By Steven Croft, Rob Frost, Mark Ireland, Anne Richards, Yvonne Richmond and Nick Spencer.
If you’re concerned about evangelism, you need to read this book. You won’t agree with everything in it, but it will raise questions, stretch your thinking, and give you some new ideas.
It’s sub-titled ‘Communicating faith in a changing culture,’ and this sums it up. Our society has changed hugely, and is continuing to change. Many people today see themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious.’ It’s estimated that 60% of adults are culturally ‘beyond the reach’ of our existing approaches to mission and evangelism. We urgently need some new approaches.
This is a book in two parts. The first part (two chapters by Nick Spencer of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity) analyses some research in the diocese of Coventry in 2003. The second part contains a range of personal responses to the research.
The research
The research found that people today still have ‘big questions,’ and as Spencer says:
‘Their (often unconscious) answers to these questions form the basis of their lives. People are open to talking about these big questions, as long as we don’t use this as an opportunity to preach at them.’
The questions include:
- Destiny: what happens after we die? Where, if anywhere, are we going?
- Purpose: What is the point of life? What values should I live by? Whose life and values might I take as an example to inspire me?
- The universe: How did it start? Is it designed? Is it planned? Is it controlled in any way?
- God: does he/it exist? If so, what is he/it like? (Is God a ‘he’ or an ‘it,’ for example?) What, if any, viable relationship could there be between God and human beings?
- Spiritual realm: Is there a spiritual realm? What form does it take? Does it have any relevance to me and to my life?
- Suffering: Why is there so much in the world? What national and international issues particularly concern me? What can be done about them?
Spencer says that
‘… the majority expressed views which, in as far as it is possible to tell, were complex, confused, contradictory, and even chaotic. No respondent had anything approaching a system or ordered set of presuppositions or beliefs through which they could interpret what they felt, thought, believed and experienced.’ (page 36)
The Church
The Church does not come out of this research well. (I know I keep banging on about this. It’s because I believe most of us inside the Church don’t have the least idea how negatively most people outside the Church see us.)
People see Christianity and the Church as being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. They don’t see Christianity as having anything to say about, or anything to offer to, their spiritual concerns and the ‘big questions.’
‘For the vast majority of respondents interviewed, the traditional Christian responses to these questions are either incredible or literally incomprehensible.’ (Page 18)
Worse, people see the church as being an institution, controlling, hierarchical, male dominated, sexist, arrogant, hypocritical and self-serving. We have some lost ground to make up.
The responses
There are four responses to the research:
- Reflections, by Anne Richards
- The local church perspective, by Mark Ireland
- Evangelism beyond the fringes, by Rob Frost
- Transforming evangelism, by Steven Croft
These contain a lot of interesting practical suggestions for different ways that churches can adapt to people’s changing views of their own spirituality. There’s also a list of resources and organisations.
One of the most provocative responses is Mark Ireland’s reflection on the local church perspective. He says:
‘The challenge for any local church seriously wanting to reach unchurched people is how far they are willing to change in order to accommodate new believers… The kind of Sunday service that nourishes the faith of life-long believers is perhaps miles away from the kind of worshipping community that might nourish the new-found faith of someone who has had no previous exposure to church culture. To move from being a church for the churched to being a church for the unchurched may be a step that is too big for many existing church members to cope with. In which case, the way forward may not be to try to make new believers fit into traditional Sunday church, but to create fresh expressions of church around the new believers.’ (page 97)
At least this has to be worth thinking about. For me, one of the most challenging comments in this book came towards the end, from the late Rob Frost:
‘We are facing one of the greatest missiological opportunities of recent times, yet many of us continue to minister, mission and evangelize as though it really isn’t happening!’ (page 107).
