As an Atheist, I Truly Believe That Africa Needs God by Matthew Parris (This December 27th, 2008 TimesOnline article is a great argument to describe how "groupthink" binds a culture and keeps it down, trapped in a lack of innovative change because "this is the way we have always done it." Below is an excerpt)

"Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith....

"Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosophical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates." Matthew Parris, As An Atheist, I Truly Believe that Africa Needs God

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And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.
"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age."

Matthew 28:18-20

The key to the missionary’s work is the authority of Jesus Christ, not the needs of the lost. We are inclined to look on our Lord as one who assists us in our endeavors for God. Yet our Lord places Himself as the absolute sovereign and supreme Lord over His disciples. He does not say that the lost will never be saved if we don’t go— He simply says, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations . . . ." He says, "Go on the basis of the revealed truth of My sovereignty, teaching and preaching out of your living experience of Me."

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. C. S. Lewis

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.

John Stott

Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms. Confusion here is fatal.

J.I. Packer

We have to find the back door to peoples’ hearts because the front door is heavily guarded.

Ravi Zacharias

Emergent Evangelism

The Place of Absolute Truths in a Postmodern World - Two Views, by Brian McClaren and Duane Litfin

One of the greatest enemies of evangelism is the church as fortress or social club; it sucks Christians out of their neighborhoods, clubs, workplaces, schools, and other social networks and isolates them in a religious ghetto. There it must entertain them (through various means, many of them masquerading as education) and hold them (through various means, many of them epitomized by the words guilt and fear). Thus Christians are warehoused as merchandise for heaven, kept safe in a protected space to prevent spillage, leakage, damage, or loss until their delivery.

Brian McLaren, The Broadened Gospel, as quoted in Christianity Today

For his part, Duane Litfin said the "get the salt out of the salt shaker" vision is not new among evangelicals. More than half a century ago Carl Henry jolted evangelicals awake on these very issues in his The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947).

The evangelical take on salvation has for half a century stressed all three tenses of salvation: past (saved from the penalty of sin), present (saved from the power of sin), and future (saved from the presence of sin). So the Emergent emphasis on "salvation within history from sin by grace" need not be set against "salvation beyond history from hell by grace."

Likewise, Litfin said, the gospel as "information on how one goes to heaven after death" is but one part of the holistic gospel that evangelicals in general—including, now, Emergent—advocate.

The radical objectivism and neutrality of the Enlightenment have long been critiqued by Christians, Litfin said, and Emergent is right to repudiate them as unchristian and unbiblical.

"But Christians also have no business embracing the equally radical perspectivism of postmodernity," he said.

"If one has been captured by a constructivist epistemology, a position that repudiates anyone's right even to make a truth claim, and which considers truth instead to be utterly situated," Litfin said, "then any truth-claim dimensions of the gospel will be dramatically muted.

Duane Litfin, We've Been Here Before, as quoted in Christianity Today

Evangelism is not an option for the Christian life.

Luis Palau

For instance, our typical evangelistic presentations are effective with persons who assume they should be good. The Gospel-presenter tries to show them that they are not good enough - they fall short of God's perfect standards - and therefore they need Jesus to forgive sin and help them do the right thing. This presentation was quite appropriate for everyone in my parent's generation. My parents, who are evangelical Christians, and my in-laws, who are not at all, had basically the same social and moral values. . . . They were part of a world in which Christianity was a folk religion even if it was not the heart religion of most people. They believed the purpose of life was to be a good person. This world no longer exists everywhere.

On the other hand, if you say to those in my kid's generation, "You know you have to be good." They will say, "Who's to say what good is?" So what are we to do with these post-everything persons who are increasingly dominating our society? The traditonal gospel presentations will not make sense to many of them.

Tim Keller, Post-everythings

Being a Christian in a Post-Christian Culture

No Christian should invite rejection. But all godly Christians should expect it [2 Timothy 3:12]. Popular culture used to appreciate Christianity as a moral force in the society to be respected, if not followed. Not anymore.

