How do you help people come to faith in Christ in a culture deeply but imperfectly suffused with Christian themes? How do you nurture genuine faith when everyone thinks they know what Christianity is, but actual knowledge and commitment are lacking? How do you educate people about Christianity when broad but shallow exposure to the faith domesticates it and makes people miss out on its soul-transforming power?
These are questions that I, as a minister in the post-Christian West, find myself asking all the time. Churches dot the landscape, if much less full than they once were. Many of our public holidays are Christian in origin. The vestiges of seventeen hundred years of public Christianity still survive in myriad ways: in invocations that begin legislative sessions, public deference toward clergy, church tax schemes, and, in a few places, legal establishment. Our society’s sense of right and wrong is shaped by Christian presuppositions that once shocked Roman antiquity. But this very ubiquity can inhibit real understanding of Christianity.
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