In one of my previous posts “‘No Religion’ officially overtakes Christianity in New Zealand Census.” I mentioned that we as the church (as The Salvation Army) need to reconnect with our community, to re-engage with society within New Zealand. And that this emphasis on ‘Religion‘ (dare I say concern around our ‘Spirituality‘) presents us with a wonderful opportunity, but the church has to re-engage in very different ways and communicate to our communities in a way that they can comprehend the importance of God in our Society.
This is not just a New Zealand issue it is something that the church in Western Europe has been struggling with for a number of decades and statements such as ‘The Church is dead‘ have been bandied around for years. Although in this environment Jesus has remained a focal point that people still seek out, God or at least our understanding of a Higher Power is something that people are still trying to comprehend. And the appreciation of church leaders such as the Pope has increased as he tackles some huge issues within the Catholic Church.
In a recent article by Carey Nieuwhof “How to Reach Unchurched People Who Don’t Think That They Need God” he shares his concerns about the number of people in Canada who profess ‘no religion’ as it is now at 24%, up from 16.5% a decade earlier.
He goes on to say that “That’s a massive shift in a mere ten years. As I reflect on it all, I’m left with this growing realization. People are learning to live comfortably without God.”
“Want to see where this might be heading? Go to Western Europe, where people have very comfortable lives and only a splinter regularly attend church. They just don’t see their need for God. Rather than being met with a wall of hostility, Christians are mostly being met with a wall of indifference and perceived irrelevance.”
I wonder if we in the church have circumnavigated this very train of thought, or by not confronting it, we have actually fed into ‘this wall of indifference and perceived irrelevance‘ when we rarely if ever praise, glorify, honour and even worship (in the true sense of the word) our Father in heaven for his part in our lives. We pat ourselves on the back for all the works that we have done with very little, if any, recognition of God, and our need of Him to make certain things come to pass so that we can do the works of His hands. After-all we are his hands and feet are we not?
All too often we sing the songs of worship and thank each other (or not as the case may be) for contributing to the weekly service, and walk through the doors of His sanctuaries (all around the globe) to the outside world and very quickly forget what we have supposedly learnt from the word of God and go to our everyday lives barely even allowing God a look-in to our world. We rely on our own strength and rarely if ever discuss the important things of life with Him, let alone our Christian brothers and sisters, who are apparently there to help encourage us and build us up in this life, so that we can be all that He would have us be.
Very rarely do we point those that we come across towards a loving God who wants nothing more than to have a personal relationship with them, and use us as His people to not only impact the world but make a real difference in the lives of anyone who would come to the Father.
Carey goes on to say: “I believe that means a massive shift in attitude and approach for those of us in leadership in the local church. Much of the church’s outreach over the last 60 years has been based on a few assumptions that are less and less true every year:
- Young adults will return to church when they have kids.
- People will turn to God when they hit a crisis.
- Most people will come back to what they left when they were young.
- When people have spiritual needs, they will look to the church to fulfill them.
Instead, here’s what I see as increasingly true among unchurched people who are learning to live comfortably without God:
- Affluence (even many of our poor are affluent from a global perspective) has left people with a sense they have all they need to face life.
- People don’t always turn to God in crisis; they honestly don’t think the church can help.
- You can only come back to something you knew; when you are on your second or third generation of ‘unchurch’, there is nothing to come back to for many people.
- Personalised, google-able spirituality doesn’t demand the assistance of anyone or anything else.
So how do you reach a growing number of people who are learning to live comfortably without God?”
We’ll explore this theme and how we can reconnect with our communities over the coming months and as we do maybe we can each work out what it’s going to take for us to rethink our cultural assumptions as we move into this next era.
If you haven’t checked out the 2018 Faith and Belief in New Zealand report, commissioned by the Wilberforce Foundation you can view it here.
The life and times of Perry... 