Imagine a football team playing every game on its home field. Since home teams win about 80 percent of their games, the team would have an immense advantage. It would have winning seasons year after year.

During the “Christendom” era (from Constantine’s conversion to the Renaissance), the Western church scored for a thousand years like a football team with home-field advantage. The church defined the game, announced the rules, and briefed the referees. The church’s team always had the crowd behind it.

All of that has changed. If the church plays today, it plays on opposition turf. Indeed, the very “map” of Christianity has changed. Once the countries and peoples of Europe and North America were “Christian,” and the countries and peoples of the Third World were “mission fields.” The picture today is starkly different. Today a higher percentage of Angolans than Americans are active, professing Christians, a higher percentage of Koreans than Canadians, a higher percentage in Fiji than in any country in Europe. The United States has become the largest mission field in the Western Hemisphere. For the church in America to carry on its evangelistic mission, we must know what we are up against and how the rules of the game are changing.

How Did We Get Where We Are?

One reason for the changed map is heartening: early efforts to take the message beyond the borders of the Western world bore fruit. The other cause, however, is less encouraging: the secularization of the West. Six watershed events, spanning several centuries, have largely placed Western life and thought beyond the automatic influence of the church:

• The Renaissance rediscovered ancient Greek philosophy and science. It redirected people’s attention from heaven to earth and from theological matters to humanity’s progress. This alternative Greek world view introduced “pluralism” and a new source of doubt to Western minds.

• The breakup of Christendom continued with the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation helped remove church influence from Western life by dividing the church and by turning its attention from managing society toward personal renewal and theology. The Renaissance and the Reformation combined to get secularization rolling. During Luther’s lifetime, people said, “Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it!”

• Secularization continued with the rise of nationalism and of proud, independent nations in a Europe once united. The nationalistic spirit that swept Europe destroyed Christendom as a political entity. Moreover, nationalism led to unprecedented warfare between the peoples of “Christian Europe,” prompting disillusionment and doubts about the church’s God.

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• The rise of empirical science challenged Christendom’s assumptions about the universe and human life. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of science (and what was passed off as science) upon Western consciousness, but its impact can be potently suggested by recalling the impact of just five thinkers: Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Marx, and Freud.

• The Enlightenment built upon the Renaissance to escalate secularization. It swaggered into European history with enormous confidence in human reason, and it left an intellectual legacy that has been felt in Western society ever since. Enlightenment thinkers believed that human beings are intrinsically good and reasonable, but that their environment makes them less good and reasonable. Enlightenment leaders taught that beneath the world’s diverse religions is a common “natural religion” universally present in human nature, so the essence of all religions is the same. Enlightenment thinkers were confident that morality and society could be based on reason alone, without revelation or organized religion. They believed that science, technology, and education would deliver “inevitable progress.” Furthermore, the Enlightenment trumpeted “human dignity” and “human rights” and inspired movements working for a more just and humane society, thereby providing a radical alternative to Christian teachings and Christian service. The Enlightenment thus encouraged doubt about Christianity and provided beliefs and causes that seemed to replace it, and it ushered in what came to be known as “modernity.”

• If the Enlightenment escalated the secularization process, urbanization, beginning in eighteenth-century Great Britain, stampeded it. Urbanization amplified the effects of secularization. During the Industrial Revolution in North America, Ralph Waldo Emerson confessed, “I look upon cities as great conspiracies; I always feel some loss of faith upon entering one.”

Our New “Apostolic Age”

The most important consequence of secularization is the growing Western populations who have no Christian background, memory, vocabulary, or assumptions; they are “ignostics,” who do not know what Christians are talking about. Because of secularization’s massive impact upon people, the Western church needs to experience a paradigm shift that allows it to perceive that the traditional mission-sending nations of the Western world are “mission fields” once again.

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To be specific, Western Christianity needs a multitude of intentional missionary congregations—churches that will abandon the Christendom model of ministry as merely nurturing the faithful—whose primary mission will be to reach and disciple people who do not yet believe. Many of our churches can be blasted out of their “edifice complex” by confronting the ways in which we have entered a new apostolic age, akin to the situation faced by the early church’s first three centuries of existence.

Objectives for communicating the gospel in the church’s first centuries had at least four things in common with our situation:

1. Because they faced a population with no knowledge of the gospel, early Christians had to inform people of the story of Jesus: the good news, its claims, and its offer.

2. As it faced hostile people and persecution from the state, the church had to influence people to have a positive attitude toward the movement.

