Discernment has always been a noteworthy trait. In the days Of King David, the men of Issachar were singled out because they “understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (I Chr. 12:32). Today, reading the culture and knowing how to respond is still crucial. We asked seven respected leaders how cultural changes are affecting the way they do ministry. Not surprisingly, the seven views are dramatically different.
Target the Trends
by Leonard Sweet
We are facing the end of one era and the beginning of another. The world that many pastors prepared for is no more.
The 500-year period of history that Martin Luther started, the era we know as the modern age, the era of Enlightenment, has come to an end. It’s being replaced by a post-modern culture.
The modern world was characterized by trust in-almost deification of-reason, which made doubt the basic spiritual problem. The spiritual problem is no longer doubt. This culture hasn’t gotten more secular; post-modern culture, if anything, is superstitious, characterized by easy-believism.
Our challenge is to help people believe the right thing. People believe in astrology, New Age, gurus, Shirley MacLaine. If we continue to minister with modern assumptions-that people need to be convinced of the supernatural-we’ll miss the mark. People today believe in miracles, in angels. We don’t have to argue the case for spiritual realities anymore.
Our challenge is to claim this moment for Christ. It is a unique moment that calls for unique strategies, skills, and sensibilities.
I have tremendous respect for the Amish, but they’ve decided not to live their moment in history. They aren’t taking any cues from our current culture. Their culture is frozen in the 1830s. They talk like it; they dress like it.
The question I keep asking myself is, What moment in history am I going to live? I don’t believe God chose me to live in this place and time by accident. God wants my life to make a difference in this moment-not some moment that I wish could be. God is calling us to plant our feet in this moment of history and to claim it for Christ.
Jesus prayed in John 17 that the Father would keep the disciples in the world, but that they would not become of the world. So we are to be “in,” not “of,” and not “out of,” either.
I want to be in touch but not in tune with our culture. I want to be in tune with the Spirit. I’m an indigenous missionary to this culture, which means I live and look and act as part of this culture, though it’s not my home. I’m not going to anchor in this culture; I’m going to anchor in God’s Spirit and in God’s Word.
Our time in history, in some ways, is facing as radical an upheaval as 500 years ago when the printing press was invented. That invention made the Bible available to the masses, and dramatically changed the Christian life.
Today, the TV screen is as powerful as the printed page.
For decades newscaster Walter Cronkite signed off, “That’s the way it is.” That’s precisely what the media does: whoever tells you the way it is has power. People today look to the media to tell them the way it is.
The impact of visual communication is so profound that there ought to be a screen in every worship service. Overheads were an early example, but now we can even project from a computer onto a large screen.
In the future one person who will work the hardest in a church service is the computer operator flashing onto the screen the lyrics to songs, prayer requests, pictures taken that week of people in the hospital bringing greetings to the congregation …
Part of today’s culture is technology. If we open our eyes to the new communications technology, the potential for enhancing worship and enabling community to be formed is tremendous.
Everybody’s “cocooning,” retreating from society; they resent your entering their home. But through the automatic dialing feature of computers we can reach anybody we want, as many as we want, providing a way to make house calls without entering the house. Saturday afternoons, for example, we might tell our people Sunday’s sermon title or ask for prayer requests for the service. They can leave a message and be remembered that Sunday.
So, whether we like it or not, we have to take cultural trends seriously. This is the world that Christ died for, and this is the world Christ calls us to claim.
Leonard Sweet is president of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.
Return to the Timeless
by Eugene Peterson
Pastors today seem driven to do something about the culture. Perhaps the best thing they could do is withdraw from it and develop a holy community, a congregation of people oriented to the reality not the unreality of the world. We’re not going to make a difference if we keep measuring results by weekly statistics.
The historical period most analogous to ours might be the time after the fall of Rome. Society fell apart; the culture shattered. The people who recovered Christian identity, Christian community, and Christian culture amid that chaos were the monks. In a sense they withdrew from the chaos to shape community and save the gospel.
