Understanding secular minds

Understanding secular minds: A perspective on "life development"

Working intelligently with people who are growing up in post-Christian cultures

Bertil Wiklander, Th.D., is president of the Trans-European Division, St. AI bans, Hertsfordshire, England.

Christian mission is communication. It is to make Jesus known by letting God's voice be heard through the working of the Holy Spirit in the minds, hearts, and lives of men and women. Success in mission is therefore an outcome of successful communication. It is conditioned by a balanced interaction between Sender, message, and receiver.

The challenge is, however, that the church and contemporary humans do not seem to "speak the same language" at least in the so called Western world. Why?

One factor is our continued neglect of the receiver in the communication process. We uphold the message: The Word of God, the doctrinal truths, and our theology. We pay homage to the Sender: God, and His call to us. And while we may be correct in what we say, teach, or proclaim, truly adequate information is not a guarantee for successful communication. Success requires that the receivers of God's message perceive the Sender as trust worthy. They must understand the message and feel that it is genuinely pertinent to them and that it actually contributes to the meaning and longings of their lives.

This is all too often not the case when the church communicates with secular people. Reasons for this are many. Often, we tend to see secular values as threats to our faith, and we are trapped in an attitude that resists change. The church faces the challenge of the secular machine everywhere, one way or the other.

My perspective is European, particularly Scandinavian, 1 since I have my roots there. The reader will find, however, that the modern secular mind-set across the world has many features in common. The process of globalization may, to some degree, explain why this is so, and will increasingly be so.

A post-Christian society

Increasingly, modern secular society is becoming "post-Christian." For centuries, the Christian worldview formed the basis upon which people made choices and interpreted the meaning of life. This disappeared in the course of the twentieth century, under the influence of various philosophies, the disasters of two world wars, and the general unfolding of society. 2

As a result, secular people may bear within them a reaction against the established Christian church. They think they have heard what the church has to say, have declined it, and finished with it. The perception is common that contemporary human cultures live in a state of freedom from old and tradition-worn values. They perceive, either consciously or unconsciously, that science and common sense have helped rid them of these hoary shackles.

In some places, Christians are seen to be "intellectually dishonest," and people do not believe that the church is able to give satisfactory answers to their questions. Stating that you are a Christian may therefore prevent communication. The church is not trusted as an institution, and church representatives, including pastors and leaders, are met with distrust or disdain.

The church must therefore seek to make itself legitimately trustworthy on modern terms, while it does not compromise its divine essence. In practical terms, this means that we do not need to have a ready answer to every question, or that we always have to "be right" in everything, but rather that we be human and compassionate.

Because objective truth is seen to be hard to find, and human relationships are highly valued in today's secular world, our commitment to biblical truth must not change, but how we communicate must change by revising our perceptions of the nature of the sender, message, and receiver, as well as the dynamics of the interplay between all of them.

Church members, rather than pastors, are often met with a greater degree of trust by secular people, for they are seen as voluntary supporters or just "regular people," and not as church professionals. A congregation that emphasizes discipleship and lay ministry, where the pastor trains the members to use their gifts in ministry, would therefore stand a better chance of reaching the average secular per son. More to the point, a group of friends meeting in someone's home is less threatening and more relational for contemporary people, than meeting with a large congregation in a conventional church setting.

Contemporary values relevant to outreach

Secular society values freedom from material poverty. Such freedom is measured by the average length of life; annual vacation days; number of persons per car and telephone; home computers per 100 people; percentage of households owning a VCR, dish washer, and microwave; women's employment and the size of women's salaries; public development aid; labor union organization; percentage of total private consumption spent on food; and high consumption of ice cream and coffee per person. In view of this trend, we can make three observations.

First, the urge toward financial well-being and independence, which is the basis upon which secular materialists build their values, creates the need for a job or an income. Thus, unemployment and fear of unemployment become major issues and are, in fact, rated very highly as a vital concern for many secular people.

Churches may reach people by providing the unemployed and their families with a meaningful network of friends or even helping them find another job. There is reason to believe that such service would build vital friendship connections and open the way for the gospel and Christian fellowship.

Second, when people face the loss of their jobs and income, and thus experience personal financial need and even poverty, they are almost always at a loss to know how to handle their circumstances. This creates human needs that the Christian churches have the potential of addressing. However, the church needs to make significant changes in its style of communication, the organization of its public and communal life, and the meeting places where it gets involved with non-Christians or the "unchurched."

Third, modern people spend so much time and energy on earning and spending that building a harmonious family life becomes difficult. This is underscored by the fact that most frequently, both husband and wife work outside the home. Thus, marriage, personal relationships, and children are top rated as strong concerns among contemporary people.

