Postmoderns have three questions for
Christians that you'd better be ready for.
Daniel
Hill holds a steady part-time job working one or two shifts a
week at Starbucks. It's hardly a career-track position, and it's
not that he needs the extra cash or battles a secret caffeine
addiction.
It's
the people.
Purple
hair, belly-button rings, tattoos, black-painted
fingernails—those people.
For
Hill, whose day job is ministering on staff with Willow Creek
Community Church's Axis outreach, Starbucks provides a context
to build meaningful relationships with postmodern, Gen-Next
twentysomethings who are far from God.
"Nothing has been more transforming for me than working at
Starbucks," says Hill, "These people matter to me."
But
the moonlighting gig isn't a free pass to easy evangelism. His
coffee colleagues are like a good cup of triple espresso—plenty
of steam, a little bitter, and enough kick to knock you on your
backside if you aren't careful.
Exhibit A: "The first day Debbie worked at Starbucks, one of the
shift supervisors points at me and asks her, 'Did you hear what
his real job is?' After she hears I work at a church, Debbie
freaks out. She says, 'Three years ago my 16-year-old daughter
was raped and murdered. Tell me, what kind of God would let that
happen? I believe in God. I just have a real problem with him.'"
Hill
isn't alone in facing these kinds of questions. Suspicion and
distrust of Christians, and wariness of God are readily
observed.
Consider the bumper sticker: "Dear God, please save me from your
followers." Or the ubiquitous Christian "fish" that has
mysteriously grown feet courtesy of the Darwinian crowd—a symbol
of faith sarcastically twisted by the culture.
Even
Christian bookstores carry such titles as: "Following Jesus
Without Embarrassing God," "Toxic Faith," and "The Subtle Power
of Spiritual Abuse."
With
fingers pointed at Christians, we're obliged to identify the
underlying accusations and offer a response. Three questions are
at the core.
Why should I trust you?
Daniel
Hill suggests that 90 percent of the accusations Christians face
are rooted in mistrust. "I don't find that people have a problem
with Jesus," he says. "They have a problem with Christians."
Anyone
who claims authority today—politicians, parents, or pastors—will
face the question of trust.
Rick
Richardson, author of Evangelism Outside the Box and
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's national field director for
evangelism, observes: "When people ask questions about
homosexuality, for instance, we're tempted to think they're
asking questions about right and wrong. But they're not. They're
asking about dominance and oppression.
"Homosexual strugglers look at what the church has done to
women, they look at slavery, at this history of collaboration
between Christian faith and Western dominance—and they say, 'In
light of that, how can I trust you?'"
If that's the question, how can we respond?
The
answer requires more than words. Christians, with PowerPoint
presentations and four-point evangelistic outlines, have
mastered the art of proclamation. But words alone aren't going
to answer the trust question.
Trust is built by actions, not words.
"We're
supposed to proclaim the kingdom of God and demonstrate the
kingdom of God," says Soong-Chan Rah, pastor of the Cambridge
Community Fellowship Church near Boston. "Evangelism for our
generation means learning to do both.
"Part
of proclamation means that we speak the whole gospel of Christ,
not just the Westernized version of it. We also need to be good
at demonstration—bringing healing to our sick society and
at-risk neighborhoods, bringing wholeness not just to the
spiritually lost but also to those who are under economic
oppression."
One of
the most fundamental ways to represent God's kingdom is by being
kind to the disaffected, even when we have genuine disagreements
with the way they choose to live.
For
Valerie Zander, who works with a team to develop neighborhood
churches in the San Francisco area, this means working with
people who are homosexual.
"The
question is, 'Do I offer genuine friendship and companionship to
people who are gay?'" Zander says. "If you're a believer, the
answer to that question is yes.
"I
have a lesbian friend who told me, 'I'm expecting.' She was
watching closely to see how I responded. Would I tell her she
shouldn't be raising a child, or would I be excited for her?
"I had
to ask myself, Does my friend want my approval? Does giving it
to her salve her conscience? Will she say, 'Oh see, look, she's
a pastor's wife and she thinks it's okay?'"
Zander
came down on the side of kindness.
"I
decided in my life, in profound ways, I believe children are a
gift from God. I truly believe that I would not be the kind of
person I am becoming if I had not had children. So I said, 'I'm
happy for you because children are a gift from God.'"
In
whatever way we respond, the one thing we can't do is ignore the
trust issue.
"It's
often the question behind the question," says Richardson.
"Because a lot of these are accusations against the church.
Whenever you try to address them without addressing the trust
issue they can't hear you," he says. "So I always start by
listening and validating the questions and identifying why
people would have trust issues.
"I'm
not going to defend Christianity's marriage to Western European
domination. I don't care where you come down on specific issues,
such as sexism, for instance. You have to take seriously the
trust issues people have with the church.
"Let
people know you've heard them and that you have compassion for
the hurts people experience."
Isn't that just your reality?
In
Evangelism Outside the Box, Richardson tells about an encounter
with Bob, a philosophy of science student at the University of
Illinois. Bob was dating a girl from Richardson's InterVarsity
group, and she asked Richardson to talk with him.
After
Richardson began discussing evidence for the resurrection and
Jesus' desire to have a relationship with us, Bob responded with
an extended monologue of his own.
