This week continues the series on preaching in a postmodern relativistic culture. If you haven’t read the previous posts, you can access them below:

Part 1: The Nature of Religious Pluralism

Part 2: Religious Pluralism in Church History

Part 3: The Influence of Postmodernity on Religious Pluralism

 Part 4: Understanding the Current Culture

Bridging the Gap

We live in a time when many are resistant to any hint of authority in pronouncements. The culture’s allergy to truth and the incredible skill required means the church loses its grasp on the essential nature of preaching for the gospel ministry. However, no church should expect that all the life transformation from the Word of God comes strictly through preaching.[1]All Christians are called to be heralds of the gospel; they are proclaimers, ambassadors, and preachers to the world.[2]The greatest apologetic for the doubt of the age is the confidence that not only surrounds Christians’ beliefs but motivates their faith. It must be lived out with gospel living by the church, but gospel living must be accompanied by preaching. In the current cultural climate of pluralism and relativism, the ground for evangelism must be properly furrowed and prepared.

Furthermore, only God can bring people to Himself. Thus, the church is called to pray for those in their community.[3]Effective preaching must begin with preparing the people and prayer.

For the task of preaching, the study of the responses of the New Testament writers to the pluralism of their day can be applied with relative directness to the analogous pluralism of today.[4]

The preacher must know the culture, but it is a piece of more specific knowledge. The New Testament preachers demonstrated that they understood the people they addressed.[5]Christian communicators must show that they remember or understand what it is like not to believe while maintaining that it is possible to come to an absolute assurance of God’s reality and love. The reality is that the preacher tends to preach to the people he listens to most during the week. Hence, he should vary the people with whom he interacts. It is only through spending a substantial amount of face time with people who do not believe and reading the best sources criticizing Christianity that the preacher can truly understand the culture. The preacher must talk to people and ask direct questions.[6] Understand the concerns of unbelievers. It is time that Christian preachers know some pagans. Christians need to forego their comfort zones to communicate the gospel.[7]

In Acts 2, the Apostle Peter’s audience was a combination of Jewish and Hellenistic peoples prepared for something better than animal or angel worship, inclined to believe in one all-powerful God Who forgives man’s sins.[8]The early Christian communicators understood and affirmed the peoples’ hopes, fears, and aspirations. Paul always chooses contact elements, points of agreement, and affirmation of some of the audience’s concerns, hopes, and needs. Paul reasons and seek to convince his hearers rather than merely contradict them.[9]

The Christian preacher must seek to contextualize the gospel without weakening the gospel. The precise way the gospel will be contextualized in our lives will vary according to the culture in which we live. The preacher must insist that the gospel addresses all areas of culture.[10]Preaching to culture is linked to preaching to the heart. Both are linked because cultural narratives profoundly affect everyone’s sense of identity, conscience, and understanding of reality. Suppose the preacher helps solve Christians’ problems with the gospel every week. In that case, secular people are not only hearing it a little differently each time, thereby obtaining a more comprehensive understanding of it, but are also able to see how faith in Christ works to bring about life change. They are being effectively evangelized even as Christians are being encouraged. Yet if the preacher under contextualizes so that the communication of the gospel is culturally alien and distant from the hearers, he will find no one willing to listen. This means that no one is changed by the gospel, no matter how valiantly he strives for the truth.[11] 

The early Christian communicators brought the gospel to bear on their culture to change it radically. Paul takes some of his listeners’ correct beliefs and uses them to criticize their wrong beliefs considering the Scriptures. Contextualization means to resonate with yet defy the culture around you. The preacher can and must affirm much of what these cultural narratives contain because their clear origins are in Christianity. Good contextual preaching appreciates yet challenges cultural narratives and norms to help people see things that are invisible to them, but that control them. The preacher can identify the Christian moral understandings from which so many secular moral ideals have originated.[12]By acknowledging these things, the preacher may gain a hearing among some who otherwise would shut him out.[13]Unless the preacher calls these out and contrasts them with the great themes and offers of the Bible, both believers and nonbelievers in a culture will be unconsciously influenced by them. If the Bible is not a product of any one human culture or set of human authors but is indeed a revelation from God Himself, then it would have to offend every person’s cultural sensibilities somewhere. Inevitably, the biblical authors say things that contradict the spirit of the age and an individual’s convictions and intuitions.[14]