Shooting Ourselves in the Foot

From the growing televangelistic movements of the 70s and 80s, the fall of well-known TV evangelists,

the blatant embarrassment of wild and crazy Christians either aborting abortion doctors or chuckling themselves silly with holy laughter, the molestation of young children by trusted priests of the Roman Catholic church and the alliance of well-meaning conservatives exclusively with the sometimes arrogant and vicious political right, life "in the name of Jesus" has not become a moral convictor of right against wrong as it used to be. Ted Haggard's recent fall and effort to get back up is another most recent example in the media.

The idea of being a Christian in popular culture has become a joke to the immoral majority even when God keeps raising up balanced witnesses like Franklin Graham, Rick Warren, Mike Huckabee, Sean Hannity and others [along with Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, and others who have a way of stinging conservatives where it hurts biblically on one side while emergent church leaders like Mark Driscoll keep throwing cold-water and lye soap on encrusted Christian cultural assumptions]. Praise God for diversity in the body of Christ to keep us honest with ourselves!

What does it mean to live in a "Post-Christian" culture? It means that you will need to accept the fact that being a real live bonified died-in-the-wool "born again" believer in Jesus is never "cool" in popular culture - even if at one time it used to be. It never has been really. But fundamental/evangelicalism of the "in-your-face-you-sinner" kind is being dissed by the popular culture in an aggressive way today that does not match American culture from the founding of America until the post WWII years.

From the 1960s to the present [and on a broader scale, from the Enlightment to the present], popular culture has been slowly moving away from any acceptance of conservative Bible believing Christianity as a valid cultural lifestyle in modern America. Right or wrong, a smart and godly Christian has to accept this reality and live with what is - not what shoulda, coulda, or woulda be if only . . . .

Conservative evangelical right wingers, with all good and well-meaning intentions, have turned themselves into obnoxious, self-righteous, critical, condemning and reactionary jerks toward popular culture in some realms of Christendom. The bumper sticker wearing, What-Would-Jesus-Do, name-it-and-claim-it, style believer is a dated dinosaur on today's young-minded map - there to look at and fondly remember as "the-contrived-old-days", but nothing to emulate or follow with conviction. The video below communicates effectively what I am talking about.

The new "Christ followers" are not "Christ-ones no more." As "Christians no more," they are trying to drop a characterization we fundamental/evangelical Christians created for ourselves during our materialistic know-it-all we're-the-cultural-cats-pajamas baby-boomer years. But evangelical Christians are out in the open now and the growing-in-majority well-educated, knowledgeable, and very discerning secular culture is taking more than pot shots at us. We are being attacked on all sides. One of the greatest disdainers is the constant characterizations of evangelicals as "idiots on a mission." They now know our mission, our missionaries, our major locations of traditional and emerging church efforts, and are dissing us to a next generation with one of the greatest tools of American freedom of speech ever expressed - humor.

The Sinner's Guide to Laughing Christians in America Out of Existence

The Sinners Guide to the Evangelical Right by Robert Lanham published in 2006 by the New American Library is a great example. Check out the web site www.evangelicalright.com for a quick introduction to the books lampooning concepts. Or read the excerpt from the book here. Somebody out there likes pointing the finger at us - and sometimes with good reason.

Taking the satirical style of humor used by Steven Colbert of the Comedy Channel's The Colbert Report, this book outlines every aspect of conservative and not-so-conservative fundamental/evangelicalism in existence in America today. As a handbook of "what to watch out for," Christians are targeted at the very heart of any and all centers of influence we fundamental/evangelical believers might have in the culture today.

Lanham demonstrates that fundamental/evangelicals are well-known now and every aspect of our beliefs and convictions are fair game for dissing, dismissing, denigrating, dissolving and slowly destroying by the shear power of a joke. And if you can't laugh at yourself when they are right, while maintaining your own convictions in light of the truth in the process, you become a part of the joke with them - a buffoon "in the name of Jesus" instead of a true fool for Christ.

What is sad, is that some of the humor in The Sinner's Guide is right on. Some of it characterizes us well and shows us with our pants unzipped, if not down. Most of it is one laughing exaggeration and disassociation-to-misassociation after another. But the shear accuracy of its research and the lengths to which Lanham has gone to speak to the historical reality of fundamental/evangelicals in America, the older and younger emerging crowd, is impressive.

