Category: Spirituality

I’ve lost count of how many missions events I’ve attended where the theme was “reaching the lost.”  I’ve always had a visceral aversion to this term, “the lost.”  It’s an aversion that’s bothered me at times — am I just afraid of the exclusiveness of the claims of Christ?  Perhaps, but I recently noticed this post on church growth seminars that resonated with me on this and other related topics.

I think at least some of my negative reaction to the term “reaching the lost” is ethically and theologically right.  Ethically, “the lost” is a way of objectifying people.  It moves us out of the responsibility to develop authentic two-way relationships with real individuals, in which we might learners and receivers as much as teachers and givers.  It sets us up as “better,” more enlightened, more knowledgeable than those who we’re trying to “reach.”  It devalues the personal story of the “other” and insists that “our” stories take priority.

Theologically, “the lost” ignores God’s sovereignty.  Ultimately God, and only God, knows who has received and who will receive the grace that is available in Christ.  Moreover, we do not “reach” people.  Rather, the Holy Spirit changes people, and God sometimes uses us in that process.  Finally, often this idea of “reaching the lost” is coupled with a sense of desperate urgency.  There is an urgency in that the “fields are white unto harvest” and we are called to go into those fields.  But there is no urgency in the sense of whether God’s plan of redemption will be accomplished. 

So, I’d rather set aside talk of “reaching the lost.”  Let’s instead talk of “announcing good news.”  God’s reign, His peace, has come in Christ, and we invite all to participate.

Some excellent quotes from Darrel Guder’s book “Missional Church“:

n      “[C]ulture is not a monolithic stationary entity that Christians should reject, accommodate, or even transform as a whole; it is, instead, a dynamic process with which Christians should interact in a critical, discriminating, and constructive manner.”

n      “The practice of hospitality is to cultivate communities of peace that intentionally structure themselves as safe and fearless spaces in the face of the despair and hostility of the world.”

n      “[M]issional communities are called to be peacemakers – reconciled and reconciling communities – making God’s peace visible through the quality of their life and ministry as model and invitation.”

   n      “[Missional communities] transform hostility and fear by creating safe spaces that welcome and honor the stranger.”

Scot McKnight posts about a new evangelical network he is helping to found that will distance itself somewhat from “emerging” / “emergent.”  Interesting.

Here, moreover, is a far more welcoming framework for evangelism. Evangelism would move from an act of recruiting or co-opting those outside the church to an invitation of companionship. The church would witness that its members, like others, hunger for the hope that there is a God who reigns in love and intends the good of the whole earth. The community of the church would testify that they have heard that announcement that such a reign is coming, and indeed is already breaking into the world. They would confirm that they have heard the open welcome and receive it daily, and they would invite others to join them as those who also have been extended God’s welcome. To those invited, the church would offer itself to assist their entrance into the reign of God and to travel with them as co-pilgrims. Here lies a path for the renewal of the heart of the church and its evangelism.

(Darrell L. Gruder, MISSIONAL CHURCH: A VISION FOR THE SENDING OF THE CHURCH IN NORTH AMERICA, at p. 97.)

In chapter 3 of Culture Making, Andy Crouch begins to contrast his approach to culture with other approaches taken by Christians.  In particular, he critiques the evangelical preoccupation with “worldview” analysis. 

Crouch notes that “[t]o define culture as what human beings make of the world is to make clear that culture is much more than a ‘world view.'”  “The danger of reducing culture to worldview,” Crouch says,

is that we may miss the most distinctive thing about culture, which is that cultural goods have a life of their own. . . . The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving.  But that is not the way culture works.  Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. 

Amen to Crouch’s more holistic sense of “culture!” 

I would go further and suggest that “worldview” thinking has become ossified within popular evangelicalism.  Too often, what is presented as “the” Christian worldview is, to a significant extent, merely the view of some white middle-class American evangelical-soft-fundamentalists living in the aftermath of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.  This “worldview” unfortunately often involves a reductionist account of American history, a coarse and ineffectual interaction with the natural sciences, a flat theology of revelation, and an alternately hostile and triumphalist approach to the public square.

To be sure, there is some value in the notion of “worldviews,” and there are some things Christians of all sorts generally presuppose:  God is the creator of all things and the author of all Truth; human beings are both glorious creations of great value and awful sinners; the universe cannot be reduced to mere “nature”; human moral, spiritual and physical life is accountable to a moral and ethical framework that derives from the inherent character of the creator-God; redemption is real and possible in the crucified and risen Christ.  It can be useful to apply these themes to the products of the cultures we inherit and inhabit and to seek to color the cultures we create with them.  But we have to take care that “worldview” doesn’t become an excuse for fighting unwise battles over situated and relatively ephemeral expressions of how these themes might interact within a particular context.