For those of us committed to global mission, it’s helpful to note that in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, Paul shaped his message in the light of the context that he was speaking into. For example, when he was speaking to a Jewish audience, he assumed that they accepted that God was their Creator and that Scripture was an authority to be appealed to. By contract, when speaking to Gentiles (non-Jews), he adopted a different approach and sought to establish the reality of the Creator God in the face of a pagan worldview which believed in many gods (Compare for example, Acts 13: 13ff with Acts 17: 16ff). Paul taught us a lesson in contextualisation; effective evangelism requires that we do the same.
Following this logic, contemporary Christians have developed carefully thought-out approaches to mission which factor the context into the way the Gospel is shared. So taking the good news into a Muslim context requires a different strategy to say, an African tribe that assumes an animistic world and life view. The Gospel doesn’t change, but the context into which it is proclaimed varies from place to place.
Consequently, I find it ironic that it’s mostly Christians from the western world who have contextualised the gospel for numerous overseas contexts when so little thought seems to have been given to how we understand, speak into and reach our own secular west. This may be partly because – until recently at least – it was assumed that the west had some Christian underpinnings. Sorting out what was Christian and what wasn’t was confusing and complex. More recently, with the rapid increase in secularisation, it is much easier to differentiate between Christianity and its competing truth claims. Today, with the ever-increasing gap between the Christian mind and the secular mind, it’s essential that believers living in the West think through how to understand, speak to and answer the questions of the post-Christian generation.
To this end, and for those who are interested, I can highly recommend Timothy Keller’s latest book, ‘Making Sense of God’. In the book, Keller makes a serious attempt at how Christians might go about exposing both the fallacies and the hopelessness of the secular project’s claims, as well as how to speak to people hoodwinked by its assumption of being the only reasonable way to understand the world. After reading the book I was left with sense of just how the secular project is founded upon so many assertions that fail to stand up to scrutiny when exposed and examined. After many years ministering in secular New York, and seeing many of the most unlikely people come to Christ, no one is better equipped than Keller to write such a book.
If you don’t have the time or the inclination to read Tim Keller’s book, there is an easier alternative. Keller has been to Google’s headquarters and given a talk to the staff there, summarising his book. You can watch it on You Tube. It’s a really good watch and packed with ideas for how we might answer our sceptical friends and relatives. You can view it here:
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2017-10-19. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.