Archive: How to Reach Secular People

By George A. Hunter

George Hunter’s new book, How To Reach Secular People (Abingdon), already into its third printing, is a milestone in the history of books about Christian evangelism. Hunter, the dean at Asbury Seminary’s E. Stanley Jones School of Evangelism, takes up the awesome challenge of engaging secular people with Christianity’s message. In the preface, Hunter reports his discovery of this formidable challenge. —the editors

How do you communicate the Christian faith to the growing numbers of “secular” people in the western world? Pastors and Sunday school teachers who teach the faith week by week to professing Christians experience their assignment as increasingly difficult; so how do you communicate Christianity’s meaning to people who do not darken church doors, who have no church background, who possess no traditional Christian vocabulary, who do not know what we are talking about? The question presses us with greater intensity as we realize that the countries and populations of the western world have become “mission fields” once again.

I have been obsessed with this question for over 25 years. I experienced Christian conversion and a call to the ministry as a senior in high school, in Miami, Florida. Soon I was absorbed in the Scriptures and indoctrinated into the Methodist Church. I even acquired a “ministerial tone” in near-record time. For the summer of 1962, while still in divinity school, I was assigned to do “unconventional evangelism” in a section of Santa Monica, California, known as “Muscle Beach.” I spent the summer conversing with people in a beatnik coffee house, a gay bar, a house of prostitution, a pool hall, an “iron pumping” pavilion, and with drug addicts on the boardwalk and surfers on the beach. What an astonishing range of sub-cultures in one location! But they all shared one feature in common: they wondered what I was talking about! They were totally secular. They lived their lives, many desperately, in terms of this world alone. My “churched” culture, with its jargon and rituals, robed choirs and stained glass, pews and pulpits, hymnals and handbells, was almost as alien to them as if it had been imported from China or the Middle Ages or Venus.

My unconventional friends were not familiar with someone from the church invading their turf! But about three dozen of them responded enough to help me begin with their questions and concerns. I used words they could understand, I shed the ministerial tone, and I learned to speak like someone from this planet. Four of my new friends discovered faith that summer—not an impressive harvest for eight weeks of ministry. But the experience rubbed my face in questions about communicating the Christian faith to secular people that I have struggled with ever since.

Hunter’s book demonstrates the spread of secularism and its historic causes. He profiles secular people and the kinds of Christians and the kind of message that reach them most effectively. He shows people models “that describe how secular people discover Christian faith.” The following is his “Target Model.”

Targeting the Secular

From my interviews with converts from secularism, and my studies of churches reaching them, it is now possible to present a distinct version of the steps that many secular people take toward a deep faith. Imagine a four-ringed target for throwing darts; and imagine secular people as beyond the outer circle, having missed the target for which God aimed their lives (Romans 3:23). The “bull’s eye” represents God’s goal for us—that is, God calls each person to become the kind of disciple who lives in faith, hope and love, one who chooses the will of God which the New Testament describes and the Christian movement needs. Each step toward the bull’s eye involves responding to God’s grace by crossing a barrier.

The Image Barrier

Secular people who are farthest away typically begin with their backs (or sides) toward the faith because of a negative image of Christianity.

One version of the image barrier, held by people who still subscribe to enlightenment ideas, assumes that Christianity is untrue. These people still believe in a machine-like universe, they still bet on human reason to deliver ultimate truth and a consensus morality, they still count on science and education to save the world. With an enlightenment world view, they assume that Christianity is disproved or is the same as other religions. But, as the dust continues to settle and increasing numbers lose confidence in the enlightenment alternative, more people will be open to other faith options—including Christianity. Churches can accelerate the dismantling of modernity by exposing and puncturing the remaining enlightenment balloons, and by offering the Christian alternative as they communicate Christian truth claims on secular turf, in secular language, with the support of good reasons.

A second image problem with Christianity involves the assumption that Christianity is irrelevant to their lives and/or to community and world concerns. Many of them once had experience in an irrelevant church and generalized to all churches from that experience. Many churches can (and do) challenge that image by becoming more relevant than any other fellowship or institution, by joining with people and communities in their struggles, and by communicating the relevance of real Christianity to people’s needs. Secular people bridge this barrier when they discover a church that is, in fact, relevant, and they become “seekers.”

A third image problem with Christianity involves the assumption that Christianity is boring. These people, raised on television sitcoms in an entertainment age, find church to be insufficiently interesting or stimulating. In response, some churches have discovered that it is okay to make it interesting, and they develop approaches, liturgy and discourse that adapt to short attention spans, and stimulate and even amuse, while teaching and inspiring.

The Culture Barrier

Once a person becomes a seeker, the second barrier typically experienced is a cultural barrier—or the “stained-glass barrier.” When secular people do visit a church, it can be a culturally alienating experience. If they do not understand the jargon, relate to the music, identify with the people, or feel comfortable in the facility, they infer that Christianity (and the Christian God) is not for people like them. This cultural barrier is not usually perceived by the church, especially when the target population represents the same general culture as the church membership; the church assumes that they do understand and relate to what we do, or they should. But secular people who aren’t already “churchbroke” usually see church goers as belonging to a different subculture from theirs. This cultural barrier is sometimes crossed when an earnest seeker agrees to “become circumcised”; they submit to the more conventional sub-culture and become like “church people.” That happens often enough to seduce churches into thinking there is no cultural barrier or that all seekers should be eager to adapt to their ways. But the churches that reach greater numbers of secular people pay the price to become much more indigenous to the people in their mission field, thus removing the cultural barrier that hinders most people from considering the faith itself.

