For many Christians, secularisation is seen as one of the most significant challenges facing the church today. But Mark McConnell suggests that rather than try to hold on tight to what remains of our former influence, perhaps the church needs a new posture.

For many Christians, secularisation is seen as one of the most significant challenges facing the church today. Where once New Zealand might have been thought of as a "Christian country", religion and the church are being increasingly pushed to the margins of society and cultural life. One common Christian response is to try to shore up what remains of our Christendom heritage and try to stand against the apparent tide. But as King Canute found out, such a strategy is fraught with the very high likelihood of failure.

Rather than try to hold on tight to what remains of our former influence, perhaps the church needs a new posture. Perhaps we Christians need to reflect on the possibility that we ourselves have bought into the myth of the sacred-secular divide. Perhaps it is not so much the secularism "out there" that we have to deal with, as it is that which lurks within our own ranks.

Secularism is often tied to post-enlightenment modernity with its basic division of fact and value, science and faith, and public and private. Arguably, the church has adopted and encouraged these basic presuppositions. This is, for example, seen in our often uneasy relationship with science. It is interesting to reflect on the antagonistic reaction of the church to the "strange" thought that it might be the sun that is stationary rather than the earth. After all, said the Christians at the time, wasn't the earth at the centre of God's creation. Such a reaction also seemed to have valid Biblical support (eg., Ps. 104:5; Josh. 10:11-13). By its own attitudes towards new scientific discoveries, the church contributed to the secularism it now battles. In some Christian circles today, such antagonism continues.

In addition, the modernistic post-enlightenment split between private and public is arguably an area in which the church itself is complicit. In traditional Western evangelical Christianity, activities such as worship, prayer and church ministry are thought to be sacred, whereas things like business, sport and shopping are secular. Such a reality is normally reflected in who we pray for on a Sunday morning: ministers and missionaries - yes; business people and bankers - probably not.

Lesslie Newbigin is well known for his reflections on Western culture when he returned to England in 1974 after 40 years serving as a missionary in India. Newbigin called for a truly missionary encounter between the Gospel and Western culture. For such an encounter to happen, Christians must regain a "proper confidence" in the Gospel as "public truth". Such confidence must not depend on the "plausibility structures" of a particular culture, but on the fact that the Gospel is a new starting point by which we see all of life.

However, for Newbigin, this did not mean an attempt to recover a Christendom model of Christianity. As he writes, "To claim that the gospel is public truth is... not to seek for the Gospel any coercive power in the arena of public debate but it is to insist that the Gospel must be heard as an affirmation of the truth which must finally govern every aspect of human life. It is not to ask that the Gospel should exclude all other voices, only that it should be heard" (Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth, 1991).

The declaration of such "public truth" ultimately depends on local congregations renouncing an introverted private club mentality and re-engaging creatively and imaginatively in living out the Biblical story in the full scope of both private and public life. This means making known the reality of the new creation in every sector of society. For Newbigin, the only "hermeneutic of the Gospel" is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. It is here that the challenge of secularisation must first be faced.

On the topic of secularisation Newbigin's best books would be:

Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, SPCK, 1986
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Eerdmans, 1989
Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth, Eerdmans, 1991

Mark McConnell
Lecturer in the School of Theology Mission and Ministry
Laidlaw College
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

0 Comments