In some ways I’ve tried to ignore the culture. I’ve distanced myself from it because it’s so sick. We just moved to Vancouver from Maryland. In Maryland the movers spent all day gathering up our stuff, and at the end of the day, one of the workers said, “You know something? I just realized I didn’t take a single TV set out of the house. That’s never happened to me before.”
I don’t own a TV set anymore. I don’t want to spend time drinking that poison.
If anything, the culture has turned me inward. It’s driven me to defy it, to try and work out what it means to be a Christian congregation in ways indigenous to Scripture and the holy communities. So, if something works in the world, I usually ignore it. Taking our signals from the culture will usually point us in the wrong direction.
If we defy culture, we must prepare to be failures, because what the culture rewards is following the culture. We won’t be able to tell stories about our success because the guy down the street will be pulling in bigger crowds than us. We live short lives, and the kingdom is long. We’re often not around for the harvest.
The grand essentials for me are immersion in Scripture and pursuit of prayer. We’re not supposed to be dealing with the culture. We’re supposed to be dealing with God.
I’m not saying we close our eyes to the culture, but we don’t need to study it that much. What the culture’s doing is pretty shallow and stupid most of the time, and pretty obvious.
We need to practice our theology. We keep saying, “God is the center. God is sovereign. God is at work.” But we don’t act like it. We start acting like the New York Times is sovereign or Wall Street is sovereign. Pastors have so many demands foisted upon them. They’re easily distracted. The demands of others are well-meaning and usually legitimate, but nobody’s grabbing us and saying, “Are you praying? Are you reading the Scripture?”
Neither the congregation nor the world encourages us to do that. So, unless we develop our own disciplines, our own determination to pursue life apart from culture, we’re sucked up in the world’s ways.
Any kind of piety that produces escapism or noninvolvement is false piety. There’s nothing biblical or authentic about it. Any time we develop piety or pursue a holy life, our lives become more accessible to the world, more available for service.
No one would tell a football player, “You’re wasting your time going to practice, doing calisthenics, working in the weight room. Get out there and play the game.” The preparation is vital because the fray is so intense and demanding.
We’re living in a world of principalities and powers. If we think we can flex our muscles and play the game without serious preparation, we’re mistaken. The only kind of work that makes any difference in the world is gospel work conceived in prayer and filled with the Holy Spirit. And if we’re not willing to participate in that, our efforts are wasted.
Eugene Peterson is writer-in-residence at Regent University in Vancouver, British Columbia.
On a Niche Hunt
by Rick Warren
Effective ministry depends on understanding people and their culture. When you study Jesus’ ministry, you find that he didn’t have a standard approach. He began where people were. Likewise Paul adapted his ministry to the situation in which God placed him.
In the 1990s we must understand and respond to four cultural factors if we want to make an impact.
First, America has become a low-commitment culture. This means the church cannot get commitment just by asking for it. Demanding it or using guilt motivation doesn’t work anymore either. However, I found that I can lead people to deeper commitment if I (1) show the benefits of it for spiritual growth, and (2) lead people to increase it through gradual steps. Today’s people will commit when they understand the specific value of doing so.
Jesus led people through gradual stages of commitment. He said to the first disciples, “Come and see.” Check it out. That’s all he required.
As he spent time with them, he increased the level of commitment to the point where he said, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” But he didn’t start at that level.
It takes more than preaching to do that-it takes a process. At Saddleback Church we have developed a ten-step “Life Development Process” that moves people from spectator to participator, from consumer to contributor, from the crowd to the core of the church. Our goal is to turn an audience into an army.
Second, America has also become a multiple-choice culture. At the grocery store they introduce scores of new products every week. There used to be one kind of Coke. Now there’s new Coke, cherry Coke, classic Coke, sugar-free Coke, and caffeine-free Coke. People expect choices.
Unfortunately, many churches still offer only two options: take it or leave it! One reason some churches are struggling today is that they’re offering generic programming to a culture that’s segmented into a million different niches. In the 1990s, the church must be on a “niche hunt”-finding unreached groups and developing a specific strategy to reach them.
