Preparing for the big issues facing the church…

From the vantage point of pastoring in Manhattan for some twenty five years, Tim Keller has a distinctive perspective on bringing the Gospel to a diverse secular culture.  He has written about this challenge in several places, most extensively in Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City.  Two online articles hint at his larger vision regarding the big issues that face the Western church and suggests several things the church should be doing by way of preparation.

“The Big Issues Facing the Western Church”

1.       The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S. In an interview, sociologist Peter Berger observed that in the U.S. evangelicals are shifting from being largely a blue-collar constituency to becoming a college educated population. …

2.      The rise of Islam. How do Christians relate to Muslims when we live side by side in the same society? …

3.      The new non-western Global Christianity. The demographic center of Christian gravity has already shifted from the west to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. …

4.      The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel. The basic concepts of the gospel — sin, guilt and accountability before God, the sacrifice of the cross, human nature, afterlife — are becoming culturally strange in the west for the first time in 1500 years. …

5.      The end of prosperity? With the economic meltdown, the question is — will housing values, endowments, profits, salaries, and investments go back to growing at the same rates as they have for the last twenty-five years, or will growth be relatively flat for many years to come? … If discretionary assets are one-half of what they were, more risky, sacrificial giving will be necessary to do even less ministry than we have been doing. …

“Preparing For the Big Issues Facing the Church”

1.       The local church has to support culture-making. Most of the young evangelicals interested in integrating their faith with film-making, journalism, corporate finance, etc, are getting their support and mentoring from informal networks or para-church groups. …

At the theological level, the church needs to gain more consensus on how the church and Christian faith relate to culture. …

At the practical level, even the churches that give lip-service to the importance of integrating faith and work do very little to actually equip people to do so. …

2.      We need a renewal of apologetics. There is a lot of resistance right now among younger evangelical leaders toward apologetics. We are told we don’t need arguments anymore because people aren’t rational. We need loving community instead. But I think this is short-sighted for two reasons. …

3.      We need a great variety of church-models. Avery Dulles’ book Models of the Church does a good job of outlining the very different models of churches in the west over the centuries. After qualifying his analysis by saying these are seldom pure forms, he lays out five models. …

4.      We must develop a far better theology of suffering. Members of churches in the west are caught absolutely flat-footed by suffering and difficulty. … The church in the west must mount a great new project—of producing a people who are prepared to endure in the face of suffering and persecution. …

5.      We need a critical mass of churches in the biggest cities of the world. I know I’m always expected to say this! But this is not a mere tack-on to the other measures for addressing the Big Issues. In some ways, this is the ‘Big Idea’ that will help us move forward on all fronts. …

“The Big Issues Facing the Western Church” is available here.

“Preparing for the Big Issues Facing the Church” is available here.

Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City may be purchased here.  An excellent introduction to this book is an interview by Trevin Wax, “Gospel, Culture, and Mission:  An Interview with Tim Keller.”