Beyond a post-Christian culture

Mike Murdock looks at the current Christian orientation of North American. Eighteen years ago in seminary, Mike was taught that North American society was post-Christian:

Well, take it the next step now. Now, our society has changed so dramatically that it has become pre-Christian. It has now actually come to resemble the cultural context in which the first century church made its proclamation - one where people have absolutely no idea what the claims of the Christian faith are.

You think that's an exaggeration? Try making a scriptural allusion in a conversation with one of your unchurched friends sometime, and watch their eyes glaze over. Say something like making a conversational reference to selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. They'll have absolutely no idea you're referring to the story of Jacob and Esau …

But, Mike goes on to say, that's not such a bad thing:

Because the good news of Jesus Christ is transcultural. The gospel does not rely on any particular philosophical or cultural framework to communicate its message because it transcends these limitations and boundaries wherever the human heart seeks to be filled. It transcends them because God himself transcends them. In the long run, what we see in Paul, and what we can take away today as encouragement is this ...

The church of Jesus Christ is that community that, like Paul, is transformed by its encounter and continuing relationship with the living God, and as long as we maintain this as the focal point, the central consideration of all we do, we cannot fail to be faithful.

Amen. Much of the railing against post-Christian, post-modern culture seems to come as much from nostalgia as from a true grasp of what the church faces. As Mike--and Christian history--reminds us, spreading the gospel doesn't depend as much on the culture as in the power of the one whose message we proclaim.