A third cultural change is the shift from a family-centered to a marketplace culture. As families fragment, more and more people find their identity and value at work. Many people spend more of their waking hours on the job than anywhere else, yet the church is strangely silent about how to apply the Christian faith specifically to work, other than be ethical and tithe. That is a major mistake. If Jesus is not Lord at a person’s work, he isn’t Lord of a major slice of that person’s life.
Many churches don’t know what to do with successful business people. In fact, we are frightened by them. We must create avenues of ministry in the marketplace for them and teach people how to be like Christ in their careers.
The fourth cultural shift is the change in music. America is a rock and country music culture. No other music style approaches these two in popularity and pervasiveness. In fact, for the first time in history, the world has a universal music style: adult contemporary. You can turn on a radio most anywhere in the world and hear the same songs.
I believe music style is the single greatest positioning factor in a local church, even more than preaching style. It determines whom you attract. Tell me your style of music, and I will tell you whom you’re reaching and whom you will never reach. The moment you define your music, you position your church.
When I first started Saddleback, we tried to appeal to all musical tastes. We’d go “from Bach to Rock.” We’d use a hymn, then a praise chorus, then a classical number, then jazz, then easy listening, then rap. We ran the spectrum. We alienated everyone. Any radio station that tried to appeal to everyone would go broke.
So I took a survey and asked, “What radio station do you listen to?” Ninety-seven percent listed a contemporary adult middle-of-the-road rock station. So we unapologetically use that style. We’ve driven off some potential members but have attracted many more who relate to that sound.
Imagine a missionary going overseas and saying, “I’m here to share the good news, but first you must learn to speak my language, learn my customs, and sing my style of music.” We’d call that a strategy for failure! Yet many churches in America do just that. Our culture has changed, but we insist on using the same language, programs, customs, and musical style we used in the 1950s. That’s a major reason two-thirds of all the churches in America are plateaued or declining.
In order to reach unbelievers we must speak in words and sing in tunes people understand.
Rick Warren is pastor of Saddleback Community Church in Mission Viejo, California.
Flex the Muscle
by D. James Kennedy
If Christians are not involved as salt and light in our culture, we will one day wake up to find our freedom to live as Christians gone. The barbarians will be at the church door, and we won’t be able to have our separatist, pietist meetings. Our society will become increasingly corrupt, godless, and hostile, until people finally break down the doors of the church and haul Christians away.
That’s what happened in Russia. The church was irrelevant to the public sphere. While the Communists were taking over Russia, the bishops were meeting to decide what color vestments to wear. Russians had seventy years to rue that failure.
The Bible lays two tracks upon which not only the church but every Christian should devote his or her energies: the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20) and the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:28). As we make disciples and take care of this planet, we are to be light and salt in the world.
If we neglect the gospel and evangelism, unregenerate people will increase and thus accelerate the decay and corruption of society. If we ignore the cultural mandate, then we will have a government increasingly hostile to Christianity.
Somebody once asked me, “Do you think Christians should be involved in politics?”
With tongue in cheek, I said, “No, of course not. We should leave it to the atheists. Otherwise we would have nothing to complain about.”
We’re far more willing to complain about what’s happening in the country than we are to work for change. Pastors need to encourage their people to be involved both in evangelism and legislation.
Some argue, “What right do Christians have to impose our morality on others?”
Virtually all legislation is the imposition of somebody’s morality upon others. Moral and ethical beliefs when applied to a society give rise to legislation. We have laws against rape, for example, because rape is immoral.
We have two powerful movements contending for the soul of this nation. One is the Christian contingent that founded this nation and upon whose morality all of the laws originally were founded. You can find many statements from founding fathers saying it would be appalling to pass any law contrary to God’s law.
Second, you have what has been called the secular humanists, who have their own agenda. The humanists have written their own code of morality. They’ve stated it twice: in the humanist manifestos of 1933 and 1973, which for the most part articulate the opposite of Christian morality. And they are busily engaged imposing that version of morality on this country, 85 percent of which claims to be Christian. So they are the ones doing the very thing they accuse Christians of doing.
Our responsibility in the church is to insist that the laws of this Christian nation be consistent with God’s Word. Every nation that ever existed has been based upon some religious or anti-religious foundation.
