From Tim Keller’s Blog at Redeemer City to City.

The Big Issues Facing the Western Church:

The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S.

The rise of Islam

The new non-western Global Christianity

The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel

The end of prosperity?

For an elaboration on these points, click here.

How Should Churches and Leaders Be Preparing to Address These Big Issues Facing the Church?

The local church has to support culture-making

At the theological level, the church needs to gain more consensus on how the church and Christian faith relate to culture…At the practical level, even the churches that give lip-service to the importance of integrating faith and work do very little to actually equip people to do so.

We need a renewal of apologetics

First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years–how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions.

Second, there a real vacuum in western secular thought.

This is a real opening, apologetically, in reaching out to thoughtful non-Christians, especially the younger, socially conscious ones. We need to think of new ways to engage, asking people how they can justify their concerns for human rights and social justice.

We need a great variety of church-models

I feel that our cultural situation is too complex for such a sweeping way to look at things. There are too many kinds of ‘never-churched-non-Christians’. There are Arabs in Detroit, Hmongs in Chicago, Chinese and Jews in New York City, Anglos in the Northwest and Northeast that were raised by secular parents–some are artists and creative types, some work in business. All of these are growing groups of never-churched, but they are very different from one another. No model can connect to them all–every model can connect to some.

We must develop a far better theology of suffering

Members of churches in the west are caught absolutely flat-footed by suffering and difficulty. This is a major problem, especially if we are facing greater ‘liminality’–social marginalization–and maybe more economic and social instability.

We need a critical mass of churches in the biggest cities of the world.

If there were vital, fast-growing movements of churches–orthodox in theology, wholistic in ministry, and committed to culture-making–in the great global cities, so that 5-10% of the residents of the 50 most influential cities were gospel-believers, a) it would have a great impact on culture-making, b) it would help the church learn new ways of reaching the never-churched (since they concentrate in cities), c) it would connect western churches more readily to the new churches in the non-western world, d) it would unite churches across traditions and models

For an elaboration on these points, click here.

 

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