Round 2 (Part 2)

[Warning: this post is a little long. I apologize, but this topic is too important to abbreviate any more than I already am.]

(2) The second major topic that our vision leadership team discussed this week was the changing nature of our mission field and the rapidly changing relationship between "the church" and "the world."

Not all that long ago the church in America enjoyed a sort of home field advantage in the world. Our message was basically comprehensible to and even respected by the average person, even those who would not have called themselves Christians. Secular organizations wouldn't have dreamed of scheduling activities on Sunday mornings because that was church time; Christian clergy were respected in the community simply by virtue of their office; and basic moral behavior could commonly be referred to as "christian," as evidenced by the obvious condescension in a statement like, "That's wasn't a very christian thing to do." Churches like ours could open their doors wide on a Sunday morning and reasonably expect that new visitors would walk simply in. And once there, they were likely to have a good idea of what to do and what was expected of them. In fact, they had probably been raised in a roughly similar kind of place.

Times have changed.

The church can no longer reasonably expect respect and deference from the un-churched world, and the people whom we are trying to reach with the good news about Jesus are no longer primed to receive that message by prior experience in a church or even simply by years of exposure to a society steeped in Christian language, symbols, and practices. The church can no longer open its doors and expect the un-churched to stream in, let alone know what to do once they get there.

The key difference was crystallized for me once as I listened to a conversation between two leaders of very large churches in different parts of the country, one that began in the 1970s and one that began to thrive much more recently. The conversation went something like this:
Leader of the recently thriving church: When you started your church, you did it by going door to door and asking people if they were part of a church and if not, what kept them from doing so, right?
Leader of the church started in the 70s: Yes, that's right.
Recently: That's a huge difference for us. You could ask people what the problems were, then remove those problems, and people would be interested in joining your church.
1970s: Right
Recently: Basically you were asking people "Why not?" and removing the problems. We have to deal with people who are asking "Why?" and then show them a compelling reason. People we're trying to reach now are asking, "Why on earth would I want to be involved with anything as dumb, backward, and irrelevant as Christianity."

(In case anybody reading this figures out who these leaders are, I'd like to clarify that the leader of the church started in the 1970s is fully aware of this shift and is fruitfully engaging the 21st century world also.)

This is also a challenge that First Lutheran needs to meet. We must learn to live as a Christian church community that demonstrates the truth of the gospel in its life together so that our message is heard as more than just self-serving religious babble but, instead, as the declaration that the one good, Creator God is saving his obviously broken world - and he's doing it in Jesus.

For anyone who'd like to read some more about these important shifts in church mission, a good web resource can be found here. For print resources, two good books to read are They Like Jesus but not the Church by Dan Kimball or The Once and Future Church by Loren Mead.