The Barna Group and Summit Ministries recently released a study that investigated the influence of various worldviews on Christianity. While we tend to think of atheism as the biggest threat, they found that postmodernism and the new spirituality have actually had a greater impact. As I mentioned in my last blog, Christianity has become overly reliant on a modernist, enlightenment apologetic and neglected the unique challenges of evangelizing an increasingly postmodern culture. We have Greeked out on our young people and left them amused by our immaculate intellectual togas while they rock the torn and frayed jeans of life lived. Our young people make their decisions based on experience and emotion so we can no longer just offer them a seat in the Christian classroom, we must also be willing to give them what they really want, a faith field trip.

I believe the majority of our youth aren’t all that interested in knowing if the Bible is historically reliable, archeologically verifiable, or scientifically compatible, they just want to know if it is experientially livable. I would suggest that this mindset is similar to that of our Jewish predecessors who viewed scripture not as a proof-text for the existence of God, but rather as a diary of their shared wilderness adventures, not as collection of academic ruminations on the Divine but rather as a series of journal entries describing their daily walks. They both expect to have a spiritual encounter with a burning bush, but one is formally introduced to the great I AM, while the other hears, “you can be God.” While the experiences are the same, the interpretation differs. If this is true, then how can we formulate a postmodern apologetic based on personal experience that will help our young people turn to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

We all have the same metaphysical questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of life? These universal questions don’t appear out of thin air but arise out of our shared experience of the world. Interestingly, despite our cultural, generational, and ethnic differences, we all have the same “big” questions, so the apologetic problem isn’t the experiential common ground, but rather the unstable worldviews we build upon it. Instead of arguing over our rickety worldview dwellings, maybe we should ask ourselves why we built them in the first place. In order to do this, however, we need to get back to the earth and dig around in the experiential dirt before we can successfully bring in the worldview earthmovers. We need to be willing to get our hands dirty in the soil of experience if we want to be taken seriously by our young people who are stuck wallowing around in the cultural mud.

I would suggest that as we sift through this experiential soil, we will find five elemental experiences that prompt us to ask the same existential questions. First, the world is spiritual. Second, the world is ordered. Third, the world is inherently good but broken. Fourth, we are obsessed with fixing it. Finally, despite good intentions, we tend to screw it up. Over the next several weeks, I will take a look at each one of these experiences and formulate an apologetic approach that I believe will appeal to our postmodern brothers and sisters.

 httpss://www.barna.com/research/competing-worldviews-influence-todays-christians/

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