Estimated reading time: 4 minute(s)
KEEPING CHURCH SIMPLE – PART 1A
I next suspected that the problem with the church was a cultural problem.
After college, I spent five years involved in church planting in the New York City Metro Area. Part of that time I spent on a church-planting team in the New Jersey suburbs. The remainder of that time I spent working in the offices of a church-planting organization on Long Island. My time in the New York City Metro Area taught me much about culture. The culture of New York was different from the Midwestern culture in which I had grow up. The northeastern United States, New York in particular, was further along the postmodern cultural transition than the Midwest. I learned about the cultural transition first-hand as I lived among New Yorkers. During the same period of time I was learning about this cultural transition “second-hand” by reading various books about the postmodern culture shift in North American and how the shift impacts the North American church.
These experiences helped me understand that North America was fast becoming the next great mission field. This realization helped me understand that I could only be Christ’s ambassador in the postmodern culture of North America by seeing myself more as a missionary to a “foreign” culture, and seeing myself less as a pastor to my “native” culture. Though I was still young enough to consider myself a native to the postmodern culture, I had grown up in middle America’s evangelical church, which meant that I was truly an immigrant to the emerging postmodern culture all around me. I would have to learn to engage this culture as a missionary.
To engage the culture as a missionary, I would first have to do what all missionaries must do when they engage a culture: I would have to “learn the language of the culture.” In my situation, this did not mean that I would have to learn a new spoken dialect as much as it would mean I would have to come to understand the norms of the people. I would then have to engage the culture on its terms, spending massive amounts of time with the natives in order to understand their worldview and how that might impact their understanding of the Gospel.
Only a few years had gone by since I had devoted my life to reaching my generation for Christ. Yet already I began to see that the problem with the North American church was much broader than I initially assumed. The issues were more than just generational, they were cultural.
In 1999 I left New York and moved to Las Vegas to rejoin my college friends as part of the leadership team of Apex, a church specifically targeting my generation. But even before I arrived in Vegas, I had already become aware that generational issues were not at the core of the North American church’s problems. My early experiences with Apex would confirm this. The average age at Apex was right in the middle of my generation. Yet the people who were part of Apex did not always fit neatly into generational categories. For example, there was a seventy-year-old man who related to our style of ministry. On the other hand, there were twenty-five-year-olds who hated our church. We were about more than just a “ generationally-targeted” ministry. Sometimes we described it by saying that Apex was more about an attitude than it was about an age. That attitude was really the understanding of the emerging postmodern culture.
Once again, I thought I had found the answer to my question of what was wrong with the church. I would reorient my life to be a missionary to postmodern North America. Again, this understanding, though proving to be a vital piece to the puzzle, would only lead me toward a deeper understanding of what was wrong with the church. My journey had just begun.
Supplemental Readings:
• Acts 17:16-34
• Acts 18:1-17
• Missional Church, ed. By Darrell L. Guder (Eerdmans 1998)
• The Church Between Gospel and Culture, ed. by George Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder (Eerdmans)
• Transforming Mission by David Bosch (Orbis 1991)
• The Celtic Way of Evangelism by George G. Hunter (Abingdon 2000)
• Resident Aliens by William Willimon and Stanly Hauweras (Abingdon 1989)
• Ancient-Future Faith by Robert E. Webber,
• Foolishness to the Greeks by Leslie Newbigin (Eerdmans 1986)
• The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Leslie Newbigin