It sure doesn’t seem ten years ago—that’s so 90s! That’s so Paula Jones and Monica Lewinski! 1998: that’s the year smoking was banned in all California restaurants and bars…Dale Earnhardt (not “Jr.”) won the Daytona 500;  Osama bin Laden published one of his first fatwas; Titanic won eleven Oscars; the iMac was unveiled; the Chicago Bulls won their last championship with Michael Jordan. Cruise Missiles were launched against Al-Qaeda in retaliation for bombing a US embassy. Mark McGwire—juiced or not, who knows?—broke baseball’s all-time single season home run record. Brian McLaren, well-known to NW readers, published his first book.  And…Google started that year! Can you even get through a day without using Google?

A lot has happened in the last decade…on the other hand that paragraph above gives some sense of continuity with our days—2008 (when this article was written and first appeared in Next-Wave). But here, I want to reflect on the biggest change I have seen in the last decade. It has to do with attitudes toward God, Jesus, Christianity and the church. David Kinnaman has researched and documented this shift in his recent book unChristian. It is a must read for anyone who cares about evangelism and the future of the church. Here are a few eye-popping findings:

…many of those outside of Christianity, especially younger adults, have little trust in the Christian faith, and esteem for the lifestyle of Christ followers is quickly fading among outsiders.

The most common reaction to the faith: they think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what is was meant to be.  They admit they have a hard time actually seeing Jesus because of all the negative baggage that now surrounds him.

…the growing hostility toward Christians is very much a reflection of what outsiders feel they receive from believers.  They say their aggression simply matches the oversized opinions and egos of Christians.  One outsider put it this way: “Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe.”

It is important to realize that young outsiders attribute their image of Christianity primarily to conversations and firsthand experiences.

Many of these young people actually went through a time when they were searching for faith.  They were probing the Christian faith, trying it on for size, but they couldn’t get past some of the mental, emotional, or spiritual barriers – often heightened by their experience of an un-Christian faith – so they gave up.  This should be a major wake-up call for us.

First, here is an observation that is not news to the readers of NW who know me: We are not in the predicament Kinnaman discovered in spite of our best efforts at evangelism and discipleship. We are here precisely because of what we have been saying and doing. What if there is so little life-change among Christians because they have simply believed the messages they heard: “say this prayer so that when you die you can go to heaven” or “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven”. Those versions of the Gospel have not and will not produce disciples on a wide scale. Or sure, some people stumble into discipleship from there, but not many. What those messages have produced, according to Kinnaman is “un-Christians”.

This observation was true ten years ago too; we just didn’t have Kinnaman’s research to affirm our gut feeling. What is different now is that people in post-Christendom USA will no longer let us get away with it. In short, spiritual transformation into Christlikeness has always been right to do; but now it is strategic. Effectiveness in evangelism depends now on “the Christianity” of Christians.

Thus we need a new story to tell. We need a version of the Gospel that naturally and routinely affects our actual life—not just our death and afterlife. It is clear from Jesus and the major writers of the New Testament that life has always been the focus of the authentic Gospel. For instance:

John the Baptist, preparing the way for Jesus said: “Change your life. God’s kingdom is here…those who came to confess their sins were baptized into a changed life. It’s your life that must change… What counts is your life. (Mt. 3, The Message, emphasis added)

Jesus, announcing the Gospel said: “Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.” (Mk. 1, The Message, emphasis added)

Paul, describing the work of God in us, said: We’re being shown how to turn our backs on a godless, indulgent life, and how to take on a God-filled, God-honoring life. (Titus 2, The Message, emphasis added)

Peter, expressing the outcome of the resurrection said: Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life… As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing… (1 Peter 1, The Message, emphasis added).

When I put the research of Kinnaman together with the Gospel as explained by those writers I come up with two key thoughts.

First, we need to change our evangelistic question. Instead “if you died tonight do you know where you would go” we should ask “if you know you were going to live tomorrow, how would you decide how to do life? What story would you embody? Who would you follow?”

Second, when asked what does it mean to be a Christian, I now answer “it means that in our actual lives—the events and people of our daily routines—we are the cooperative friends of Jesus, seeking to live constant lives of creative goodness through the power of the Holy Spirit…and we do this for the sake of others”.

While a lot has changed in ten years, some things are not new—like the essence of the Gospel and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Let’s get together again in ten years to see if we have made some headway with this—and to see if they do put an asterisk next to McGwire’s name, see what new products MAC has introduced, see how much of the world Google owns, and how many books McLaren really can write!