We are called to be both salt and light. As light we illumine the world with the truth of the gospel, and as salt we prevent the utter corruption of an already corrupted society.
That so many Christians have not been engaged in the latter is one reason why our society has been corrupting so rapidly.
D. James Kennedy is pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Proclaim Not Protest
by Jack Hayford
The November election formalized a lower moral baseline than we’ve ever admitted to as a nation. But we don’t gain anything by making enemies of society, by berating others for ignoring our moral standards. Little evangelistic fruit will result from our reminding society that America once had superior morals and was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic.
These things are important historically, but I live in an urban quagmire where I cannot touch people by reminding them how much better we were decades earlier or by touting my moral platform in protest against their surrender to such things as abortion and homosexuality.
In 1962 the Bible went out of the public schools. To appeal to someone under age 35 for a moral code on the grounds of the Scriptures is to declare yourself in their eyes one of two things: either painfully irrelevant or hopelessly intolerant.
The Lord is calling us to manifest the heart of God for the lost, and that means we take a stance of proclamation more than protest. That doesn’t mean we sacrifice our convictions or surrender to moral cowardice. But as much as I may internally protest the values of the culture, I don’t perceive my call as one to protest the culture but to proclaim the Savior.
The best way to do that is to show the characteristic of Jesus that was so winsome to publicans and sinners. I’d rather go downtown and in the name of Jesus offer help to someone who’s going under because of tough stuff in the society. They’ll start listening to the truth of God because they’ve seen the love of God in the way I came to them.
Salt, if it’s force-fed, becomes embittering. When it’s sprinkled, it flavors. Light, if shined in the eyes, is blinding. But if projected into the darkness, it attracts out of the dark. It offers an answer rather than an accusation.
I’m not arguing for some insipid gospel that doesn’t call people to repentance. But where should we do that? John the Baptist called those who came to hear him to repentance. Calling people to turn to God when they come inside the venue of your ministry is one thing, but it’s another to parade in protest because worldlings don’t meet the divine standards we’re holding in their face. In their environment, they don’t care, and they didn’t ask us to come.
Van Nuys was a suburb forty years ago, but we are becoming increasingly urban. Just a mile from our church is one of the mean streets of Los Angeles, with drive-by shootings and narcotic distribution. Into that environment some of our people go every week to give away food and clothing. They will gain a platform to be heard, not by their words but their works.
We distributed food and clothing at a park pavilion in another area about three miles from here, and that proved fruitful. We found that if we go not so much with a message but a lifestyle, then the opportunity comes for the message. It’s requested and responded to. We baptized scores of people who came to Christ through that outreach.
Our church is increasingly reflecting the face of Los Angeles, which has become more multi-cultural. Our congregation is probably a third Asian, middle-Eastern, African-American, and Latin-American, and two-thirds Caucasian/Euro-American. Still, before the Los Angeles riots, I didn’t fully appreciate the impact of injustice on the African-Americans in our society.
While a handful of militants light the fires and while the majority would not do that, those fires show the anger, deep anxiety, and the sense of alienation that exists in the whole culture.
The average Caucasian pastor thinks he understands and has overcome the impact of prejudice and injustice against African-Americans, but I’m learning from people of color that many subtle forms of prejudice still need to be addressed.
Jack Hayford is pastor of Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California.
Exposition Not Entertainment
by James Montgomery Boice
My ministry is based on regular, systematic Bible exposition, and I devote more time to it now than I did ten years ago.
Out of expository preaching has grown a well-rounded church in the heart of Philadelphia. We don’t have any parking. But all the ministries you’d expect in an inner city go on here: work with street people, homosexuals, internationals. We have high school tutoring for kids and counsel pregnant women struggling with the abortion question.
But the heart is good theology, explaining right belief about God.
The most significant thing that has happened to the Western world is television. We are an entertainment-oriented, feeling-oriented age.
People now look to churches to entertain them, and the churches that are most entertaining are most successful. People don’t come to church trying to find God or expecting a sense of the transcendent, or understanding what worship is or wanting to learn how; they come to feel good, another way of saying they come to be entertained.