3. As they confronted an empire with several entrenched religions, Christians had to convince people of the truth of Christianity, or at least of its plausibility.

4. Since entry into the faith involves an act of the will, Christians had to invite people to adopt this faith, join the messianic community, and follow Jesus as Lord.

The early church was intentional about achieving each of these four objectives. They informed people by creatively communicating and interpreting their gospel in conversations, synagogue presentations, and open-air speaking. They influenced people’s attitudes by their changed lives, ministries of service, love for one another, and love for non-Christians (even their enemies, even in martyrdom). They convinced people by reasoning from the Scriptures and employing common-sense apologetics. They invited responsive people to confess faith and be baptized into the messianic community.

Much later, Christendom was dominant; the parish church was at the center of community life. Because it informed every area of the culture’s life, the church achieved the goals of informing, influencing, and convincing through enculturation. Most people were already informed in the faith’s basics, were favorably disposed toward the faith, and already assumed its truth. So the Christian communicator could largely focus on inviting people to adopt the faith.

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With the spread of secularization, people increasingly held a negative attitude toward the church and withdrew. In time, many people no longer understood, or recalled, the faith of their ancestors. Today this secularization is so advanced that no communicator has the luxury of beginning at point 4 (the invitation) and appealing for a response. We must first plow, seed, and water the fields before we can reasonably expect to gather harvests. However, as British evangelist Donald Soper contends, most evangelism today presupposes that the Middle Ages are still with us “and takes little or no account of the fact that the church today is back in apostolic times.”

The Emerging Opportunity

Coincidentally (or providentially), the Western church’s new apostolic challenge is joined by a rising opportunity more vast than anything the church dared pray for. Princeton Seminary philosophy professor Diogenes Allen suggests in his Christian Belief in a Post-modern World that Christianity’s mission to the West now approaches an unprecedented opportunity. He demonstrates that, due to twentieth-century revolutions in science and philosophy, the Enlightenment is now a spent force, as is the period of “modernity” it produced.

Human beings are not as good and reasonable as Enlightenment ideology taught, for example. “There is an increasing recognition,” says Allen, “that evil is real and that it cannot be removed merely by education and social reform.” Enlightenment teachings about a common “natural religion” in human nature have not survived examination. Society has proven incapable of developing, by reason alone, a consensus morality. Science and education have not liberated humanity from entrenched problems such as crime, pollution, poverty, racism, and war, and this failure has crippled the notion of “inevitable” progress. Additionally, many leading scientists and philosophers now admit the limits and fallibility of science. Many are more open to the possibility of God.

The pillars of “modern” Western civilization erected during the Enlightenment are now crumbling. Allen observes that we are now in a period of culture lag—in which most people in the West are not yet as aware as scientists and philosophers that the Enlightenment is over. But, Allen predicts, “when the dust settles,” we will see that “the fields are ripe for the harvest.”

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The Image Barrier

From interviews with converts from secularity and studies of communicators and churches who are reaching them, we can discover strategies for reaching secular people and spreading the faith in the West. Present space permits the presentation of one model.

Imagine a four-ringed target for throwing darts. Picture secular people on the edges of the board, beyond the outer circle; they have missed the target for which God aimed their lives (Rom. 3:23). Each step from the edge to the “bull’s eye” (God’s goal for a person to become a Christian disciple) involves crossing a barrier.

The first is the image barrier: Secular people who are farthest away typically begin with their backs (or sides) toward the faith because they hold a negative image of Christianity.

One version of the image barrier, held by people who continue to see the world through Enlightenment lenses, assumes that Christianity must be “untrue.” These people still bet on human reason to deliver ultimate truth and a consensus morality, still count on science and education to save the world, and still assume Christianity is “disproved” or “the same” as other religions.

As increasing numbers lose confidence in the Enlightenment alternative, however, more people will be open to other faith options—includeing Christianity. Churches can accelerate the process by puncturing remaining Enlightenment balloons and by offering the Christian alternative on secular turf.

A second image problem with Christianity involves the assumption that Christianity is “irrelevant” to people’s lives or to community and world concerns. Many churches can (and do) challenge that image by joining people and communities in their struggles and by communicating the relevance of real Christianity to people’s needs.

A third image problem with Christianity involves the assumption that Christianity is “boring.” People raised on television can find church uninteresting or unstimulating. In response, some churches have decided that it is okay to make church “interesting.” They develop approaches that adapt to short attention spans and stimulate—even amuse—while teaching and inspiring.

