LIFEdevelopment.info - Audience
INTRODUCTION
Over the last ten years I have written two books dealing with the subject of reaching the secular mind, Present Truth in the Real World and Knowing God in the Real World. The first, Present Truth, was about method. What kind of strategies can open secular people to the gospel? The second, Knowing God, was about message rather than method. How do you present the gospel in terms that secular people can understand?
Since the world is changing rapidly, I have wondered if the ideas in these books are still relevant. To what degree have "post-modernism" and "new age spirituality" outdated the concept of a "secular mind?" What about the events of September 11? Has the world changed so much that everything we thought about outreach ten years ago needs to be discarded? I've had a number of opportunities to explore these questions in New York City over the last year.
Shortly after the events of September 11 the president of the North American Division, Don Schneider, visited the Seminary with a proposal. He felt burdened to do something special for New York City in the wake of the terrorist attacks. He reported that things had changed dramatically in New York. People were making eye contact on the street and in the subways. Secular people were showing an interest in spiritual things.
So Elder Schneider proposed (as he did to many other church entities) that the Seminary send one or two individuals to New York for a period of six months. Each individual would continue on salary and live in a high-rise apartment (the kind you can't enter unless you live there or know someone who does). The goal would be to get acquainted with the residents in the building, plant gospel seeds and after six months hope to have at least one Seventh-day Adventist in each building to carry on the mission.
Andrews University responded with enthusiasm. I led a Seminary fact-finding team to New York City in late October of 2001. We went fully prepared to discover that things had changed dramatically and that secular New Yorkers were now open to the gospel in ways that they hadn't been before. But by late October it was already clear that the dramatic spiritual changes that took place after September 11 had quickly faded in face of the ongoing complexity of life in the big city.
Not willing to give up easily, however, Mark Regazzi from the undergraduate religion department was sent to midtown Manhattan for more than two months and Don James from the Seminary went to Roosevelt Island (a small residential island a few hundred meters from midtown Manhattan) for nearly five months. Both individuals had a life-changing experience and made many wonderful contacts, but no indigenous, secular New Yorker reached a point of serious interest in the Adventist message.
We were not surprised. As part of our "fact-finding" visit we had visited a number of "cutting-edge" churches that were trying to reach out to mainstream New Yorkers. These churches were attracting people by the thousands. At the close of each service the individuals in our group fanned out among the attendees and interviewed as many as possible. We discovered that, as successful as these churches were in attracting large numbers of people, they were reaching few, if any, secular people. Most of the attendees had grown up as members of the respective denominations, drifted away and then found themselves re-attracted by an "accepting church." Not one person could realistically be called unchurched or secular, nor were they indigenous New Yorkers as a rule. Underlining the point, we learned that most Adventists attending churches in Manhattan (the city center) were made up of immigrants who commuted to church from residences in the outskirts of the city.
We went home convinced that the observations I had made and the strategies I had drawn up ten years ago were still valid. As was the case then, secular people are not normally reached by programs, strategies, or high-tech extravaganzas. They are not reached by religious media or jargon. They remain highly resistant to what most of us call "church." While the level of spirituality seems to have increased, with the onset of what is being called "post-modernism," that spirituality is not translating itself into large numbers of unchurched people joining traditional churches or even churches of any kind.
September 11 notwithstanding, secular people are best reached one-on-one by people willing to live and invest in the neighborhoods and work places that they frequent. Secular people respond to relational approaches that meet them at points of felt need. Secular people require freshness and creativity in those who would present the gospel to them. They need to hear the gospel in language that is free from parochial cliches. Some things have changed, but much has stayed the same.
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