Ministiring to Post-everythings

I included a link to this same post on the NCC Young Adults blog yesterday. I'm including it as seperate post on my own blog for two reasons: 1) the more I think about the issues involved, the more curious I am to hear responses from people. In posting it on two different blogs, I'm hoping that the response will be greater, and 2) recycling posts makes me look like a more productive person.

Do you find it difficult to communicate the truths of Christianity and the message of Christ to those that you come into contact with? Is it hard for you to find ways to show people on the campus or in the work place that the isolation and despair that they experience is symptomatic of the fact that they have violated God's law and that they are in need of the righteousness of another to put them back in right standing with the Creator of the universe? More than likely, if you have attempted to share the truth of the Gospel with others you have encountered these problems. We live in an age that has been labeled, "postmodern." For the greater part of history, most people had taken belief in God as a given. With the coming of Englightenment thought in the seventeenth century, men began to attempt to arrive at certain knowledge of truth and reality by their own reason and intellectual abilities, apart from the idea of dependency upon or responsibility to a divine being. This move towards modernity has created the context for our dependence solely on what man can achieve and discover on his own, apart from any sort of supernatural reality. This can be evidenced by the almost religious reverence that we have when we speak of things being "scientific."

However, ours is a generation that is characterized by a despair of ever finding the certainty that the Enlightenment set out to give us. We are no longer sure that we can really say what is right and what is wrong, if such distinctions even exist. We are trapped within the context of our own experiences, and we cannot know anything for certain about the things outside of this context. This puts sever limitations on our own knowledge and our ability to discover truth (and again, this is a category that we aren't sure if we can even affirm the existence of) or to discern right from wrong. The ways in which we are traditionally taught to evangelize do not seem to be sufficient in light of this condition. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan speaks to this dilemma in his article entitled Post-everythings:

"...typical evangelistic presentations are effective with persons who assume they should be good. Then the gospel-presenter tries to show them tha[t] they are not good enough - they fall short of God's perfect standards - and therefore they need Jesus to forgive sin and help them do the the right thing. This presentation was quite appropriate for almost everyone in my parents' generation. My parents, who are evangelical Christians, and my in-laws, who are not at all, had basically the same social and moral values. If you asked them the questions such as, 'What do you think about pre-marital sex, or homosexuality, or pornography?' both sets of parents would have answered the same. They were part of a world in which Christianity was the folk-religion even if it was not the heart-religion of most people. They believed that the purpose of life was to be a good person. This world no longer exists everywhere."

This is the problem: In previous generations, people have had general ideas about what is right and wrong and therefore had similar ideas about what a good person acts like. Appeals to sinfulness mean something to people like this. However, many in our generation would look at you cross-eyed or even react violently if you bring up categories of right and wrong. For these people, we must first find ways to communicate the concepts of good and bad before we can show them their depravity before a holy God and their subsequent need for a Savior. No doubt, all human beings have an inborn understanding of right and wrong, but the suppression of these concepts by our postmodern age have caused people to doubt their own ability to distinguish or affirm these distinctions.

How then can we set out to present the truths of the Gospel in a way that is faithful to God's Word and also able to communicate these truths in way that penetrates the minds of people in the postmodern world? Keller, who has had enormous success in ministering the Gospel to a young generation of hip Manhattanites, suggests several ways in which we can go about this task, including the use of narrative. Stories are one of the greatest tools we have in communicating the need for a Savior to our generation. Think of how obsessed our culture is with movies, role-playing games, first person shooter video games, and other forms of entertainment. We love being placed in the center of story.

This love of narrative, while particularly characteristic of our generation, is not a unique characteristic. The longing to be in the midst of story that is greater than the tale of our own individual lives is something that is inborn. We can easily see that Scripture, which is given to us largely in the form of stories, speaks to this longing. We are given the story of a majestic garden that is corrupted through the disobedience of its inhabitance. We are told of a race of people sought out by the Creator to bring restoration to his fallen creation. We follow these people through their captivity and their release, their military victories and their devastating defeats, all the while looking forward to the One who will set all things right. We are told of the miraculous events that surround the birth of this One and we listen to Him teach about the Kingdom that He is instituting. We see Him as He sets in to motion the promised restoration in an unexpected plot twist that sees our protagonist hanging dead on a cross. We are told of the impossible reality of His resurrection, and we are commissioned to bring about the realization of His kingdom in the world through the message of His death and resurrection.

This is an amazing story! Perhaps by attempting to communicate not only the propositions of the Gospel, but also the story of the Gospel, we can have a greater influence on our postmodern world. Our culture provides us with all sorts of narratives through film, music, and other mediums into which we can inject the redeeming message of Christ and His cross. Instead of simply telling people that they are sinful and that they need a Savior, perhaps we can show them through a stories that communicate to them. Instead of assuming an understanding of right and wrong, perhaps we can make sense of these categories for people through narratives that clearly illustrate them.

The question in now, how can we do this? I'd love to hear suggestions from people. As we set out to evangelize as a group and as we attempt to reach individuals with the message of the Gospel on our campuses, how could we employ narrative in our efforts? Does anyone have any example of different stories (i.e. movies, books, whatever) that communicate the realities of our sinful condition and a need for redemption? Let's make this practical!