The Gospel Barrier

Once the image and cultural barriers are crossed or removed, seekers are free to consider the gospel itself the only stumbling block that people should face. There are several dominant models (covenant, kingdom, justification, atonement, forgiveness, reconciliation, salvation) in the biblical gospel presumably because no one paradigm conveys the full reality of God’s deed in Jesus Christ.

Most churches reaching secular people distil some cogent version(s) of the gospel, because seekers often experience the gospel barrier as an intimidating thicket of more theological trees, bushes, limbs and vines than they can grope through. Effective churches help seekers with this theological barrier in several ways.

First, the churches focus on the faith’s foundational truth claims and do not, for now, try to teach everything. For example, a church may discern that certain convictions about God, Jesus, sin, reconciliation, the love ethic and the kingdom of God are essential to producing real disciples, while convictions about angels, consubstantiation, Jonah’s whale and the date Ephesians was written are less important. Once people become Christians, in time they can affirm many things they could not have affirmed at their time of conversion.

Second, the churches surmount the theological barrier by meaningfully interpreting the foundational convictions of Christianity, rather than merely perpetuating and parroting the tradition.

Third, the church joins seekers in the discovery of the good reasons that support many Christian truth claims.

Fourth, they encourage an experiment of faith so that people may experience the validity of Christianity as a threshold to commitment.

The Total Commitment Barrier

Once people accept the gospel and are Christians, the fourth barrier or challenge relates to becoming a totally committed Christian who seeks and obeys God’s will and lives to advance God’s kingdom. When people first become Christians, typically they do so for the benefit Christ gives them. They want (and receive) meaning for their lives, or higher self-esteem, or glue for their marriage, or the experience of acceptance, or the promise of heaven. But, as the evangelical tradition has often expressed it, they have received Jesus as Savior, but not yet as Lord. If they fail to become totally devoted, they become nominal Christians—almost as selfish and self-seeking as they were before, never experiencing the transforming power that Christianity promises, and not embodying the authenticity that seekers look for to see if Christianity delivers on its promises. Therefore, effective churches invite and challenge their Christians, for their own sakes and the world’s sake, to a life of obedience to the will of God.

This ultimate evangelical challenge is so formidable that some churches dodge it and appear content to have people (depending on the tradition) “saved” or “confirmed.” Secular people do not know that the God of the Bible is their Lord, that their rightful response to the Lord is lifetime commitment to God’s will.

Frequently, people who have moved past the barriers are as unaware as rank pagans of God’s radical claim upon their lives. In Mastering Contemporary Preaching, Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago, reports that “becoming totally devoted to Christ” is the most difficult single topic to get across to people. “When I teach that to secularly minded people, they think I’m from Mars. The thought of living according to someone else’s agenda is ludicrous; it contradicts Western culture’s myth that ‘you can have it all.’”

 

 

Good News Interview

Good News: What encourages you about what the UM Church is doing today in evangelism?

Hunter: I am especially encouraged by what a number of UM local churches are doing in evangelism. They have decided they are essentially mission stations in a mission field, that finding and reaching lost people is their main business, and that the established church is renewed as a steady stream of new believers is entering its ranks. However, most churches have not yet discovered and embraced their real mission; they are just “chaplaincy” ministries.

Good News: Your book suggests a distinction between “apostolic” ministry and “chaplaincy” ministry. What is the difference?

Hunter: At least eight out of ten churches function out of a chaplaincy model. They assume: (1) that ministry takes place mainly in the church building, not in the world beyond; (2) that ministry’s primary target is Christians, not non-Christians; (3) that ministry is primarily the responsibility (or privilege) of ordained clergy, not of the laity; and, (4) the validity of any ministry is indicated by the vocational satisfaction of the clergy person, not by changes in peoples’ lives or by changes in the community. Churches living out the apostolic pattern make the opposite assumptions. Their mission is a lay movement to non-Christians, mainly in the world, producing changed lives and reformed communities.

Good News: How can a church move from the “chaplaincy” to the “apostolic” mode of ministry?

Hunter: Churches who experience this “paradigm shift” frequently make three discoveries: (1) they discover that their members, even the protectors of the status quo, are not becoming deeply fulfilled Christians by sitting on the sidelines while the clergy play the game, (2) they discover that their ministry area is not a settled Christian community but a pagan mission field—with many receptive seekers, (3) they rediscover, usually from the Scriptures, their “first love” of making new disciples.

Good News: Is How To Reach Secular People a “church growth” book? Some people are convinced that church growth is only about numbers. Do you make a distinction between evangelism and church growth?

Hunter: The real distinction should be between evangelism and mere membership recruitment. True evangelism involves incorporating new believers and seekers into the Body of Christ, and therefore involves the growth of the true Church. The field called “Church Growth” basically asks this question: “We know how the faith ought to spread, but how does it really grow? What is really happening when churches reach and disciple people?” In this sense, How To Reach Secular People is a Church Growth book focusing on how a distinct population—people with no Christian memory—are reached and become disciples.