How Do We Reach a Changing Culture?

Wednesday evenings, we have been doing a study on the effects of a consumer mentality on the church. We've defined consumerism, shown what it looks like in the church, and addressed its negative effects. But one of the things we have also noted is that it it a cultural influence that is not likely to change anytime soon. Yet, as a church, we must still continue to function in spite of the cultural changes that have taken place all around us. We find that the fabric of the neighborhood has changed, and changed again, and that it is hard to keep up with the change.

There are some words of wisdom from the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians that I think will help us find a way to cope with the cultural change that has taken place everywhere, and sort out all of the issues related to it and to the effectiveness of the ministry of our church. We must become a church that builds community for the "weaker brother," and once we understand how to do that, we will be a good distance down the road toward relevance.

It's sort of like coming to that moment in your life when you realized, all of a sudden, that giving gifts brings you more blessing and joy than receiving them.

The first church I served following graduation from seminary was First Baptist Church of Thayer, Missouri. Though I grew up in a small town, up to that point, all of the churches I'd served were in big cities, namely Tucson, Arizona, Houston, Texas and the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. JoAnn grew up in St Louis, so moving to Thayer was culture shock for us, as was serving a church in a small town. The approach to ministry in the church was very different than anything I'd experienced before as a minister.

We soon learned how to approach ministry in the culture of this small town. Fifth quarter parties in the fellowship hall after high school football games became a major outreach event, and after just the first football season, our youth group had grown from 4 people to more than 20. Joining the Rotary club brought about instant relationships with a number of businessmen in the community, as well as the high school principal and soon, I could come on the campus at lunchtime, or just about any time of the day, without having to seek permission to do so. At one point, when two students died in a tragic auto accident, I was called on to spend the day at the school helping out with grief counseling. When VBS was coming up, the superintendent, who was a deacon in the church, offered the mailing list of all K through 5th grade students in town so we could send personal invitations.

We also learned how to adapt to living in a small town. Thayer had a Wal Mart, but it closed at 7:00 in the winter and didn't have a grocery store. That closed at 6:00. There was one doctor in town, and no hospital. The closest mall was 80 miles away, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and it wasn't much of a mall. For major shopping, you had to plan to take a day and go to either Memphis, Tennessee or Springfield, Missouri. If you lived in town, you could get cable TV, if not, you could get one channel.

When we moved to a new church field in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the ministry strategies that had worked so well in Thayer generally didn't work there. Though the two churches were about the same size, with a similar budget, the approach to ministry was completely different. Fifth quarters didn't work because our students went to four different high schools and no one went to the football games. We tried one after two of the big rival schools in town played basketball, which was the big sport, but it didn't work because the kids from the losing school were sulking, and the winners were not all that gracious. There were several Rotary clubs in town, and the one with the most business connections in it was closed to new members. Thayer was a rural community, two and a half hours away from a city of any size at all, Bowling Green was a college town, large enough to have its own television stations, a large mall and several other shopping areas. Several of the grocery stores were open all night. It was a different environment, a different culture, people dealt with different issues and the approach to ministry had to be different.

As the culture of the community around us has changed, part of our ability to reach people depends on our ability to adapt our approach to ministry in order to reach them. That ability depends in part on our spiritual preparation, and it depends on our ability to find ways that communicate the gospel to the culture. Those are going to be different than those ways which succeeded in the past. It is something that God can lead us to do, if we open ourselves to receiving a word from him.