I would recommend The Sinner's Guide to any pastor or church member who can laugh at himself and his particular Christian group. But for no other reason, imagine what it would be like to view the Allies in WWII from the Nazi perspective or democracy from the Muslim terrorists perspective. This book is like reading a real life Screw Tape Letters about real Christians in today's world, without the keen insights of C.S. Lewis to go along with it.

When Dante took on the Roman Catholic faith with his Dante's Inferno tour of hell in the Divine Comedy, he was an insider lampooning the system of Catholic Christendom in his day as he declared a reality of faith in deserved divine judgment [See the excellent virtual version of Dante's Inferno here]. The fundamental/evangelical church needs this kind of honest ribbing by its own because we take our self-righteous moralism too seriously - from the left side as well as the right. But the intention of those outside the faith is to maliciously debunk the faith by associating us with "idiocy" as others are led away from the faith by our own self-righteous positioning in culture.

Biblical or Cultural Assumptions?

We should expect criticism and condemnations from nonbelievers as a matter of faith that counts all tribulations with joy under persecution [James 1:2-4]. But the apostle Paul had an evangelistic plan in mind to deal with outsiders that had more to do with personal character expressed properly in the culture with wisdom than assaults on the character of nonbelievers in moral self-righteous comparisons [Colossians 4:1-6;1 Timothy 2:1-8].

We are supposed to assume that nonChristians are sinners and because of Jesus in us by the Spirit we are not like them anymore. Not because of any moral superiority on our part in the flesh, but because of a divine transformation from within by faith [2 Corinthians 3:17-18; 5:14-17].

Our contemporary assaults on the postmodern secularist over the years has backfired on us. Instead of our constant finger pointing winning a sympathetic audience by the so-called "moral majority," we have proven Jesus' words about judging others to be correct. "For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you" [Matthew 7:1-2]. And we are receiving the fruits of our judgments on the postmodern secularists - in spades. It almost makes the concept of "love your enemies and do good to those who despitefully use and abuse you" seem like a good idea. I wonder who thought that up [Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27, 35]?

Identifying with Christ Over Christian Culture and/or Popular Culture

Confidence in our Christian flesh has done us in today as respected believers. By trusting in our own carnal positioning from many angles, we have dug a hole for ourselves in which our enemies will gladly bury us if God allows it. Humbling ourselves to see the lack of character in our approach to win the world around us may be a way of seeing what the apostle Paul meant by "confidences in the flesh" which abounded among many so-called Christian groups in his day.

Identifying with Fleshly Confidences

The apostle Paul told us to "put no confidence in the flesh" as many were doing in his day. While we are to be worshipping by the Spirit and letting personal transformational change in our lives testify against the world around us and to the power of the Gospel in Christ working in us, there is a carnal substitute in Christendom that substitutes true Christian faith for a false "Churched" faith rooted in false identities with cultural falsehoods of fleshly standing.

Philippians 3:1-9

For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.

Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinks that he has whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more:

Circumcised the eighth day,

of the stock of Israel,

of the tribe of Benjamin,

a Hebrew of the Hebrews;

as touching the law, a Pharisee;

Concerning zeal, persecuting the church;

As touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.

Fleshly Righteousness of Tradition

Fleshly Righteousness of National Heritage

Fleshly Righteousness of State Heritage

Fleshly Righteousness of Racial Heritage

Fleshly Righteousness of Religious Heritage

Fleshly Righteousness of Political Heritage

Paul zealously used political connections to gain authority to persecute Christians – Acts 9:1-2

Fleshly Righteousness of Moral Obedience

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.

More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith

Philippians 3:3-9

From the chart of Philippians 3:1-9 above you can see Paul's words put into cultural context. While everyone operating out of a fleshly religiosity "in Jesus name" is identifying with something less than Jesus Christ by the Spirit alone, Paul has matured so as to discard all the fleshly props that others use in their fleshly pride to identify themselves [Philippians 3:13-16].