Until then…

Todd

[This article first appeared in the January 2008 issue of Next-Wave. You can browse the rest of the articles from that issue here: http://www.the-next-wave.info/archives/issue109/index.cfm.html ]

Bishop Todd Hunter

Bishop Todd Hunter of the Anglican Mission in the Americas, is the founding pastor of Holy Trinity Church, an Anglican church in Costa Mesa, California and author of Christianity Beyond Belief (IVP 2009), Giving Church Another Chance (IVP Spring, 2010) and The Outsider Interviews (Baker Books, Summer 2010). Todd is also the founding director of Churches for the Sake of Others, the West Coast church planting initiative for The Anglican Mission in the Americas. Prior to his work with the Anglican Mission in the Americas, Todd founded Three is Enough, a small group movement that makes spiritual formation doable.He lives with his wife Debbie and their two children, Jonathan and Carol Ann in Eagle, ID.

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“Why,” you may wonder, “is he starting this article with some self-revealing biography?”  The answer is that I want you to grasp a bit of my history so that you will be able to understand the connection I’ve come to see between belief and practice. These are the things I have finally started writing about the last few years.

Though I have written many magazine articles and contributed chapters to books, for me writing started in earnest during my Doctor of Ministry work at George Fox Seminary in Portland, Oregon.  My thesis was: Re-hearing the Gospel: Toward Improved Practices in Evangelism and Discipleship.It is not a great piece of literature.  I would not run down to your local library to get a copy sent to you—as if any one would actually do that. I guess I am just trying to save myself a little blog-world embarrassment!

But the title does give you a window into my thinking over the past five or so years. I’ve been wondering: what is the connection between belief and practice? The name of this article is the title of my first book published by IVP.  It is due out February 1. I am just now finishing the first draft of a second book with IVP. The working title is: Re-Practicing Christianity: What To You When Your Faith Has Stopped Working For You.

Todd’s Own Christianity Beyond Belief
Okay. Let’s summarize these meanderings so far. I’ve tried over the years to believe as rightly as I can. I’ve got thousands of books in my library that scream: “Todd is telling the truth!” But in recent years I have become aware that I could do better on both elements of the synergy between belief and practice.

For instance, I have been capable of passing a standard theological exam for 30 years. But interacting more deeply regarding the Kingdom of God through people like Willard and Wright, is forcing me to try some new practices that are not natural to me.  This in turn leads me to the spiritual formation people for help in transforming my broken parts into something that is useful for God in his work of love and restoration for the least, the last and left out.

The more I dig into this pattern—and remember I am an end user, so I do it for myself first—the more I see the essential connection between belief –> transformation –> practices… practices that others experience as for their good.  In my experience, this process is like the old analogy about an ancient plow pulled by oxen: on the first pass over the field the plow just barley makes a line in the dirt. But as the ox is carefully steered so that the plow passes over the exact same line, there is after the second pass, a slight rut. After several additional passes there is a clear groove. Finally, after many passes the soil is fully ready for seed that will bear fruit.

The ancient ox and antique plow suggests itself to me as the way things work best. When I learn something fresh, the new thought can be original in one of two ways. One, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” Or two, “This info/idea/concept is going deeper into my life.” Both are fine, but for veteran Christians like most of the

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readers of Next-Wave, I have a feeling the latter is more our experience. We learn something—either new or deeper—which in search of obedience sends us to our grace-enabled work of spiritual transformation which leads to a life, a way of practicing our faith that is good for others.

I’ve developed a mental outline that I use to keep me on track—in the sense of the ox and plow.  It is the way I conceive of “What it means to be a Christian:”

• I am seeking to be the cooperative friend of Jesus—following Jesus as his apprentice, that I can be an ambassador of the Kingdom
• To live a consistent life of creative goodness—I practice the presence so that I can be alert to the people and events of my life. If I am not present and alert, I cannot be an agent of good.
• Through the power of the Holy Spirit—it is the Spirit that enables all the above. He gives the character to care about others, the gifts, the power and the authority to actually serve others in practical ways.
• For the sake of others: none of this is to be done for the sake of mere personal piety. God created humans, and later Israel and the church to join with him in creative care for his creation.

Those four simple thoughts are my mental framework for daily life. They are the practices associated with thirty years of believing Bible stuff. To live those bullet points out in the rhythms and routines of my actual life, I feel the constant need to apprentice myself to Jesus through the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. To get to a Christianity that is beyond belief, I find myself using this process over and over and over again as a rule for Christian spirituality:

Belief –> Transformation –> Practices –> Deeper Belief That Only Practices Can Bring –> Deeper Needs For Transformation –> More Effective, More Life-Giving Practices.

Can you picture such a rhythm for your life? If you can visualize it, give it try.

And let me know how it goes!

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