This issue of Leadership is dedicated to helping pastors understand and minister within today’s shifting culture. The theme comes in two parts:
I. Change outside the Church.
You may find the interview with futurist Faith Popcorn, The Church’s Ten-Year Window (p. 22), both troubling and hopeful. Popcorn has no particular interest in Christianity, but surprisingly, she suggests that rampant cultural disillusionment is an opportunity for the church.
One major cultural shift in the last forty years has been the intellectual mood change from modernism to postmodernism. Leadership senior associate editor Dave Goetz explains it and its implication for ministry in The Riddle of Our Postmodern Culture (p. 52). Certainly one repercussion of postmodernism is a hyper-skepticism; in Why They Struggle to Believe (p.40), four religious seekers talk frankly about their objections to the gospel.
But how much should pastors really care about trying to understand the culture? Not too much, says Will Willimon in This Culture Is Overrated (p. 29). “In leaning over to speak to the modern world,” Willimon writes, “I fear we may have fallen in.”
II. Change inside the Church.
Since so much is changing outside the church, many people resist change inside the church. In Helping a Settled Congregation Move Ahead (p. 61), pastor John Beukema identifies seven steps to the future. Popular consultant Lyle Schaller busts the myths of bringing about change in the church in You Can’t Believe Everything You Hear about Church Growth (p. 46).
Yet one thing will never change. In The Power of Mere Words (p. 32), contributing Leadership editor Craig Brian Larson argues that more powerful than any technology are the words of a faithful preacher. God’s Word is truly changeless and eternal.
-The Editors
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
