A week ago my wife, Melinda, and I attended a lecture at Calvin College by Shoon-Chan Rah entitled “The Next evangelicalism and the Changing Face of American Christians.” It was based on his similarly titled book by IVP, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity
Here were some thoughts from the notes I took on my iPhone:
- Regarding US diversification, by 2043 more than 50% nonwhite minority.
- The Pew and ARIS religious survey reports suggest a decline of evangelicalism and Christianity. Show Christianity is in danger and in decline.
- 17.5% go to church in 2005. Mainline lost 25% in 25 years. Evangelical numbers flat and keeping up with popular trends.
- The decline in evangelicalism is in white evangelicalism. That’s what the Pew and ARIS show. Only reason evangelicals surviving is because of ethnic minority increase. Large and increasing denominations are stable and increasing because of nonwhites. Surviving because they are ethnically diverse. Smaller and declining denominations are 89-96% white, i.e mainline protestant. Baptists 64% white and pentacostals 58% white, which are increasing in size.
- There is a decline and collapse in Evangelicalism among white attendance and commitment. The silent story is increase an vitality among ethnic nonwhites. The story isn’t that evangelicalism is declining. The story is that it is declining among whites. Dying white churches and being replaced by nonwhite churches.
The lecture was an eye-opening glimpse into the future face of America, not to mention Her current face.
Afterward Melinda and I went to a local coffee shop to discuss our thoughts. We both came away with a similar feeling: while we appreciated Dr. Rah’s revelations regarding current evangelicalism, we thought he painted a more rosy picture than it deserves. We both were excited to see that massive shift away from an Anglo-Western domination toward a diverse portrait, but we wondered about the white community that is leaving the church en mass.
Now, here me out: I celebrate the diversification of evangelicalism in general and Western Michigan evangelicalism in particular. Near our house in Alger Heights there are a myriad of storefront hispanic and black churches that fit under the evangelical umbrella and several more throughout the city amidst the dominant form of “white” Christianity. This diversity is one of the reasons I have fallen in love with my city. I am excited about the increase in ethnic minorities who are coming to Christ and finding expression within the larger body of Christ.
A linger question remains: How are we to respond to the changes in our white evangelical Grand Rapids church community?
Let’s face it: for a long time (really long time!) Grand Rapids and the broader West Michigan area has been demographically white. Really Dutch and really white! Look at the statistics for three West Michigan counties from 2000 (From US Census QuickFacts):
KENT
White persons, percent, 2000 86.2
Black persons, percent, 2000 9.3
Asian persons, percent, 2000 2.1
Hispanic or Latino, 2000 9.5OTTAWA
White persons, percent, 2000 94.7
Black persons, percent, 2000 1.5
Asian persons, percent, 2000 0.4
Hispanic or Latino, 2000 8.2MUSKEGON
White persons, percent, 2000 83.3
Black persons, percent, 2000 13.4
Asian persons, percent, 2000 0.5
Hispanic or Latino, 2000 4.5AVERAGE
White persons, percent, 2000 88.07
Black persons, percent, 2000 8.07
Asian persons, percent, 2000 1.07
Hispanic or Latino, 2000 7.4
Like I said. White 
My guess is that these demographic averages across West Michigan will shift when the new census data is released later this year and our area will still be mostly white. While I am super excited about the ethnic shifts that have taken place and are occurring in my city, I’m still concerned with the analysis from Rah, Pew, and ARIS that shows a massive decline among whites in mainline and evangelical Protestantism.
I am not saying I am concerned with whites at the expense of ethnic minorities. Instead, it seems like (at least for Dr. Rah) there isn’t a concern for what is occurring in this particular demographic because so much good and growth and occurring in other demographics, in ethnic minority communities. Perhaps I misunderstood Rah, but it seemed as though he was saying the story isn’t so bleak because there is massive growth among minorities, even though it really is bleak for the white demographic.
It seems that if the national trends hold true for Grand Rapids, there could be major problems for the Grand Rapids church. Perhaps those problems have already been manifesting themselves. While the Grand Rapids church isn’t exclusively demographically white, it is by and large made up of white people. National churches that are majority white are hemorrhaging. National churches that are diverse are stable and/or growing. National churches that are ethnic minorities are growing. It seems as though the same could (and perhaps is) be said of Grand Rapids.
