During my final semester at Moody (www.moody.edu), as I completed my degree in Evangelism and Discipleship, I had to write a final paper to culminate my learning. I used this as an opportunity to examine some of how our culture is changing and how we are sharing the gospel/evangelizing/sharing the good news/telling our personal faith journey’s (or what ever your variation of saying this is).

I’m going to start out by admitting a few biases. I don’t think change is bad. I’m a fan of understanding your audience and communicating through a means that won’t poison the message or the hearer from even starting to listening to it. I accept that the Bible is an awesome big book of truth, and that it has many different parts because there are many different situations in life that need to be addressed. So from that I gather that 1 verse is never the end all be all of sharing the message of Christ. And finally until I can come up with more, I know I will offend some of you because I might talk about evangelism and not discipleship, or I might refer to sharing the gospel more than sharing God’s love, or I might talk more about talking with people than doing. Such is life in my mind. We are pendulums swinging back and forth from one extreme to another. We never are perfectly balanced in life, so I won’t attempt to claim I am. Please if you disagree, great, comment, create your own blog, challenge my thoughts, help me keep my crazy thoughts and ideas in check.

So here I’ll end my ramblings, and move on to the topic of this post. Just another thought from a child of God who is inwardly turned upside down by Him, but still alright.

evangelistic methods after modernity

I’ve found today’s society to be marked by three general characteristics:

post-modernism…truth is absolute…or is it?
post-consumerism…I have to get the newest…but maybe I don’t?
post-interruption…look at this flashy ,cool, new…please put me on your “do not call” list.

And as I consider the emerging society that we live in, I feel that street preaching-based forms of evangelism, tract and bible distribution, confrontational and five-law based evangelism’s are defunct and useless.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention with my extreme claims, I’d like to over the next few posts explain why I believe our culture has changed, what it is becoming, why our current methods are loosing effectiveness, and begin to explore what’s to come for the future of evangelism.