The Prodigal God?

Minus the question mark, this is actually the title of a book by contemporary Christian author, Timothy Keller.
As many of my friends know, I read few books compared to most people, instead keeping my nose in the Book.
I know that I sometimes come across as rather hard on the prolific output of modern Christian authors to some people in Christian Blogoslavia, and I don't deny there will always be some good books "out there" for some people, but the fascination for these books is all out of proportion to their practical value, and just provide an opportunity to waste time like the ancient Athenians who "…would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new." (Acts 17:21) This text from Acts describes the Christian spiritual elite of today, always eager for "telling or hearing something new."

Back to The Prodigal God. Hmm, well, that's an interesting title, and the book (I gather) is about "attracting the irreligious," which is also the title of a blog where this book was discussed earlier this month. Now, not this book, but the ideas it talks about, interested me, and got me to thinking about them. Starting with a quote from this book, here are some of those thoughts…

"The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did."

—Tim Keller in The Prodigal God, pp. 14-15.

It's pretty easy to see that our Christian witness both as preachers and congregations doesn't have anything much to attract the world's attention, but I don't think that it necessarily means that we're not declaring the same message that Jesus did.

Though the Bible says that Jesus was followed around by multitudes of people, we don't know exactly how many in most cases, and the overall population of Palestine was probably what, three million or even more at the time of Christ, yet I doubt His audiences were anything as large as the following that most modern evangelists and church leaders have. On a percentage basis, Christ's message probably didn't attract more than 5 or 10 percent of the total population of Palestine. Most of Christ's authentic followers are even named in the New Testament. Just because Jesus was followed by "crowds" doesn't mean that they were even attracted to Him for the right reasons. Notice, there were only about 120 disciples immediately after Christ's ascension. It wasn't until the day of Pentecost that 3000 were added, all in a single day.

What we see in America and other modern cultures is a population that by and large functions out of religious habit, or out of irreligious habit. Most of us are educated enough to know who Jesus is and what the claims of Christianity are, and we just don't need it. I have known people who are very intelligent and yet joined groups like the Mormons because their system "works," that is, because it helps create successful (I won't say healthy) family life, even though they did not believe the mythology or any of the doctrines behind it! They just go thru the motions. Since it is impossible to know what is really true, they grabbed what simply "works." In the same way, our sophisticated but spiritually dead neighbors can afford to be indifferent, and actually slightly hostile or contemptuous, to Christ, because they've "made it." As an old issue of Zapped Comix (pictured above) put it, "Who needs God? I'm independently wealthy!"

Churches are stuck at all different places.

Some churches function as though they're still in a Christian world—in fact, whether or not they admit it, I think that's what most Christian churches do. They are usually houses of worship surrounded by unbelieving neighborhoods that they never even attempt to evangelize, and most of their members live elsewhere. This, I think, is a remnant of "Christian world" mentality. All the territory has been claimed, so there's no need to go out on forays into the hinterlands anymore. But the reality is, it just ain't so.

Still, can you imagine your church, pastor or preacher and congregation, engaging in the evangelization of the neighborhood around your house of worship? How would you do it? The neighbors aren't primitive barbarians living in the forest, to whom you can bring the light of the gospel to teach them not to keep killing each other and stealing each other's wives, or material improvements to alleviate their low standard of living. No, for most of us, the neighbors are pretty affluent and either belong to a church out of habit, or take Sunday morning walks with their significant others, their families, their pets—or just sit in the sun room with a cup of coffee, a sweet, and the newspaper, until they fall asleep. After all, Sunday is supposed to be a "day of rest"!

Even those of us whose house of worship is in a working class or poor neighborhood, what would it cost us as congregations and as individuals to evangelize our unsaved neighbors? Here, we really could do some good, we might find souls that need help, but the help might be too costly for us to deal with. And then, the resistance when it occurred might not be very polite.

Our world is in some ways very different from the world that Jesus and the first generation of disciples lived in. For one, they lived in an age when if you could convince a man of something, he would give in. Nowadays, you can convince a man, but he won't give in. If he loses the debate, he protects himself from being convinced by saying, "It's just your opinion." Our education system has failed us miserably, by taking away the certainty that there is a real right and real wrong, not only in morality, but in almost every other field, sometimes even in science.

I think the Church (now I'm using capital C, meaning all of us) has to realise that its responsibility is not to save the world, but to make disciples of all nations, starting with ourselves, and that making disciples cannot mean that we force our neighbors to be disciples. If it turns out that where we live, our honest efforts to share the good news with those around us is met with disinterest or hostility, so be it. But if it turns out that the good news is given a hearing and is accepted by some, but at a price, we have to be content to share what we have with them.

Finally, we have to realize that the populations around us are not static, but that there is a rate of turnover. That means, we don't just try to evangelize for a year and then give up. The work of sharing the good news goes on 24/7 because it is the responsibility of every member of the Body of Christ. There is no one who cannot share the good news with at least one person, acquaintance or stranger, every day. The sharing needn't be an overt or verbal testimony. It can be so much as a smile or a kind word outwardly, and a prayer "Lord, give the increase" inwardly. Since it is all the Lord's work, not ours, we needn't trouble ourselves either about the visible results. This is where, I think, we run into trouble the most, and to no avail.