As secular people are helped to bridge one or more versions of the image barrier, they may become “seekers.”

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The Culture Barrier

Once a person becomes a seeker, the second barrier is typically a cultural barrier (the “stained-glass barrier”). When secular seekers visit a church, it can be a culturally alienating experience. If they do not understand the jargon, relate to the music, identify with the people, or feel comfortable in the facility, they will infer that Christianity (and the Christian God) is not for people like them. This cultural barrier is not usually perceived by the church, especially when the target population represents the same general culture as the church membership; the church assumes that “they” do understand and relate to what “we” do, or at least they “should.”

This cultural barrier is sometimes crossed when an earnest seeker agrees to “become circumcised”: they submit to re-enculturation and become like “church people.” That happens often enough to seduce churches into thinking there is no cultural barrier, or that all seekers should be eager to adapt to our ways. But the churches that reach many secular people pay the price to become indigenous to the people in their local mission fields, thus removing the cultural barrier that prevents most people from considering the faith itself.

The Gospel Barrier

Once the image and cultural barriers are crossed or removed, seekers are free to consider the gospel itself—the only stumbling block that people should have to face. There are several dominant paradigms in the biblical gospel (new covenant, kingdom, justification, atonement, forgiveness, reconciliation, salvation, sanctification, and so on)—presumably because no one paradigm conveys the full reality of God’s deed in Jesus Christ; and there are many cultural forms for communicating the meaning within each paradigm. One widely used single expression is the credo of the New Life for All movement in Africa and Latin America:

1. God created all people for Life.

2. People, in their sin, have forfeited Life.

3. God came in Christ to offer people New Life.

4. People can receive this New Life by turning from their sins to Christ in trust and obedience to the Community of New Life.

5. People knowing New Life are called to be faithful in all relationships.

Most churches reaching secular people distill their message into some similar form, because seekers often experience the gospel barrier as an intimidating thicket of more theological limbs, bushes, and vines than they can grope through.

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Effective churches help seekers with this theological barrier in several ways. First, the churches emphasize the faith’s most foundational truth claims and do not try to teach everything. Second, the churches help with the theological barrier by meaningfully interpreting the foundational convictions of Christianity rather than merely parroting the tradition. Third, they join seekers in discovering good reasons that support Christian truth claims. Fourth, they encourage an experiment of faith for a season so that people may experience the validity of Christianity as a threshold to commitment. Fifth, they give people enough time to reflect on the Christian possibility while encouraging closure in measurable time.

The Total Commitment Barrier

Once people accept the gospel and are Christians, the fourth barrier or challenge relates to becoming a totally committed Christian who seeks and obeys God’s will and lives to advance God’s kingdom. When people first become Christians, typically they do so for the benefits Christ offers. They want (and receive) meaning for their lives, or glue for their marriage, or the experience of acceptance, or the promise of heaven. But, as the evangelical tradition has often expressed it, they have received Jesus as Savior, but not yet as Lord. If they fail to become totally devoted, they become nominal Christians—almost as selfish and self-seeking as they were before, never experiencing the transforming power that Christianity promises, and not embodying the authenticity that seekers look for. Effective churches invite and challenge their followers to a life of obedience to the will of God.

This ultimate evangelical challenge is so formidable that some churches dodge it and appear content to have people (depending on the tradition) “saved” or “confirmed.” Frequently, therefore, people who have moved past the image, cultural, and gospel barriers are as unaware as rank pagans of God’s radical claim upon his people. Noted megachurch pastor Bill Hybels reports that “becoming totally devoted to Christ” is the most difficult single topic to get across to people. “When I teach that to secularly minded people, they think I’m from Mars. The thought of living according to someone else’s agenda is ludicrous.”

Nevertheless, Christians who accept the challenge to live by God’s agenda become the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and the agents of the human race’s hope. This is happening often enough, in enough places, that we can almost forecast the apostolic reawakening of mainline Christianity in the Western world. While Christendom is gone with the wind and the church no longer has the home-field advantage, a growing number of Christian churches are becoming like the Notre Dame football team: they relish the challenge of playing away from home.

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To be sure, Christians face a challenge in the secular world more serious than anything Notre Dame ever faces in the Orange Bowl. We are called to mission in a fallen world, whose kingdoms are not yet the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, a world in which evil sometimes seems to be in charge. So, before we go, we are counseled to wait until we have received “power from on high”; and as we go, we remember that God’s prevenient grace precedes us, and that he who is in us is greater than he that is in the world.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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