Other high priorities are world peace and environmental concerns. The church has the distinct opportunity to address these needs and to do it in a creative and fruitful way.

Significantly, however, the concerns that most of our churches seem to prefer to address, such as faith, church, God, the Bible, salvation, sin, and atonement, are those that end up at the bottom of the secular person's list. While we must, of course, address these absolutely crucial and foundational issues, we need to hold back on these matters that appeal to ourselves and find out what actually appeals to lost, secular people.

Only when we genuinely share in the concerns of contemporary people, will they be willing to move on to deeper levels of faith.

We must therefore see conversion as a process that takes time. If we expect quick results from outreach to secular people, we will either be disappointed or bring someone into the church who has no roots and may leave us more disillusioned than ever.

Silence concerning the soul

Today, the average urban person finds it difficult to talk about his or her personal inner needs. While the popular art forms of our time some times address the issue of dying and the human fear of death, people generally don't speak to one another on a personal level about such things. Much of the social pressure of today's cultures pressure people into silence regarding their inner needs. And they secretly wither away with their unspoken questions.

The church could fulfill its Christian mission by finding a way to listen to these silent needs of secular people. But the church seems trapped in its traditional forms of "doing church the way we've always done it."

Again, one striking fact that I have noted in the assessments of the trends of our times is that a very large proportion of secular people need and want to deal with matters of their own personal faith, their doubts, and existential needs, but they want to do this in small informal groups of friends rather than in the setting of an official church context, about which many of them possess that innate sense of suspicion already described.

Thus it is clear that some sort of small-group ministry is a must for every church that wants to reach secular people. And, hopefully, this could also give us fresh approaches to the format of our Sabbath Schools.

The condition for achieving such a change, however, seems to be that we become willing to step out of our old church structures and try new, functional ways of actually listening to people and becoming one with them as their true, trustworthy friends.

God and the secular mind

Increasingly, contemporary people have no strong definable belief in God. Faith or philosophical variations of all kinds are proliferating. While 32 percent of the people in Western Europe express belief in some sort of personal God, the figure for Sweden is 19 percent and for Poland, 91 percent. In traditionally Christian Scandinavia, about 80 percent of the people stand isolated from any current meaningful Christian influence.

A post-Christian society, however, is far from nonreligious. The spiritual needs of people remain, and they are finding new ways of fulfilling them. Thus, there are trends towards the development of an unofficial "private religion," in which people have their own gods, and there are now Christian books that guide churches on making Christianity private. 3

In this context, we often find trends toward mysticism, meditation, and occult practices. Old gnostic and spiritist views are brought back on the scene by the so-called New Age religion. Stand-alone psychological prescriptions for peace of mind and emotional well-being abound.

In these new religious forms, two things are predominant, namely the disregard of the Bible and a significantly confused or variated picture of God. This is especially true when it comes to any meaningful regard for the concept of God's "holiness" and "authority."

These are, of course, fundamental elements in an Adventist and conservative Christian understanding of truth. But, in many places in the world today, these cultural trends and perceptions increase the distance between us and the target of our mission. Bridging this growing gulf effectively without losing our identity or integrity is a challenge that we must learn to recognize as a valuable opportunity rather than a drawback.

The occurrence of new forms of religion that question any absolute authority and confuse the nature of God are to a large extent the result of the process of "individualization," which has characterized Europe since the Renaissance and the Reformation. 4 This established and now maturing way of thinking has produced the "pluralistic" modern society, where there is wide tolerance for any kind of religion but no sure answers relating to values. The dominating idea of the relativity of absolute values and authorities, how ever, tends to create a profound psychological anguish in significant people groups today.

One analyst says: "There are no absolute values to hold on to, but each individual is his own boss in regard to values and norms. People live partly in the context of values with which they have grown up and partly detached from them. There are always many alternatives, outlooks, views and lifestyles to choose from, but the amount of optional alternatives per se makes it rather unlikely that my choice is the right one. The relativity of values creates a large amount of freedom but also a constantly disturbing uncertainty."5

This opens new possibilities for the church. Human beings today are largely and increasingly alone. We can give them genuine friendship. They are uncertain of what to believe. We can give them assurance. But to do that, we need to be extremely humble, keeping in mind the church's lack of credibility, and teaching with great sensitivity the authority and holy nature of God and the Bible. We must truly listen to people with patience and respect, entering into conversation and friendship with them. And this must be done while we hold with certainty the firm conviction that the receiver will be blessed by developing a life of faith.

The process of trivialization

The technological change of conditions for human life tends to multiply people's relations but at the same time render them superficial. The enormous increase of information and knowledge created by the communication and computer age continues to "trivialize" people's perceptions of God, themselves, the world, and other human beings.