Perhaps I am making too much of these statistics and worrying too much about an entire demographic of people. Perhaps not.
Any thoughts? Specifically, do you think, demographically speaking, whites are exodusing from the Grand Rapids church in the same way they are nation wide. If so, why is that the case and what can be done about it? What are the problems this demographic has with the Church, especially in our area?
These are the lingering, hyperlocal questions that remain from Dr. Rah’s lecture
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A few weeks ago in my New Testament 3 class we studied the books of 2 Peter and Jude. One of the major topics of these two books is false teachers. Each book makes it clear that these men and women came from “among the people” and “among you,” rather than outside the Church. False teachers do not come from outside the Church through the media, other religions, etc…but arise from within particular church communities. It is within the communities of Christ that these intruders “introduce destructive heresies” secretly (2 Pet. 2:1b). They are not overt about their introductions, but instead secretly introduce doctrines and teachings that are foreign to the rule of faith and Holy Scriptures.
My friend and colleague, Jason Myers, and I had a conversation about whether it is possible to identify false teachers in 21st century America. We wondered aloud whether the Church has the ability and permission to identify, name, and address men and women who are teaching doctrines and practices that are foreign to the Rule of Faith of the Church in our democratic, multi-cultural, postmodern context.
Is it even possible to ID false teachers in an environment that exalts every voice and every perspective equally? In a “the-world-is-flat” culture, how can the Church of Jesus Christ contend for the Rule of Faith that was given and entrusted to the Church by Jesus? And perhaps more importantly, now that that same ethos has entered into the Church (empowering everyone to have as equal a perspective and interpretation on Scripture and that Rule), while at the same time Her members are incredibly biblically illiterate and ignorant of church history, how can the Church protect Herself against those within the Church who slip in unnoticed and begin teaching so-called heresy?
These questions are not directed at one particular end of the theological and ecclesiastical spectrum. I think these people exist on the right and left equally. Given the unique point in history the Church find herself in, I think there is a real possibility of such people slipping in and creating destruction. Given the weightlessness that plagues modern American Christianity—a sort of “tumbleweed complex” in which She is completely untethered from the historic faith—coupled with mass biblical and theological illiteracy, there seems to be a great need to take the reality of false teaching and false teachers more seriously.
How that looks, though, is a mystery…
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Yesterday a friend of mine and I launched a hyper-local experiment for Grand Rapids, MI called ZOOMAE. In short, ZOOMAE exists to empower dreamers to stimulate spiritual renewal in Grand Rapids through publishing, networking, and missional projects. ZOOMAE is the english phonetic spelling of the greek word for “yeast” and is used by Jesus in Matt. 13 and Luke 13 to metaphorically describe the Kingdom of Heaven’s explosive growth and transformative power.
I simply love this metaphor! Yeast is incredibly tiny, simple, ordinary, normal, and seemingly insignificant. Yeast is also transformative and stimulates explosive growth when embedded and distributed throughout the locality of a lump of dough. Jesus says the same thing of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the Reign of God when those who are stewards and partners of that reign (the Church) are as equally embedded, distributed, planted, and partnered. Even though seemingly insignificant, normal in appearance, ordinary, very simple and incredibly small, individual Jesus-followers will exact tremendous transformational and stimulative influence on localities. When the Church hyper-locally lives out Her identity as the continuing presence of Jesus Christ by proclaiming the good news of the Reign of God, people and places will be transformed. When simple, ordinary, normal followers of Jesus live radical, embedded lives within particular localities, radical transformation and explosive growth will happen.
That is the vision of ZOOMAE: to empower simple, ordinary people of Grand Rapids to dream big for God in their city to stimulate spiritual renewal and life transformation.
In large ways the experiment was born out of several conversations among friends around the local watering hole. For some time a few of us have wondered how it would look and what would happen if we considered ourselves pastors to the city. Not a building or organization, but the whole city. It was also born out of a desire to empower local practitioners, pastors, leaders, and activists to speak prophetically into the city through the tangible, written medium of books. These two ideas morphed into a broader effort to empower Grand Rapids Christians to own their city in a way that would see the Kingdom of God descend and bring transformation.
