The Church in a Changing Culture

Church Planting: Brad Brisco
Friday, May 20, 2005

One of the greatest challenges facing the church in the Western world today is discovering how to connect with a rapidly changing culture. Multiculturalism, pluralism, urbanization, and rapid changes in technology have created great challenges for the church. However, along with the challenges have come enormous opportunities to impact the culture through evangelism and church planting.

George Hunter in "The Celtic Way of Evangelism" frames the cultural challenges in these terms:

"The Church faces populations who are increasingly "secular" - people with no Christian memory, who don't know what we Christians are talking about. These populations are increasingly "urban" and out of touch with God's "natural revelation." These populations are increasingly "postmodern" - they have graduated from Enlightenment ideology and are more peer driven, feeling driven, and "right-brained" than their forebears. These populations are increasingly "neo-barbarian;" they lack "refinement" or "class," and their lives are often out of control. These populations are increasingly receptive - exploring worldview options from Astrology to Zen - and are often looking "in all the wrong places" to make sense of their lives and find their soul's true home.

In the face of this changing Western culture, many Western Church leaders are in denial; they plan and do church as though next year will be 1957. Furthermore most of the Western Church leaders who are not in denial do not know how to engage the epidemic numbers of secular, postmodern, neo-barbarians outside (and inside) their churches.

While there are indeed great challenges with these cultural changes, notice the upside, or silver lining, is that people today are wide open to spiritual things. You do not have to look far to see that our culture, while many times rejecting the church, is in search of the transcendent. James Emery White uses a wonderful biblical metaphor to shed light on the situation that we find ourselves in today. He states that we are no longer speaking to the God fearing Jews in Jerusalem, who by the way were looking for a Messiah, but we now find ourselves speaking to the pluralistic pagans on Mars Hill.

So what are the implications for the church and its leaders? Just as Paul did with the pluralistic philosophers on Mars Hill, we need to begin to connect with postmodernists by starting from where they are. This will require us to become students of this new culture. We can no longer remain strangers to the culture, but we must do our best to understand the changes that have taken place and then create new strategies for connecting with the culture that will allow us the opportunity to share the life changing message of Jesus Christ.