Eddie Arthur, posting from a remote mountain location in the Philippines, is in danger of losing his humourless readers with a picture and references to Starbucks before they get to the meat of his post – and then in danger of losing his more humour-loving readers by presenting this meat as “One last thing”. So I will rescue this strong meat from oblivion by reposting it here.

The meat in question is a quote from Mission Under Scrutiny by J. Andrew Kirk. (The author is not a close relation of mine, but there is some evidence that we have a common ancestor in or before the 15th century.) Here is what Eddie quotes, complete with typos and missing question marks, understandable from a jet-lagged visitor to the Philippines:

… how well does it (the church) communicate with its context? Is the church reviewing the efficacy of its attempts to transmit the good news of Jesus Christ within its neighbourhood? How aware is it of the distance between the Gospel message and the beliefs and values of most citizens today. Has it really taken on board the fact that the vast majority of people living in Europe now are no longer lapsed Christian believers, or even the un-churched in the sense that belonging to the church would still be culturally appropriate? Neither Christian belief or moral values nor belonging to a faith community are remotely within their horizon. There is little or no residue of a common language that could form a bridge between the Jesus story and their own stories. The church often gives the impression that it is content to minister to an ever dwindling population. Christians have to learn how to make the unchanging message of salvation in Christ meaningful to generations preoccupied with other concerns. (p.95)

Indeed! Too often our churches here in the UK, even those like mine which have a heart for evangelism, content themselves with evangelistic methods which work reasonably well with the minority of the population with some church background. An explicit example is “Back to Church Sunday”, but even initiatives like the Alpha Course tend to assume some kind of Christian upbringing. Methods originating in the USA, which so often attract cult followings over here, tend to have this problem simply because in the USA, at least in the more conservative parts of it, it is still possible to assume much more Christian background than is possible here in England.

These methods do bear fruit among people brought up in contact with the Christians, and so are pronounced successful and embraced by many churches. But they barely touch the growing majority of our nation who have no Christian background at all, and are often in fact repelled by anything they do see of church culture, whether traditional or modern style, as being completely outside their cultural expectations.

I don’t know how we can reach such people, but the first step towards doing so is to recognise that even our apparent success stories are in fact failures.

UPDATE 5th November: as Eddie tidied up his typos, I have updated this to his tidied up version.