Tim Keller’s wrote a blog in which he addressed the Big Issues Facing the Western Church. Read #4 on that list below:
4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel. The basic concepts of the gospel — sin, guilt and accountability before God, the sacrifice of the cross, human nature, afterlife — are becoming culturally strange in the west for the first time in 1500 years. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, it is time now to ‘think like a missionary’–to formulate ways of communicating the gospel that both confront and engage our increasingly non-Christian western culture.
How do we make the gospel culturally accessible without compromising it? How can we communicate it and live it in a way that is comprehensible to people who lack the basic ‘mental furniture’ to even understand the essential truths of the Bible?
Are you thinking like a sports missionary in regards to your sports ministry? Are you communicating the gospel in such a way that a non-believer without a church or Christian background can understand it? Are you instilling into coaches and volunteers the importance of “cultivating” relationships so that the gospel can be communicated in such a way?
I think we can sometimes take for granted that non-believers will understand concepts like sin, forgiveness, redemption, etc. but the fact of the matter is, those terms have little-to-no meaning to non-Christians. We are living in an ever increasing post-Christian culture and it’s going to take concentrated effort on “cultivating” and “sowing” in order for the “reaping” to take place.
For more information on this subject and practical ways to reach out to our secular culture, read this past blog entry and read the linked article within it.
