I find time and time again that talking to non-Christians forces me to take my theology to another level. "I pray," says Paul to Philemon, "that you may be active in sharing your faith, so that you will have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ" (v. 6). Unbelievers are not satisfied with the pat answers and unexplained terminology that Christians all too readily accept.
...Communicating the gospel cross-culturally and across subcultures causes us to reflect on how much of our Christian practice arises from the gospel and how much from our own culture. Mission is the opportunity to rethink which elements of what we believe do belong to the gospel and which in fact belong to our culture.
-Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church
1 comment:
Good thoughts here-- and they are precisely why I think that it is so important that for a pastor (elder) to carefully *define* and *explain* terms such as "sin," "faith in Christ," and so on when preaching on Sunday mornings. Our post-modern culture in America understands sin (if it even understands or accepts the term at all) to mean something very different than what the Bible means by sin. If we use this word and other Biblical words without defining and explaining them to post-modern minds, we are basically speaking nonsense to such minds.
Non-believers do, by God's grace, come to church on any given Sunday-- to say nothing of people who have been coming to church for years, and *think* that they are Christians, but in fact may not have a true relationship with Jesus Christ. Every Sunday sermon should take "theology to a higher level," because every Sunday sermon is likely to be speaking to at least *one* non-Christian who does not understand Biblical terminology. This likelihood does not mean that preachers should *do away with* Biblical terminology (not at all!), but it should be carefully defined and explained.
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