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| Part of "The Missing Generation" |
In 1995 I read Foolishness to the Greeks by Leslie Newbegin during my first semester at The Divinity
School of Duke University. A driving thesis of this small but powerful text is
that “the West” is a missionary situation and not a Christian culture.
Newbigin, a long time missionary to India returned to his native England and
realized that from the time he had left until the time he returned, the world
had changed. He rang the warning bell that people of faith needed to begin acting
like missionaries instead of rulers, and his warnings fell largely on deaf
ears. Now England has only about 4% of its population as faithfully practicing
Christians.
When I read this Protestants were still the majority across
the United States. The mega-church movement with its seeker-sensitive
approaches and amazing levels of theatrical production were growing, every year
more churches than ever passed the 1,000 in worship mark and it looked like
revival was coming, Christianity would prevail, and the Kingdom would come. But
I had a feeling, an intuition, an hunch that we were where England was when
Newbigin wrote the book. That the world was changing, even in the Bible-Belt of
the United States, and that we needed to live like missionaries rather than rulers
of culture. Now, almost twenty-years later we have come to realize that most of
that mega-church growth was a result of urbanization and the attraction of
already practicing Christians away from smaller, mainline churches to the
bigger, better, programming model of mega-churches. The socio-graphic needle
reflecting the number and frequency of church attendance really didn’t move and
has, in fact, began to flicker backward. Last year protestants, the backbone of
American Christianity, fell below the majority and the only segment to grow
were the “Nones.” All of our assumptions about how we “do church” have fallen
on culturally deaf ears and we must rethink the entire focus of our endeavors.
Welcome to the mission field.
Here are some recent NPR reports from a current series entitled Losing Our Religion that may help in our understanding of what it means to live the missionary life.
