Preparing Leaders for a Post-Christian Context
How do we get the church’s leaders ready for ministry in a world which has mostly moved on from Christianity? How can a denomination like ECO or a movement like The Fellowship Community prepare leaders who will be able to engage with a rapidly-changing post-modern (and even post-post-modern) cultural context? Dana Allin, Synod Executive of ECO posed these questions in a good piece on the ECO blog. It’s a challenging question. My hunch is that, like many ministry-related questions, it begins with relationships.
When I was a seminary student in the Seattle area, I worked part-time for my church and part-time for our local YMCA. Both contexts were crucial in developing my sense of pastoral identity and commitment to the gospel. But it was the people I met daily at the YMCA who most influenced my sense of how to do ministry in a post-Christian context. I would have lengthy, far-ranging discussions with women and men who were removed from the world of faith, but who expressed deep hurts, fears, and a growing sense of isolation in the world we inhabited together. The gospel can always be proclaimed, even to tech-savvy urbanites who are willing to admit to fears and flaws. In many ways, the Y became a place where my most valuable pastoral conversations happened regularly, and I treasured those moments.
One element of ministry in a post-Christian world which I learned in my time at the Y is availability. We need to be available to our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and other parents at our kids’ schools who do not share our faith in Christ. We need to show people who do not know the Lord that Jesus-followers show up, keep our promises, and go out of our way to serve others with no intended return.
This sense of availability extends to how we engage the physical world around us. We need to use and enjoy public settings like the library, the park, or the crosswalk near your kids’ school. Linger at Starbucks and get to know all the people behind the counter. We actually need to be available to others to push past the “what’s true for you is true for you but not true for me” nonsense that our culture has seduced our friends and family members (and, at times, even those of us within the church) into believing.
We also need to train men and women to have a deep commitment to speaking the language of their peers, which can only happen when they hang out together. Michael Polanyi called this “elbow knowledge” – the things you can learn and be trained to perform simply by being near someone who knows what they’re doing. We can do this by encouraging our seminary students and rising leaders to prioritize meeting non-Christian friends for coffee as often as they take time to talk with a professor, elder, or church staff member. In these conversations, we are to be humble and also seek to use linguistic creativity to convey important aspects of the gospel as clearly as we can.
I used to play soccer with a team of people who didn’t go to church, and we always went to a weathered Mexican restaurant after our games to grab a bite to eat. I don’t quite know how it happened, but one night the Lord let me have a long conversation with a couple of my teammates about common grace. I didn’t use the words “common grace,” but the idea (I hope) was conveyed in a way that made sense to them. Again, it comes back to relationships – if my teammates could trust me and believe that I love them, getting into a weighty conversation isn’t awkward or forced, and it transcends the barriers we see constructed every day in our culture. A post-anything world is no match for loving relationships animated by Jesus Christ.
I grew up in the south, but the best training I’ve ever had for ministry in a post-Christian culture came from the six years I spent in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll make a crazy suggestion: if you’re struggling to connect with the idea of a post-Christian culture (and how truly wonderful it can be to do ministry with people who have no idea who Jesus is or why the church exists), just move there. Pack up and go, like Abram and Sarai, to a foreign land and learn to speak the language of the people of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. If that’s not something you find appealing, keep in touch with great resources like “Christ and Cascadia” (christandcascadia.com), an online journal studying ministry in the Northwest, written by women and men who do ministry there. Or keep up with friends who serve in those kinds of locations, be it east or west, north or south.
We’re quickly burning through the days when church leaders could effectively serve congregations with a narrow focus, casting few glances to the outside world. Unless you’re in one of those rare environments where the idea of post-Christian culture is still an anathema, it’s time to get out in public, connecting with others through relationships which Christ will use for his amazing glory, no matter where culture goes.
Travis Fletcher is a member of the Fellowship Community serving as Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Church, Grand Junction, CO
