Initial Notes on Ministry in a Therapeutic Age

We don’t live in that sort of environment any longer. Most people don’t have a clear idea of what Christianity is. Just last week I was speaking with a friend who had been briefly attending a fairly large evangelical church in Lincoln. He was meeting with a young man from the church who had attended for seven years. The young man took to my friend as a kind of mentor and started asking him various questions. Amongst those questions was “How big a deal is Jesus in Christianity? Like, can I just pray to God directly or do I need to believe certain things about Jesus too?” That’s the level of Christian knowledge with someone who has been going regularly to a church for seven years. We are in a space now where people don’t know what Christianity is, they aren’t living in a world tacitly shaped by Christianity, and so they are having to find other stories and belief systems to structure their life. The therapeutic is one of those systems and it is not irrational or at all strange that it has become such.