All I know is that we'll have to lead with love

Beyond that, finding an effective entry point into our overwhelmingly secular culture remains, at present, above my pay grade

A recurrent theme here at Precipice is our culture’s increasingly entrenched view that Christian faith is irrelevant - to anything.

I came across a piece at The Atlantic this morning by theologian and apologist Tim Keller that I found impressive for its (guarded) optimism about this. Keller holds out hope that acting upon, with actual results, the Great Commission is doable. (I word the task before believers this way because “evangelize,” and especially the noun form of that word, is such a loaded term that it might here be misinterpreted.)

He covers a lot of the territory that gets an ample airing among those concerned with the present state of affairs.

He offers a razor-sharp articulation of the eventual result of putting the self front and center:

The modern self is exceptionally fragile. While having the freedom to define and validate oneself is superficially liberating, it is also exhausting: You and you alone must create and sustain your identity. This has contributed to unprecedented levels of depression and anxiety and never-satisfied longings for affirmation. The modern self is also fragmenting, as Bellah argued, its individualism leading to the erosion of family, community, and unity of shared values in the nation. The breakdown of neighborhoods and communities means that, more and more, our lives are run by faceless, massive bureaucracies and inhumane technologies aimed solely at economic efficiency.

Exactly so.

The universal human yearning for something central and transcendent is left in its currently starved state when there is no notion of a lodestar in any of the dominant worldviews to which modern people are adhering. And Christians have zeroed in on just what such a lodestar looks like. That’s because there is a linage going back to a group of people who walked and talked with the only begotten Son of the creator of he universe, ate with him, laughed, cried and prayed with him, heard his voice as he preached, watched his gruesome execution, and walked, talked, ate, laughed, cried and prayed with him some more after he’d risen.

But fewer people by the day give a flying diddly about such a witness.

Keller offers a broad prescription for starting to reverse that:

The escape from political captivity. American evangelicals have largely responded to the decline of the Church by turning to a political project of regaining power in order to expel secular people from places of cultural influence. But a demographically shrinking Church that identifies heavily with one narrow band of political actors will not be relevant in America. A dynamically growing body of believers making visible sacrifices for the good of their neighbors, on the other hand, may indeed shape the culture, mainly through attraction rather than compulsion.

A union of “extraordinary prayer.” All religions promote and call for prayer. But historically, during times of fast growth and renewal, Christian movements have been marked by an extraordinary amount of communal prayer. During the early years of the explosive Christian movement in Korea, all-night prayer meetings were common, and they remain so in many parts of the country to this day. During the 18th-century Great Awakening in America, Jonathan Edwards wrote of the “explicit agreement and visible union of God's people in extraordinary prayer for the revival of religion.” Unions of believers for prayer—both large and small gatherings—have an empowering effect. The renewed growth of the Church in the U.S. will not happen without it.

The distinguishing of the gospel from moralism. In a relativistic culture the Church will have to clearly declare that there are moral absolutes—which will be unpopular, to say the least. It will be called domineering and abusive, but it must not flinch. Yet there is danger on the other side too.

Well, okay. But it seems to me there’s a step that’s required before this work yields any results.

We have to make the ordinary post-modern American see that he or she has a need for something beyond the self. To the self-defined and validated self, the whole notion of sin and redemption is utterly foreign. I repeat, utterly foreign.

Evangelizing to those at a crisis point in their lives works somewhat better than it does to the ordinary Joe. Jail ministry is effective (when it’s effective; I’ve seen inmates come to the end of a weekend and not be moved from their secular position) because the target audience has the fact of sin in its face 24 hours a day. Unlike the non-jailed, who feel like they’re pretty good people, at least by their own moral metric, the inmates who do have a conversion experience have the question of what an eternal fate might look like looming relentlessly.

But a culture that has turned one of humankind’s greatest gifts for sublime creation - music - into a sybaritic reveling in the darkest products of human imagination, and humankind’s combined capacity for technological advancement and innate inclination to care for others - the practice of medicine - into institutional opposition to the understanding that there’s a basic a priori design to the universe, is going to have to first be reintroduced to a basic idea against which it will balk.

I don’t have any kind of blueprint for how to go about that. For starters, I need to inventory the current state of my own faith and make sure it’s solid enough to even talk about spreading the Gospel and be taken seriously, starting with myself.

And that makes my point as well as any means by which I could make it. As Precipice and Ordinary Times readers know, I don’t have the confidence borne of a lifetime of solid encouragement and mentoring and a lifestyle permeated by Christ. I was “raised” in a mainline Protestant congregation - PCUSA - and my parents, particularly my father took it seriously - at least as seriously as they were equipped for in a time when their church as well as the larger society were already well on their way to abandoning the centrality of the Gospel. But weekdays were filled with work, as well as making sure I did my homework and got to Boy Scout meetings on time, and weekends were for cocktail parties, dinner parties, attending plays, racing sailboats and paying attention to the political scene. They were completely unequipped to converse with me about Ram Dass and Jimi Hendrix. When sex and drugs came along, they’d already left that church - my mom going back to the Christian Science of her youth, and my dad reading sort-of-theological stuff on his own - and beyond trying to put their foot down, had no real way to articulate why I shouldn’t immerse myself in the culture’s shiny objects.

So I have no particulars to offer Keller about this. But convincing the ordinary citizen that certain behaviors - the kind humans spend most of their time engaging in - run counter to a Creator’s design for the human being, and that an accounting for so behaving, and the need for a Redeemer to take the harshness out of such an accounting, is the step that’s required to get anybody to listen.

“Good news! We’re saved from the Hell and death we deserve!” is going to fall flat.

This first step is going to require an attentiveness that Christians sometimes in their zeal don’t sufficiently muster. We’re going to have to become apologists. We’re going to have to cultivate the art of meeting people where they are.

We’ll have to show love.

After all, our predicament is the same, whether we’re believers, agnostics or atheists. It’s really somewhat like discussing the approach of inclement weather with someone. The key is to get the postmodern to look at a radar map and see that a storm is on the way. Someone who looks no further than the blue sky overhead is not interested.

What moves that needle?