He
touched on Einstein's theories and introduced the findings of
scientists Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. Then
Bob got downright evangelistic.
"Quantum theory has immense consequences for our view of
reality," Bob explained. "First, logic can no longer be seen as
either/or. You can't say either Christianity is true or it's
false. Reality is also/and. Light is a wave, and it's also a
particle.
"So
when you give me your arguments, you're operating with that
old-time dichotomizing logic that went out with the downfall of
Isaac Newton's world of simple, certain scientific truth.
"Second, all reality is participant reality. There is no such
thing as an independent, objective world that you can observe
without changing it. You can't measure light particles without
changing them, without creating the reality you observe. You
probably want to make me think the early Christians just
reported the historical facts.
"They
helped create the facts they observed, and then reported them
out of their interpretation of reality. Scientists do that.
Writers do that. Religious people like you do that."
The
good news, Richardson says, is that accusations related to the
radical changes in science during the twentieth century and
objections to Christians' claims of truth don't necessarily
require a doctoral-level understanding of quantum physics.
"What
you're really arguing for," says Richardson, "is an
acknowledgement that reality isn't just inside you. It's also
outside you.
"The
reality of God is out there. I work hard with people here—to get
them out of their total experience orientation. If all you seek
is experience, if you're just looking for what's true for you,
it's a self-defeating search. Reality is something you find
while you're seeking something else."
The
Starbucks-serving Daniel Hill says that the "whatever works for
you" mentality is a foundational part of the postmodern mindset.
Still, he says, it can be fruitless to engage that argument
directly.
Hill
calls the postmodern mindset "kind of the air they breathe"
rather than a deep-seated philosophical barrier to faith.
"I've
never been able to persuade someone intellectually to abandon
the relativistic mindset," he says. "That's never the doorway I
get someone to walk through. What's more likely to happen is
that they'll see the power of a transformed life in another
Christ follower and be transformed."
Hill
says we also do well to remember that relativism has its plus
side.
"People are open to Jesus," he says. "They just don't consider
him the only way. I try to engage them in who Jesus is and not
that the others aren't correct."
What good is Christianity?
Richardson calls this the question of utility and relevance.
Does your belief change lives? Does your religion work? Does it
help me, whether I'm in your group or not? Or are you just
another self-serving group?
"The
question of the uniqueness of Christ is not primarily
philosophical," he writes.
"People are not looking for theological comparisons but for
attractiveness, relevance, and usefulness."
Katy,
a business consultant in Washington, D.C., had been hearing the
rat-a-tat-tat of a recurring message for five years.
"Our
role on earth is to take on suffering and allow ourselves to
become agents of God's redemption," her young adult pastor would
say. "Seek out the pain of the world so you can engage it and
see the Lord redeem it."
Today,
two young girls in Washington's inner-city are grateful that
Katy was listening.
"Our
young adults group started a mentoring program in Anacostia, the
murder capital of the murder capital of the country," explains
Bill Haley, the source of Katy's five-year echo.
"It
became very clear that at one point, the mother of the little
girl she was mentoring was going to need
alcohol rehab, and the little girl and her sister were going to
need someone to take care of them."
Katy
volunteered, thinking it was a six-week commitment, and then
watched that short-term assignment stretch into more than two
years.
"She
eventually needed to quit her job as a business consultant to
take care of these two children," says Haley, director of urban
ministry at the D.C.-area Falls Church. "We lay down our own
interests for the sake of coming to the aid of those who would
have no other help. That's an incarnation of the life of Jesus."
It's
also an effective response to the third question of the
postmodern culture.
"I
believe the greatest apologetic for this day is the apologetic
of Jesus and the early church," says Haley, who lives with his
wife in inner-city D.C.
"Simply put: Being a Christian means following Jesus. If our
discipleship is not leading us to continue to give away our
lives to other people, at great personal cost, then we are not
following Jesus.
"There
is a fundamental call to Christians to be involved in generous
compassion to the poor and the broken and the underprivileged.
There's more in the Bible about justice and compassion than
evangelism."
What they can't argue with
In today's culture there will always be questions and
accusations—some fair, others unfair; some informed, others
ignorant.
As
ministers of the gospel, what is our response?
Hill
suggests the best way may also be the simplest.
"Be
intentional and authentic in your friendship," he says. "Their
response to my overtures can't determine whether we stay in
friendship. If it does, then it's not a friendship but a
manipulative ploy to get them to become a Christian. It's a
difficult paradox to reconcile."
Especially when abstract discussions about cultural accusations
turn personal, and real people and eternity hang in the balance.
Remember Debbie, the woman whose daughter was raped and
murdered? More than a year and a half after they met, Hill is
still working on that friendship, reaching out, extending a hand
of grace. He asked her to tell her story at church.
"During one of our Axis messages recently, we were asking, 'How
do you find God in the midst of pain?'
"I
asked Debbie to come and share her story, and she did. She tells
this gripping story of loss and hurt and pain, and everyone was
waiting for the end of the story," he explains. "But she
finished by saying, 'I have a real problem with God.'
"It's
not the end of the story," Hill says. "It's the middle."
Brett
Lawrence a former youth minister, is a writer in Newark, Ohio. |
