The tectonic activity of cultural change is making it necessary for today’s Pentecostal ministers and missionaries to adjust their methods and media to communicate God’s good news about Jesus Christ more effectively—just as the Pentecostal pioneers did.
In an interview for Leadership Journal, Brian McLaren states,
In dealing with postmoderns, you’re dealing with people who do not know the basics of Christianity. If anything, they have a negative idea of what Christianity is. So it makes no sense to them if you come on too strong and quickly ask for a commitment.… For postmodern people, anything presented as an argument is less persuasive because arguments suggest a message of conquest rather than a message of peace. Postmoderns are so assaulted by advertisements and political messages that for a message to be important and true, it must come in a form other than argument. [1]
This postmodern resistance to anything perceived to be argumentative or manipulative is a problem for contemporary ministers educated to preach to those with a modern mindset.
Seminaries and Bible colleges generally train preachers to dissect the Scriptures in search of “principles” to share with their congregations. In this approach, the preacher seeks to ascertain the biblical author’s original intent by analyzing specific biblical passages. With careful hermeneutics (involving grammatical-contextual-historical-syntactical-theological-cultural exegesis), the preacher develops succinct propositions, precepts, or principles to summarize the author’s key concepts. Walter Kaiser calls this process of summarizing authorial intent “principlization.”[2]
To aid in communicating these biblical principles to his or her audience, the preacher restates the timeless truths in contemporary terms. Ramesh Richard refers to the process of restatement as “contemporization.”[3] With the work of principlization and contemporization in hand, the modern preacher designs deductive sermons with carefully crafted, point-making arguments to convince congregants to apply the propositional truths to their lives.
While effective in the past, this paradigm for homiletics faces the challenge of a shifting culture. When contemporary preachers stand before their congregations, they find themselves confronted by people who prefer to receive and process information in different ways.Some congregants favor sermons based on propositional truths, logically supported, deductively designed, and dogmatically delivered. Other congregants, often younger and influenced by postmodernism, prefer sermons that are image rich, experientially supported, inductively designed, and delivered with authenticity and vulnerability on the part of the preacher.
Many preachers are skillful at preparing and presenting sermons that connect well with the first group of congregants. They have not been as adept at preparing sermons that connect well with the second group—those who are younger and most affected by postmodernity.
A declining trend in church attendance reflects this inability to connect with those who are younger and influenced by postmodernism. According to a 2006 national survey conducted by the Barna Research Group, “Mosaics [individuals born after 1983] are least likely to attend church in a typical weekend (33 percent) versus Baby Busters (43 percent), Baby Boomers (49 percent), and Elders (54 percent).”[4]
George Hunter notes that, of the more than 350,000 churches in the United States, about 80 percent are stagnant. Of the 20 percent that are growing, most increase by biological or transfer growth. Less than one percent of churches are growing by winning the unchurched. [5]
Tom Clegg and Warren Bird estimate that the unchurched population of the U.S. is the largest mission field in the English-speaking world, and the fifth largest globally.[6]
The Church in Western Europe and North America is stagnant or in decline. It is not winning its world and, in some cases, not even holding on to its own. There may be many reasons why the Church is no longer effective at evangelism, but one important reason is that preachers are slow to adjust and become proficient in connecting with and effectively preaching the gospel to those influenced by postmodernism.
[1]Brian McLaren, “How to Evangelize Today,” Leadership Journal (August 2001) Web site; available from http://www.christianitytoday.com/leaders/newsletter/2001/ cln10801.html; accessed 29 June 2006.
[2]Walter C. Kaiser, Toward an Exegetical Theology: Biblical Exegesis for Preaching and Teaching (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1981), 152.
[3] Ramesh Richard, Preparing Expository Sermons (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001), 19.
[4] George Barna, “Church Attendance,” The Barna Group Web site; available http://www.barna.org/; accessed 13 August 2006.
[5]George Hunter, Church for the Unchurched (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 20.
[6] Tom Clegg and Warren Bird, Lost in America: How You and Your Church Can Impact the World Next Door (Loveland, Colo.: Group Publishing, 2001), 25.
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