When we began advertising for our first I.Q. (Identity Quotient) Forum last year, we used the tagline, “Forming a Christian Identity in a Post-Christian World.”
This was a tagline that the committee had spent more than one meeting wrapping our minds around. Could we actually say that the world was post-Christian? I mean, that’s a pretty serious label to slap on the world. “Post”? “After”? Are we in an after-Christianity world?
Shortly after we began sending out marketing materials with this tagline, I received a kindly-worded email from a pastor that inquired as to the wording “post-Christian.” He wondered if we meant to say post-modern instead.
“No,” I wrote back. “We really mean post-Christian.”
Maybe using the term post-Christian is a pill too bitter to swallow. Can we, as Christians, force ourselves to admit that our relevance to today’s world is in question?
It is an affront to the Church to be asked to contemplate whether or not we have been trying to hear the heartbeat of God through a stethoscope clogged with the detritus of everything from bigotry to intemperance to escapism to anti-intellectualism. Do Christians spend their time inveighing against the changes in the world, but making no effort to understand or interpret them? Has the church become the perpetrator and, subsequently, the victim of its own irrelevance?
According to Wikipedia, “Post Christian” is a term used to describe a person or a society whose foundational philosophy is believed to have originated within Christianity, but has developed beyond the confines of Christianity to encompass a wider worldview.
Confines of Christianity? That has such a negative connotation--the “confines” of our little cloistered choir loft. But maybe “confines of Christianity” is a term we deserve. Have we bothered to look up from the Master’s table of plenty in order to develop informed opinions about the revolutions taking place in the world around us? Do we even attempt to become all things to all men? Can we invite the world to “come and dine” if we don’t have the intellectual means required to approach their table? Are we prepared to use current culture to connect with others in our witnessing efforts (as Paul did on Mars Hill in Acts 17:28), or are we content to bash society’s ills from the safety of the pulpit?
A world with no conscience is no worse off than a church with no voice. A world embracing moral relativism can’t be helped by a church that has neglected to occupy until He comes. Is sitting in our churches singing horizontal choruses of worship really what God had in mind when He commanded us to occupy (Luke 19:13), or, as the New Living Translation says, are we to invest what He’s given us in Kingdom work?
I submit that being the light of the world requires us to illuminate the courtroom, the poll booth, the college/university classroom, the biochemist’s laboratory, the media, the printing presses, the counselor’s office, and the New York Times Best Seller List.
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