Who knows where this will go over the coming months. Now we are finishing up the organizational ground work (i.e. board of directors and 501(c)3 application) and beginning to lay the ground work the rest of the year for the big launch in 2010. Over the coming weeks I will fill in some of the details like the publishing, networking, and missional aspects, as well as the coming theme for 2010. Until then, check out the Facebook page.
be His; just do,
-jeremy
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Series
1-Introduction
2-The Post-Colonial Era and The Church
3-Toward A Post-Colonial Worldview
4-Post-Colonial Theology and Missions
5-A Case Study – Evangelism Explosion International
EVANGELISM EXPLOSION: AN OVERVIEW
Evangelism Explosion International (EE) began in 1962 by Dr. D. James Kennedy as a response to his rapidly declining church plant in Fr. Lauderdale, FL, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. It is both an evangelism equipping program and evangelism technique that is similar to Romans Road or Four Spiritual Laws. After launching his evangelism equipping program, attendance soared from 246 to 3,134 in 1974, largely due to the intentional evangelism efforts of EE. During this time, Dr. Kennedy realized he also had the opportunity to train pastors in his techniques, resulting in 582 trained pastors and lay leaders in 6 clinics during this same period. By 1975, EE had gone global, holding clinics in Saskatchewan, England, South Africa, and Australia. On March 17, 1996, Coral Ridge Presbyterian church celebrated a milestone in the the history of this 34 year old ministry: Evangelism Explosion was now in every nation training its people in personal evangelism. In fact, by 2000 the EE material was in every territory and translated into 70 languages. The scope of EE and its global reach makes it an ideal case study for reflecting on a post-colonial worldview of mission. Obviously, God has used the Dr. Kennedy and this ministry for His glory, and He will continue to do so well after his death, so my critique comes after much appreciation.
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Series
1-Introduction
2-The Post-Colonial Era and The Church
3-Toward A Post-Colonial Worldview
4-Post-Colonial Theology and Missions
5-A Case Study – Evangelism Explosion International
POST-COLONIAL THEOLOGY
As America’s influence around the world wanes, so too the time of Western dominance in theology is over. No longer is there an “assumed primacy…of the West” in general, let alone specifically in the area of theology. In a post-colonial era where the voices of previously suppressed non-Western nations are exerting their influence on the world stage like never before, so too is the South and East beginning to own their own theological discourse. Because the Western versions of Christianity that have prevailed for the last fifteen hundred years are no longer viewed as connecting with this time and place, the time is ripe for such emerging global voices to enter the theological conversation. Thus, as the Western Church approaches global missions from a post-colonial worldview, it must ‘unbundle’ Jesus from Western Civilization and allow the Church in emerging global contexts to frame that Story in their own language.
For example, just listen to the voice of the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania:
We believe in one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on earth…We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grace.
“The hyenas did not touch him.” What a wonderful way to express the resurrection of our Lord and communicate the majesty and glory of the Story of God using indigenous language! Notice what sort of language was not included: Trinity; sovereignty of God; election; determinism; the omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence of God; and other Western theological constructs. In other words, these African people crafted a theological credo that was contextual to their expression of faith in Jesus. The expression of faith in theology is never universal, anyway, but is in fact very particular; our dogmas and doctrines of God, of humanity, or Jesus, of sin, of salvation are firmly embedded in the Greco-Roman context of another time, and in some ways have become meaningless even in our own postmodern Western context. Imagine, then, how those Western, Greco-Roman theologies and doctrines appear in an Asian or African context. The Aristotelian Unmoved Mover concept of God, which is shared by many contemporary Western Christians, just will not translate to the Masai people.
A post-colonial worldview of missions, then, needs to make space for the theology of Christian spirituality to emerge within other tribes, while also allowing those tribes to inform the contemporary theological discourse. “Theology in a postcolonial context is a highly political affair. Postcolonial theologies will not settle for a position at the margins of their Western counterparts. Rather, they serreptitiously seek to turn the margin into the centre, thereby disrupting the serenity grounded on the assumption that Western formulations are self-evident.” And there’s the rub: why must ‘Western formulations’ be entirely self-evident? While I certainly understand and would agree that the Zeitgeist of God’s Story has helped formulate our theology and preserved truthful understandings of His Reality, must they be the sine qua non of theological discourse? Why cannot the West learn from African Christological expressions? How could Asian understandings inform our understanding of pneumatology? Or why cannot the Western Church learn from the Eastern (Orthodox) Church’s understanding of worship and prayer? We’ve already begun to recognize that the Western understanding and articulation of the gospel has been too often truncated, shallow, thin, bland, anemic, privatized, personalized, polarized, and compromised. Perhaps our more globally integrated era will help further expose weaknesses in our thoroughly Platonic, Enlightenment theology. And if the Western Church is to have any positive theological affect in this new era, She must have be grounded in a post-colonial worldview that makes space for theological reflection and construction by the global Church. While the West certainly provides a tether to historical theological categories (e.g. Trinity and the dual nature of Christ), we must be able to learn as students from the global Church if we are to both contextualize God’s Story and partner with our overseas brothers and sisters in missions.
