Theme: ?rogress

We are always moving forward in time. That’s easy to tell, because as soon as the hands on your clock stop swinging round you reach for fresh batteries. If the clock stops moving its broken. But there’s no guaranteed benefit of time’s forward march. The structure of time simply dictates that we cannot press pause or rewind. Moving time does not guarantee improvement, either individually or collectively. And so with every step forward and every tick of the clock we would do well to ask, “is this progress”?

This is the question we want to ask with Bridge Songs 2011. And we want to ask it every place.

To the hopeful, we are a world merging together into a glorious global village where walls fade in the morning mist of technology’s brave new dawn. Political parties, religious denominations and cultural stripes matter less and less as community and relationship and connectedness matter more and more. World peace, it seems, could be as close as your cross-continent video chat.

To the pessimist the world is going to hell in a very large hand basket. The speeding information superhighway pulls us to frightening places and enables us to fight old wars with new weapons. Our very identities are no longer safe, as the reality of relationship is traded for the convenience of blurted communications mediated through well crafted avatars. The world is as fiery and feisty and furious as ever, only now we have the power to end it all with the click of a button. Or a mouse.

To the individual, progress often seems tenuous at best. We focus on the two steps backward and forget the steps forward, regardless their count. We forge new-year’s fitness commitments only to laze and binge by springtime. We dig freshly into spiritual commitments that fizzle out and leave us wearied. We stare into the glaring eyes of habits that just won’t die.  We remain haunted by past regrets we cannot seem to shake. The “me” I don’t like seems to wake me up each morning, and the me I want to be seems to leave me in his racing dust.

Time is moving forward and we are aging, year by year. But are we growing? Is this progress?

This is the question we want to face head on with Bridge Songs 2011.

Bridge Songs is going into it’s firth year, as is it’s host church, Urban Bridge Church. Five years in, are we making headway. Are we doing something better than we did when we started? Or simply “more”?

Our host community, Alberta Avenue, is about the same amount of time into a revitalization effort, but I can still spot prostitutes and drug activity on our streets. Some days it’s easy to see us moving proudly forward. Sometimes it is not.

The future. The past. The dawning utopia. The impending apocalypse. The long lost golden age. I am building a better me. I am fighting my demons. This is all of that and more.

This is ?rogress.