Every believer must navigate himself through these fleshly props of personal identity that actually rob us from a deeper intimacy with Christ by His Spirit. As you can note for yourself, the fundamental/evangelical church as a whole has identified in one way or another with all the cultural props of identity which Paul lists about himself.

Tradition - We have worshipped our Arminian and Calvinistic traditions in the same way that Jewish scholars for centuries made their liberal and conservative traditions render God's Word of no effect in cultural practices that please God. We have worshipped our denominational traditions. We have worshipped our Bible translation traditions. We have made the traditions of Christianity in all its facets greater than the living Christ himself.

National Heritage - We have worshipped our American heritage and the faith of our fathers with a greater attention and regard than Jesus Christ himself. Instead of the power of the gospel through the Holy Spirit to change culture being our fundamental/evangelical focus over the years, we have glorified our national heritage and the faith of America's founders more than the power of an intimate godliness to transform individuals into an image they have never been before. By holding on to our past so as not to change, we have failed to create a new past for our children by constructive changes for the future.

State Heritage - This same heritage of statehood has been glorified from state to state, with Christians in each state holding to the forms of its forefathers rather than allowing the Holy Spirit to change things by His leadership in light of scripture. Our state leaders have sought to save the culture by legislating the Ten Commandments back into a corrupt culture rather than setting men and women free from their pride and lusts in the power of God's Spirit to convict of sin, renew and regenerate through repentance. The law only kills, it is the Spirit that gives life to the culture.

Racial Heritage - Race has divided Christians through the years when godliness by the Spirit would have settled the matter long ago. Christians who still struggle over racial issues demonstrate that their innate pride is not rooted in Christ as much as in their skin color - skin being "of the flesh."

Religious Heritage - Religion has been the bane of healthy relational godliness in the body of Christ. By worshipping our religious forms and traditions and comparing ourselves among ourselves as to who is more religiously right than another, we have killed the Spirit's power to bring conviction on the culture as we have glorified our ways and means as greater than God's Way and Means in His Son by the Spirit. We all know Paul did this with his Jewish heritage but it is harder to see it in our Catholic/Protestant religious selves from generation to generation where our religious minds have been hardened just like the Jews were [2 Corinthians 3:14].

Political Heritage - This has been one of the great weaknesses in the evangelical church in our modern era. I am very thankful to God, who puts down one and sets up another [Psalm 75:6-7], that we have had a series of both liberal and conservative evangelical presidents in the history of the U.S. in my life time. But the 21st century fundamental/evangelical church is learning now, after the politicized 1980s and 1990s, what Billy Graham learned when he aligned his ministry with Richard Nixon in the late 60s and early 70s. The politics of God are not the politics of man and we will be judged by our identity in godliness with God himself, not by our identity with the conservative or liberal politics of Caesar in society.

There is a conservative carnality of fleshly controls and a liberal carnality of fleshly controls - and neither of them are by the Spirit in the power of God Himself to guide us. With the same self-righteousness that drove Saul to seek letters from city to city by which he could persecute Christians, conservative and liberal Christians have rallied from city to city to establish their own self-righteous identities before an increasingly corrupt and secularized world.

Was it God's righteousness in Christ we were fighting for or our own righteousness in the flesh as evangelical Christians before an obvious unrighteous secularism? Saul was acting out of all good intentions before God as evangelicals have as well. What have we lost by acting with all good intentions? With all good intentions, have we paved the way to hell by focusing on the way to the White House over the Way to heaven? Did we put all of our eggs in the presidential basket and forget about the resurrected Easter basket that we are so well-known for?

Moral Obedience - Moral obedience "under law" is not the Christian calling. All the law can do is continually point to our failure in being able to keep it [Romans 3:19-20]. And when we hold the Law up to an immoral world and then judge them by it, what have we accomplished? We have promoted only more disobedience and rebellion in the culture by our condemning self-righteous judgments in light of and "under law." By calling on sinners to do anything but repent and be changed through the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ by the Spirit of God, we capitulate all of our power as Christians to the self-righteousness of pride in those who obey Law in their flesh or the unrighteous failure of those who have no power to keep the Law without God's Spirit living within them.