POST-COLONIAL GLOBAL MISSIONS
If the Western Church embraces a post-colonial worldview of missions, how exactly would ‘doing missions’ look from that posture? If we are in fact doing global missions in a post-colonial context from a post-colonial worldview of missions, we will first recognize that the Other does not need to conform to our Western morals, values, and customs. In fact, it might be best to encourage Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish seekers to not become members of the Christian religion at all given how closely aligned Christianity is with the West. In his book, Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren explains, “Although I don’t hope all Buddhists will become (cultural) Christians, I do hope all who feel so called will become Buddhist followers of Jesus; I believe they should be given that opportunity and invitation. I don’t hope all Jews or Hindus will become members of the Christian religion. But I do hope all who feel so called will become Jewish or Hindu followers of Jesus.” While this suggestion may seem radical and have a slightly universalist tinge to it, we need to understand that the words ‘Christian’ and ‘Christianity’ carry with them much baggage and Western, especially American, connotations. In the previous paragraph of his book Brian affirms the need to become “humble followers of Jesus, whom I believe…to be the Son of God, the Lord of all, and the Savior of the world.”
Global missions outreach through a post-colonial worldview of missions must be rooted in the notion of “following Jesus” over against other religions, while permitting the Other to remain embedded in their cultural and spiritual traditions.
Rooting our post-colonial mission efforts in “following Jesus” as opposed to “becoming a Christian” is not only important to a post-colonial worldview of global missions, it is also biblical. It’s called discipleship, which of course finds its meaning in Jesus’ Great Commission. It means embedding ourselves in the tribes of the Other, learning their customs and spiritual heritage, and committing to the long process of helping them become students of Jesus, rather than simply Christians. But as Dallas Willard wrote, “non-discipleship is the elephant in the church!” While the Western church is woefully inadequate at discipleship in its own Western context, a post-colonial worldview of missions needs to shift to this model from a thoroughly proclamation colonialist one. Through discipleship Western global missions must include these elements: we must embed ourselves among the Other and first embody and demonstrate the Way of Jesus by being disciples ourselves before proclaiming the gospel of Jesus; we must consciously seek to make disciples, to bring others to the point where they are daily learning from Jesus and follow Him with their lives and lifestyle, instead of winning converts through evangelistic colonialist endeavors; we must take the time to change whatever it is in their actual belief system that prevents them from placing their confidence in Jesus as Master of the Universe, while connecting their existing belief system to God’s Redemptive Story as found in Jesus; and finally, while we do not want to syncretize Jesus with Buddhism or Hinduism, we must allow space for the following of Jesus as Lord without embracing a Christianity that is rooted in the West nor American culture.
Finally, the Western Church through a post-colonial worldview of missions will make partnership with the Church of the global South and East a vital component of global missions in an effort to reach all nations with the good news of Jesus Christ. Such partnerships will be mutual, complementary and indigenous, recognizing that the vital centers of missions are dispersed throughout the world today, and could be multiplied with deliberate Western Church partnerships. Ironically, already African nations are sending missions to North America. For example, the Anglican Church of Rwanda planted a church on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Church of the Resurrection. Another movement within American Anglicanism, called the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, is a missionary effort from the Church of Nigeria to shepherd disaffected former Episcopal churches who have left the American Anglican communion over several biblical and ecclesiastical issues. Such partnerships, however, must flow from a spirit of mutuality of authority and unity of purpose. Just as theology must shift from a Western-centric posture to a global discourse, including and especially the tribes at the margins of our world, so too must missions shift toward an arm-locking posture with our Asian, African, Indo-Philippino, and South American brothers and sisters as co-equals for the sake of the gospel.
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