisensory Worship Interactive CD-ROM (Nashville: Abingdon).
27. This provocative argument from Kirk Hadaway is worth discussing: “We actually worship God. God does not require that we bow down and worship him. In what we do in our worship is communion with God in Christ as God’s people. The pose of worship is to come together as God’s people, as the body of Christ, and be we are in praise of God’s glory and celebration of what God has done. What does is to let us practice being what we are, seeing the world as God sees it-re ing and realizing the Realm of God in our midst. Through such practice the comm_ is formed, and we as individuals are transformed into members of it.” See Kirk Ha Behold / Do a New Thing: Transforming Communities of Faith (Cleveland: Pilgrim 2001), 99.