Paul matured in Christ to see that no form of fleshly self-righteousness in culture would be "Christian" in its essence. Only what Christ does in and through us by His Spirit is truly of Christ. Any other identity in culture of any kind that is held up, exalted, magnified, and glorified in the righteousness of the flesh is truly the enemy of Jesus Christ in its application and in its results [Romans 3:25-28; Philippians 3:18-19]. Even if it is done "in Jesus name." The contemporary Church has found this out the hard way and God has delivered us over to a Christ-rejecting postmodern culture as we have self-righteously and moralistically exalted ourselves over it "under Law."

We must humble ourselves and divest ourselves of all fleshly righteousness "in Jesus name" so that not having a righteousness of our own, God can begin changing the culture through the sufferings of Christ endured by his godly ones who are seeking identity with the things above and not with the traditional, national, state, racial, religious, political or moral things of this earth.

To identify with anything in popular Christian or nonChristian culture other than dying to all fleshly confidences in order to rise in spiritual maturity by God's Spirit alone is to pursue a Christian identity in the flesh we have not yet counted as loss. This can include our identity with the most traditional forms and functions of the church in our religious heritage or our identity with the most trendy forms and functions in identity with popular culture. Both can be based on prideful confidences in the flesh.

For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things. For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Philippians 3:18-20

Cultivating a Healthy Christian Identity

A healthy Christian identity is not built on comparisons with others as we exalt ourselves in spiritual pride against another group [2 Corinthians 10:12]. This approach is the carnal root of all church schism, denominationalism, and fleshly division in the body of Christ. I am not saying that there should be no just divisions in the body based upon legitimate biblical and doctrinal differences. Even Jesus expected these proper divisions in light of the Word of God [Matthew 5:17-19]. I am saying that the majority of Christianity in America has built itself around fleshly differences based on spiritual pride - either differences between Christians-to-Christians or differences between Christians-to-nonChristians.

Poles Apart Does Not Equal One As Jesus and the Father Are One

Our lack of love for each other and for our enemies has been our undoing in terms of respect for the Christian faith in America. By these carnal identities in our flesh, we have proved ourselves not to be the disciples of Jesus Christ in the American mainstream [John 13:35]. American Christians have spent, or should I say "wasted," so much time trying to maintain our coolness of place in the culture, that we have dissed the innovative hearts of a younger generation by our crusty oldness and we have dissed the wisdom of our elders by our youthful arrogance.

By not taking what our Bible teaches about the realities of a fleshly Christianity compared to a truly spiritual Christianity born by the Spirit in real time and space seriously, we have been seduced by the devil to a carnal pride among us that has deceived us into becoming poles apart from each other either in our own forms of self-righteous legalism or in our own forms of unrighteous liberalism in our flesh. And both these poles of carnal righteousness kill the spirit of God's righteousness revealed in Christ [Romans 10:13; Galatians 2:21].

Whoa, Nelly!

When the popular culture sees Christians coming down off their high horses in a spirit of humility and gentleness like the Savior we claim we are becoming like by faith [Matthew 11:27-30], then and only then will the power of evangelism return to America and the concept of a quickening revival that is not staged, propped up by the flesh, and administered like a dose of methamphetamine shot in the arm of a dead body, be possible.

When fundamental/evangelicals stop fighting for "our place in society" and stop trying to "take back America," as if we ever owned it or had some special right to it in the first place, then our cultural influence will return. By humbly passing through this world with influence on our way to our real home in heaven, then God will begin convicting the unbeliever in the American culture by His Spirit alone and hearts will be awakened to Christ by a conviction of His righteousness that will cause men to fall on their knees before a holy and righteous God by faith. People do not want to worship a self-righteous church in love with itself and its American religious heritage. I don't either. Do you?

I love and appreciate the greatness of the Christian heritage all the way back to its beginnings. But I worship a God much greater than our American or Western heritage of believers with its traditions and trends to identify us. God is our defense in culture as we live out a godly faith before men from place to place. This is much more powerful than making the weapons of our fleshly identities in culture the power brokers for our sense of justifiable existence as Christians, that is, Christ followers.

Gary Hinchman

BGEA Is All About Jesus