discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 175<br />
beled as nominal Christians in both Protestant and Roman Catholic areas of<br />
Europe think of themselves as post-Christian. They have not rejected Christianity;<br />
they see it as part of their heritage but they feel they have moved on beyond<br />
it. The Church is struggling to find ways to reevangelize countries like<br />
Denmark where more than 85 percent of the population claims to be Christian<br />
but church attendance sputters along between 1 percent and 4 percent.<br />
Postmodernity<br />
The coloring that postmodernity gives to the thinking of people around<br />
the world is another aspect of the context in which mission is done today. In<br />
postmodernity there is skepticism about concepts such as progress, objectivity,<br />
reason, certainty, personal identity, and grand narrative. Postmodernity is characterized<br />
by the feeling that all communication is shaped by cultural bias,<br />
myth, metaphor, and political content. Postmodernity, typified by parody,<br />
satire, and self-reference, sees society as dominated by a mass-media that has no<br />
originality. In much of postmodernity, meaning and experience can only be<br />
created by the individual and cannot be made objective by an author or narrator.<br />
Postmodernity and globalization have combined to produce a culturally<br />
pluralistic yet profoundly interconnected global society that lacks a dominant<br />
center of political power, communication, or intellectual production.<br />
The context produced by postmodernity will affect how evangelism and<br />
discipleship are done. Postmodernity will also shape how support for world<br />
mission must be generated. Some see in the postmodern fascination with story<br />
an opportunity for the Christian story to get a good hearing. Narrative theology,<br />
which grapples with the theological messages of the narratives of Scripture<br />
rather than attempting to do systematic theology, is a way of doing theology<br />
that should appeal to postmoderns.<br />
Exegeting the Culture<br />
New Contexts for Mission 175 175<br />
Global population growth, urbanization, changes in other religions, the<br />
resurgence of animism and postmodernism are features of the context in which<br />
today’s Christian global mission is being done. The church growth movement<br />
fathered by Donald McGavran urges church leaders to study thoroughly the<br />
context in which they are ministering. Scholars sometimes discount the insights<br />
of church growth studies, saying that those are simply crass attempts to<br />
market the church. What they do not see is that church leaders must be exegeting<br />
the culture with the same dogged determination they use to exegete or<br />
understand Holy Scripture. It is a mistake to summarily dismiss the usefulness<br />
of the social sciences in understanding the context in which the Church must<br />
minister today. Mission leaders must be reading cultures and seeking to under-