When Christians evangelize, they call their hearers to trust Jesus for salvation. The problem is, almost every word in “trust Jesus for your salvation” is liable to be misunderstood by Western secular people today.
Trust—It’s for the gullible.
Jesus—We can’t be sure what he said, and he existed so long ago that he’s irrelevant.
Your—If there’s something out there called salvation, it certainly isn’t for me. Don’t presume to tell me what I need.
Salvation—This life is all there is, so it makes no sense to be “saved” from it. Also, “salvation” raises the dangerous specter of fundamentalism.
Where does that leave us? The message of trusting Christ for our salvation isn’t just rejected today: it’s excoriated. Many people think our evangelism peddles an oppressive ideology that preys on the vulnerable, manipulates the weak, and privileges the self-righteous and entitled. “The church protects and covers up pedophiles and bullies who exploit vulnerable churchgoers, so don’t talk to me about trusting their hateful god.”
Other people laugh at our evangelism as if it were equivalent to a plea to sign up for Melanesian frog worship (yes, that’s a thing). That’s quite a hill of anger and prejudice to climb, humanly speaking. Good news, then, that God is the God of the impossible (Mark 10:27).
As if this wasn’t enough, we must also continue to evangelize believers. In the West today, few new people are entering the church through the front door, and increasing numbers are leaving through the back. Both groups need gospel-ing.
A large part of our challenge today is to get the real Jesus in front of those in the church and those outside. Here are three ways we might, by God’s grace, do just that.
1. Cultivate a biblical social imaginary.
One contemporary phenomenon contributing both to the dechurching of Christians and to unbelievers’ resistance to the Christian message is that modern culture vigorously and effectively catechizes us every day from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.
This cultural catechesis comes in both subliminal and explicit ways, through our institutions, our entertainment, and our work. It’s cultivated in what’s seen, measured, and rewarded in society. We’re shaped to inhabit the world with particular expectations, hopes, dreams, and fears.
If churches and Christian families don’t provide countercatechesis and a thick community rhythmed and patterned by different influences, then our assumptions, dreams, and lives will remain resolutely secular in their formation, even if we spout biblical verities on a Sunday morning.
If churches and Christian families don’t provide a countercatechesis, then our assumptions, dreams, and lives will remain resolutely secular in their formation, even if we spout biblical verities on a Sunday morning.
There’s a desperate need to disciple Christians at the level of what Charles Taylor and others call the “social imaginary,” to model and explain to unbelievers how the Bible shapes more than our worldview—more than our ideas—but also our dreams, affections, and habits in healthy, robust, rich, and subtle ways of its own. Our approach will change in different contexts, but a Christian social imaginary will include cultivating a vision of discipleship that accomplishes two crucial tasks.
First, a biblical social imaginary will help Christians to appreciate how the world is aggressively catechizing them and what sort of fears, dreams, assumptions, and hopes we’re nudged into having. If Christians have no idea how thoroughly and effectively worldly catechesis shapes us, we can do precious little about it. After all, the most effective propaganda is making people believe that things simply “are the way things are.”
Second, a biblical social imaginary will help Christians, together in community, to cultivate countercatechetical habits of thought, speech, and behavior that are deep enough to present a different rhythm and pattern of life to that of the world. These things can’t just be learned on an intellectual level; they need a community (church, friendship groups, family) where they’re regularly, repeatedly, and intentionally lived out. Otherwise, the world will be on video, but Jesus will be on audio.
When Christians cultivate a biblical social imaginary, they’ll grow to be deeply, deliciously, and destabilizingly different from the unbelievers around them, just as the New Testament authors expected (Matt. 5:16; John 13:35; 1 Pet. 2:12; 3:15).
2. Understand the gospel as both the antithesis and the fulfillment of the culture’s aspirations.
As Christians present Christ to the culture, they typically fall into using one of two playbooks. Some adopt a stance of antithesis, assuming that whatever the culture stands for, the church must stand against; whatever the culture values, the church must vilify. The second stance, sometimes adopted in reaction to the first, is to present the gospel as the linear fulfillment of the culture’s aspirations. Both approaches sell the Bible short and leave the culture cold.
In 1 Corinthians 1, a dazzling passage full of cultural insight, Paul shows us a better way. He is clear that the gospel is the antithesis of the ambient cultural values: “We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (v. 23, NIV). But he’s also clear the gospel is the ultimate fulfillment of these values: “The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (v. 25, NIV).
What are the modern equivalents of the “wisdom” and “power” that Paul saw valued so dearly in the cultures around him? Much has been written on this important topic (see, for example, Daniel Strange’s Making Faith Magnetic and Rebecca McLaughlin’s The Secular Creed), but here are some quick ideas. Justice and freedom are perhaps two of the main late-modern shibboleths, but also consider sanctuary (read the astonishing afterword to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: it’s a powerful apologetic for the deep psychological and social importance of sanctuary); forgiveness (social media never forgives, never forgets); and the riotous priority of gift and grace in a biblical social imaginary over the calculative paradigm of the market, merit, and competition. In each of these areas, God’s message has both challenge and comfort for weary modern souls.
This model of combining antithesis and fulfillment—or what contemporary cultural apologist Daniel Strange calls “subversive fulfillment”—is set out for us in perhaps the greatest work of public theology and cultural engagement in the 2,000-year history of the church: Augustine’s City of God. His masterpiece stands as an exemplary model of this Pauline mode of commending the gospel to a hostile culture.
3. Help Christians to exult in, and live out, this gospel-shaped life.
This nuanced stance to modern culture isn’t just biblical; it’s exhilarating. To discover the rhythms and patterns of a distinctively biblical social imaginary, to feel the challenge and sweetness of how the Bible subversively fulfills modern society’s deepest longings and calms its deepest fears, is time and again an invitation to marvel at “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God” (Rom. 11:33). The wall between “praise” and “evangelism” thins. As C. S. Lewis notes, we praise what we enjoy, and if Christians enjoy God with our time, treasure, and talents, with the rhythms and patterns of our lives, then we’ll surely declare his excellencies to those around us (1 Pet. 2:9).
The truths of Christianity scratch the places where modern people itch. Making Christians more aware of these wonderful biblical truths and their beauty and potency for evangelism today would, under God’s sovereignty, be a small piece of the grand jigsaw puzzle of helping our neighbors trust Jesus for their salvation.
The truths of Christianity scratch the places where modern people itch.
Does following these three encouragements mean we stop preaching “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2)? By no means! That message provides Paul with his astonishingly incisive cultural critique. But it does mean that, like the Paul of 1 Corinthians 1, as we preach the weak and foolish cross, we also engage the surrounding culture’s dominant values, showing how “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor. 1:25, NIV).
The Gospel Coalition