Why Chasing Cultural Trends Is Killing Your Church’s Mission
By Harold L. Senkbeil and Lucas V. Woodford
As Western Christianity continues to decline, two veteran pastors argue that the church’s real problem isn’t irrelevance but that we stopped trusting in God’s Word to do what he promises it will do.
Christians in the West stand at an uneasy crossroads.
Christendom has ended. The church has lost her long-privileged place in society. Her boom years are over. The Christian morality that once guided the West is now but a vestige, seen as not only quaint and antiquated but inimical to human flourishing. The challenge is daunting.
Wave after wave of innovative approaches were introduced in the twentieth century to grow the church. Many of these outmoded evangelistic efforts were labeled as “contextualization”—the idea that if the church wants to effectively reach out, it must contextualize its message so people find it familiar and attractive. In this approach, human culture sets the agenda for the word.
Still the church continues to decline precipitously while the culture breeds an increasingly permissive society, not bound to any divinely established order. Contextualizing the gospel for successful evangelism in a secularized world of burgeoning paganism is a recipe for spiritual disaster. Shaping our missional efforts according to cultural trends only puts an expiration date on the church.
Faithful Mission in a Shifting Culture
We propose an entirely different model—one rooted in the Bible itself. The book of Acts is a practical guide to mission in every generation. It shows how the first Christians were driven not by their cultural context but by the word of Christ to change the hearts and lives of people living very much in the world, yet not of it. They weren’t seeking to convert cultures but people who lived in various cultures.
Faithful mission in a chaotic world builds on this New Testament template; people in every context—every nation, tribe, and language—should be acculturated by the word of Christ. For two millennia Christians have held that the church cultivates its own transcendent culture in a rapidly shifting social context—the culture of the word. The field is the world. The seed is the word. The word grows and cultivates its own unique culture. You could put it this way: as the word is sown, the culture is grown.
It’s time to reclaim that approach for the present uncertain moment.
The vitality and growth of Christ’s church is not rooted in the shifting sands of cultural trends but the living and abiding word of God. The book of Acts provides a blueprint for confident mission in a shifting culture. The story of the growth of the church in that antagonistic setting is the story of the word of God in action. In fact, not once but three times in Acts we find explicit references to the growth of God’s word (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20).
All too often human ingenuity leads to something other than a culture of the word. While novelty may be well-intentioned, it too often robs Christ’s mission of the vitality he seeks to provide by his clear word. That word remains powerful enough to overcome opposition of all sorts, including the downtrend of the Western church.
Leading a Church Without Panic or Paralysis
The decline of the church in the West has caused a lot of hand-wringing. It manifests in two extreme reactions: anxiety and panic or immobilization and inaction. Trusting the power of the word gives us wisdom to act strategically and urgently given the facts and avoid unnecessary anxiety and panic, which leads to bad decisions. Like walking on a log over a river, we must keep our balance or we will fall off either into panic or inaction. These attitudes betray a distrust in God’s word, which declares the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ’s church (Matt 16:18), and it instructs the church and her pastors to “preach the word” and to “be ready in season and out of season” (2 Tim 4:2).
Faith requires we act with urgency and decisiveness in the face of adversity. Like the word itself, faith is busy and active. It’s always in motion, clinging to Christ and loving others. A culture of the word instills in us the confidence to maintain a nonanxious presence as we navigate the challenges of our day. To develop the culture of the word in the church requires that the word be regularly sown in her midst.
That’s why our mantra is as the word is sown, the culture is grown.
This article has been adapted from Harold L. Senkbeil and Lucas V. Woodford’s book The Culture of God’s Word: Faithful Ministry in a Post-Christian Society, published by Lexham Press. In this book, they reclaim the biblical approach to transformation and social witness by returning to the apostles’ own example in the book of Acts.
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Harold L. Senkbeil is executive director emeritus of DOXOLOGY: The Lutheran Center for Spiritual Care and author of the award-winning titles The Care of Souls, Christ and Calamity, and Dying to Live.
Lucas V. Woodford is president of the Minnesota South District of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and associate pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Farmington, Minnesota. With Harold L. Senkbeil, he is the coauthor of Pastoral Leadership: For the Care of Souls.