As I travel the country, I am appalled at the low level of spirituality in worship services. Sunday morning prayers have disappeared. Public reading of Scripture is omitted.
Good theology in music is on the way out. People don’t understand what they’re singing. They’ve never been taught it. And the music is not designed to stimulate our thought and elevate our sensibilities to remind us of God’s actions on our behalf; it’s designed to make us feel good.
Preachers can’t talk too long or be serious, and they can’t use words with theological content. Sermons are measured by felt needs. We’re supposed to be funny and tell personal stories.
The church has to rediscover who God is, come to know him, and fellowship with him. The avenue for that has always been Bible exposition and teaching. There’s no shortcut.
Feeling good is a cop-out. You can feel good and not be a Christian. You jump around as a Hare Krishna to feel good. And telling our personal experience isn’t it. Experience can be right or wrong, and we have no way of evaluating that unless we have in mind a clear sense of the revelation of God in content that we can articulate.
Harry Blamires, author of Christian Mind, says there no longer is a Christian mind. We may have a Christian ethic, but people no longer think as Christians. They don’t even know what that means. When you try to suggest what that means, it’s like talking into a vacuum. People don’t disagree with you; they just don’t know what you’re talking about.
I spent last fall preaching Romans 12:1-2 about being transformed by the renewing of your mind. I analyzed our culture in terms of secularism, humanism, relativism, and materialism. I also talked about television. Then I went through the doctrines of the faith to show how our theology ought to make our thinking different from the thinking of the world: the doctrines of God, of revelation, of man, of sin, of redemption.
We’re afraid that if we preach the Word of God, it won’t work. But God does speak through his Word. That’s the way the Holy Spirit works.
Granted, we have to teach so people can understand, and we have to understand them to bridge the gap. As John Stott says, we have to bridge between two worlds. But the chief thing we should want to do is teach the Bible.
Many people want to explore our human experience, but our country is up to its eyeballs in that. Exactly the opposite is what we need. We have to insist our experience be validated by the Word of God.
James Montgomery Boice is pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Finding My Prime Focus
by Don Argue
Christians can develop a defensive mentality. Instead of penetrating this society as salt and light, we tend to pull back and lob spiritual grenades into the culture.
Once a semester we dismiss our entire student body for a day. The students fan out across downtown. They put on window screens or storm windows for the elderly. They clean up transient areas.
They work with the Salvation Army. They paint buildings. They do everything possible to have an impact by showing they care. If the opportunity comes to share Christ, of course, they do it. We hope, of course, that this will motivate students to continue to minister this way on their own.
Fifty of our graduates over the last few years have gone into inner-city ministry projects in Detroit, Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston. In those settings, you have to do more than address spiritual needs. They are helping to provide food, health-care, child care, and housing. The gospel means sensitivity to where the real world is.
I was invited to address 150 corporate leaders in downtown Minneapolis recently about the National Association of Evangelicals.
Afterward a female corporate executive, a graduate of a liberal college in Minnesota, said to me, “I appreciated what you said. Our daughter has become what you were talking about this morning.”
“Tell me about it,” I replied.
“Our daughter has a master’s degree in social work. She moved to Chicago. Are you familiar with a church called Willow Creek?”
“Yes.”
“She started going there. That is really not where we’re at, but something happened in her life. We can’t get over it. She could be making substantial money, but she has chosen to work in a center for battered women and their children. She is moving into the city.”
People in our culture take notice when we care for the needs of others.
My prayer is that I be sensitive to what God wants to be my prime focus.
I think of what God said to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations” (Jer. 1:5).
I don’t want my own agenda to get in the way of what God wants for me. Every person is given unique gifts. We’re all different. We all have our places to fill. My goal is to keep on the cutting edge of what God wants me to do. That comes through times of reflection, prayer, constantly analyzing where my gifts and callings are being most effectively used for Christ, and by cutting out those things that may be good but are not what I’m supposed to be doing.
Don Argue is president of North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and current president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
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