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By now, we are all painfully aware of the complex challenges facing the “big C” Church today. We addressed several of those challenges in a prior episode titled “Facing the Four Challenges of our Changing Times.” However, we should focus on seizing the amazing ministry opportunities presented by our times. Christians must work in their spheres of influence to project a hopeful, optimistic narrative of a future shaped by Scriptural truths. We must confidently stake out a place in the marketplace of ideas and state to the world: “Here is the Way to a better future as a person, a community and a country.” Here are four specific opportunities presented by advanced modernity:
#1 Our Society is Weak in the Middle. In 2000, Robert Putnam published a book entitled Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.[1] In Bowling Alone, Putnam meticulously catalogued how Americans have disconnected from families, friends, neighborhood clubs, business associations, and even democratic institutions. This trend has only grown since Bowling Alone was published. Personal autonomy is strong in our society, and government programs will not go away any time soon. But, the fabric of our society—the intermediary institutions—has frayed. We are now hyper-connected through social media, but we are hardly connected to each other.[2] Younger generations (such as millennials and especially Generation Z) especially lack much genuine connection to each other and their community. This is an opportunity for churches because they are, by definition, places of connection and community. Churches should seize this opportunity by emphasizing communities within the church (think Sunday School or small groups) and the community that is the Church.
#2 The Church is Exploding in the Global South. The Church has seen dramatic if not explosive growth in South America, Africa, and Asia. Last Sunday, more Christians attended Church in China than in all of “Christian” Europe.[3] Christianity is the world’s largest religion and the first truly global faith, with adherents from Boston to Bangladesh. That said, the church is growing slowest in North America and Europe.[4] It appears that wherever the forces of advanced modernity have been at work, the Church’s witness has been blunted. The Church is certainly not anti-modern, for Christian scientists acting on Biblical ideas helped ring in a new age of technology and progress. And, the Church is certainly still growing in North America and Europe. However, the Church has to date failed to effectively win the post-postmodern (you read that correctly; we are not even sure what to call it) mind and heart amidst a whirl of activity, notifications and subversive ideas. The Church in the west, then, has the unique opportunity and responsibility to prayerfully engage our times and to be the vanguard of Christian truth in a modernizing world. We must, through the power of God, serve our generation (Acts 13:36) by better understanding our modern neighbors and better winning them to an ancient but enduring truth.
#3 The So-Called Secular Age is Giving Way to a More Spiritual One. Despite the oft-repeated secular prediction of a modern world without religion and despite the efforts of the new atheists, belief in God makes sense to four out of five people in the world and will continue to do so. [5] It turns out that people simply need religion. Now, this does not mean that people will just naturally jump from a general belief in a higher power to an acceptance of the Christian Gospel. Our brave new world is more pluralistic than ever before. A teenager in the mid-western United States has access to the full gamut of world religions via his or her smartphone and has little cultural pressure to follow Christianity. This is a grand opportunity for the Church to champion the Christian Gospel among contradictory religious truth claims[6] and the claims of secularism. The Church should welcome this opportunity to display the beauty and uniqueness of the Gospel to our neighbors.
#4 The Technological Revolution Continues to Produce New Tools to Spread the Gospel. Since its creation, the YouVersion Bible app has been downloaded more than 250 million times. On its website, the App’s “Happening Now” page records fascinating daily statistics such as “117 Bible [Reading] Plans started in Turkey.”[7] And this is just one tool developed to help spread the Good News. Imagine if the Apostle Paul was somehow beamed from the first century A.D. to a well-equipped church office in Rome, Georgia (since we are using our imaginations, why not?) in 2017. Imagine his delight at what he would find with the help of a web browser, Google Translate and the nearest millennial. We can video-chat in real time with people on the other side of the planet, circumnavigate the globe in about 48 hours on a commercial plane flight, tweet encouragement instantly, quickly translate the Scriptures into tribal dialects and can help cure epidemics with the wonders of modern medicine. The Church has always had the convicting power of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8) and Christ’s promise and presence (Matthew 28:16-20), and that is truly enough. However, unlike the generations of Christians before us, we have access to a set of unique tools to help us impact our world with the Gospel. While ultimately relying on God’s power, we should endeavor to take full advantage of these tools.
It has been said of St. Augustine that he was “…no mere spectator of the crisis [the fall of ancient Rome]. He was, to a far greater degree than any emperor or general or barbarian warlord, a maker of history and builder of the bridge which was to lead from the old world to the new.” May the same be said of us.
[1] Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
[2] Jared Keller, “Americans Are Staying as Far Away from Each Other as Possible.” Pacific Standard. 11 June 2015. Web. Accessed February 27, 2017.
[3] Tom Phillips, “China on Course to Become ‘World’s Most Christian Nation’ Within 15 Years: The Number of Christians in Communist China is Growing So Steadily that by 2030 it Could Have More Churchgoers than America.” The Telegraph. 19 April 2014. Web. Accessed February 27, 2017.
[4] “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050.” Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life. 2 April 2015. Web. Accessed February 27, 2017.
[5] Id.
[6] For example, the Quran claims that Jesus was “no more than a messenger” (Sura 4:171, Yusif Ali) and the Bible records Jesus claiming that “…no man comes to the Father but by me.” (John 14:6); these claims contradict each other and cannot both be true.
[7] Youversion. https://www.youversion.com/happening-now. Accessed January 25, 2017.
Link to books I mentioned:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical
Getting Religion: Faith, Culture and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Age of Obama