The secularized West is experiencing a growing disaffection with both militant atheism and traditional Christian faith. The Vatican recently addressed this issue in a study published by the Pontifical Council for Culture. It is more than interesting to me to see how this document begins to address this problem. It suggests that any effective pastoral strategy must begin with seeing “the importance of witnessing the beauty of being a person loved by God.”
This document, titled “The Christian Faith at the Dawn of the New Millennium and the Challenge of Unbelief and Religious Indifference” draws several key conclusions, besides the one stated above, that are worth thinking about by all Christians in the West. These conclusions are:
- The church needs “To renew Christian apology to give an account with gentleness and respect of the hope that animates us (1 Peter 3:15).”
- We must “Reach ‘homo urbanus’ (urban man) through public presence in the debates of society and put the gospel in contact with the forces that shape culture.”
- There is an “urgency of learning to think, from school to university, and to have the courage to react, faced with the tacit acceptation of a dominant culture often marked by unbelief and religious indifference by a new and joyous proposal of Christian culture.”
- We should “show to the nonbelievers, indifferent to the question of God but open to human values, that to be truly human, is to be religious, that man finds the fullness of his humanity in Christ, true God and true man, and that Christianity is a good news for all men and women in all cultures.”
For all who take the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20), and the cultural commission (Genesis 1:28), seriously these are solid points worthy of much deeper thought and corporate application to the growing body of Western missiological material that has opened a fresh spring for the global church.
John H. Armstrong is founder and director of ACT 3, a ministry aimed at "encouraging the church, through its leadership, to pursue doctrinal and ethical reformation and to foster spiritual awakening."
