I’ve been listening to talks by Laurence Singlehurst while commuting this week. They’re from a cell church conference held here in Queensland back in 2003. This morning’s talk focused on postmodernity and the difficulty we have in raising new teenage disciples.

Laurence talks about ‘passionate dualism’ or turnstiling, in which teenagers totally buy into the culture of charismatic worship while they are in the company of Christians. Many young people seem to have the capacity of doing so while engaging in immoral or illegal acts in their ‘other life’. He’s talking about sex before marriage, drunkenness and taking drugs. What’s different, Singlehurst explains, is that this used to be seen as rebellion and inconsistency and a matter for guilty conscience. Now it’s felt to be normal. ‘Who needs to be consistent?”

I am Spartacus (Mark Walley) posted a section of an article by Singlehurst with this summary on enthusiastic dualism:

Enthusiastic dualism is the capacity, particularly seen amongst young people, to hold Christian views and beliefs in the Christian part of your life (the youth meeting and church), but when at the night club (or school, university or whatever) with your non-Christian friends, hold the beliefs and values of the night club and do what everybody else does. Your values, beliefs and behaviours are those of your friends. You move between worlds with no sense of conscience, and hold inconsistent viewpoints.

Developmentally, integrity is not seen as a high priority until later in life. Young adults have always had the capacity to blithely hold conflicting approaches to life together. However what we’re seeing now is that the prevailing mood in society is for the individual to pick and mix from various beliefs, behaviour norms and cultural expressions.

But what about adults? Don’t we see the same inconsistencies in lifestyle? Maybe not always on matters of sexual behaviour. But we all have blind spots.

Having said that, I’m enjoying Laurence’s input. He’s director of Cell UK, an organisation with its origins in Youth With A Mission England.