For most people today, there is less training in reading and writing, analytical thinking, and pursuits that engage crucial functions of the imagination. While we talk of being in touch with ourselves and our inner emotions and needs, there seems to be less of that actually happening.

Along with this, or as an integral part of it, there is less time for getting together, for quiet and deep fellow-ship with parents, relatives, and friends. The result is an increasing lack of rootedness and identity, and thus a lack of stability and security.

As a result of this, the average modern human is increasingly involved in varying, temporary, and occasional commitments.6 The life long commitment to one kind of work, a local community, or the per son with whom one lives, is no longer self-evident. People have several commitments. They are brief, changing, and often new. People are constantly moving and do not like to limit or "imprison" themselves in one particular, binding commitment.

In all of this, the only lifelong project to which modern secular people are committed is themselves, the ideal of self-realization and personal development. Therefore this interest may well be an avenue for the church to use as an avenue of communication with them.

These realizations are indeed foundational to the concepts behind the design of the "life development" approach, featured in this and other articles in this issue of Ministry. In this approach we are seriously seeking to understand evangelism in terms of spiritual growth, using friendship as a fundamental cornerstone in such a ministry, along with the home as the chief meeting place.

People with natural gifts for counseling have reported that they receive a multitude of requests for counseling from non-Christians or simply for "time to talk." If our laity would be trained to do this work, according to their spiritual gifts, we are convinced it would be an effective way toward authentic church growth.

Some conclusions

One of the elementary lessons from the monumental study Church and Denominational Growth: What Does (and Does Not) Cause Growth or Decline (1993) by Roozen and Hadaway is that the mission of the church succeeds where leaders create a climate where one preaches, thinks, speaks, and plans evangelism, being driven by a clear picture of people's genuine needs and a genuine love for those we seek to befriend and reach.

In view of my observations here, this evangelistic emphasis may go along with the following general recommendations for our mission plans in secular societies:

1. Church identity: Safeguard a strong internal Seventh-day Adventist Christian identity, while "remaining an open social network, able to maintain and form ties with [those who are outside our inner circle]." 7

2. Mission awareness: Maintain the belief that the gospel of Christ answers human needs, but let the gospel speak to people in new ways highly responsive to their actual concerns.

3. Life development: In church life, focus on ongoing inner spiritual growth, gift-oriented lay ministry, and training for leadership and witnessing along the lines of friendship and the home setting.

4. Public credibility: Restore the church's credibility by actively participating in public life (statements, releases, media initiatives), and by making our communication relevant and transparent to the secular world.

5. Some specific areas of emphasis:

  • Develop specific approaches to youth and children, families, and single and married people.
  • Underscore relationships rather than activities. Develop meeting places and worship styles where believers come close to new people.
  • Use church members' friendships with unchurched as a tool of evangelism.
  • Develop counseling ministries and equip members to be good friends who can listen and help.
  • Respect secular people's silence about their needs and help them open up in a small-group fellow ship in homes.
  • Be sensitive to people's relativity of values and refrain from being perceived as one who always knows best. Make Bible studies discovery oriented.
  • Convey rest and freedom from the urge to earn and consume, using the Sabbath as God's gift to us.

Finally, the attitude we need to adopt as we communicate and execute our mission to secular people must reflect a genuinely Christ-like attitude. It is the attitude of incarnation, as described in Philippians 2:1-11, by which we empty ourselves in order to serve others, and, as the apostle Paul put it, by which we become "all things to all men, that [we] might by all means save some" (1 Cor. 9:22).

1 Cf. my case study on Sweden in Re-Visioning Adventist Mission in Europe, ed. E.W Baumgartner (Berrten Springs, Mich : Andrews University Piess, 1998), 70-81

2 See Leslie Newbegin, The Gospel in & Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids, Mich Wm Ecrdmans, 1989).

3 See Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith. Faith Journeys Beyond the Churches (London- SPCK, 2002)

4 See Francis Schaeffer. Escape From Reason (Downer's Grove, 111 'InterVarsity Press, 1968), Lorenz LyttkenS, Den disciplincrade
manniskan (Stockholm. Sweden Liber, 1985), 55-85.

5 Lyttkens, 153ff (my translation)

6 Lyttkens, 147 ff.

7 Rodney Stark, "Why Religious Movements Succeed or Fail. A Revised General Model," Journal of Contemporary Religion 11
(1996). 2:143

 

 


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Bertil Wiklander, Th.D., is president of the Trans-European Division, St. AI bans, Hertsfordshire, England.

March 2003

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