Tim Keller says that today’s global city centers are complex salad bowls of all worldviews. How should today’s pastors respond to the challenge of engaging culture and proclaiming the gospel as the key to transformation and joy when other modern worldviews are competing for attention?

Dr. Keller has written a 20-page paper called Our New Global Culture: Ministry in Urban Centers. This paper surveys the rise of global cities, the culture and dominant worldviews within these cities, and a framework for ministering in them. You should check it out if you want to do missional ministry in the city.

• Read it here.

Gospel-Centered Discipleship

In this book, Jonathan Dodson calls us to fight the good fight of faith in the strength of the gospel. Read a free chapter and get the book here.

This post is a follow-up to 5 Big Issues Facing the Western Church.

1. The local church has to support culture-making.

Most of the young evangelicals interested in integrating their faith with film-making, journalism, corporate finance, etc, are getting their support and mentoring from informal networks or para-church groups. Michael Lindsay's book Faith in the Halls of Power shows that many Christians in places of influence in the culture are alienated from the church, because they get, at best, no church support for living their faith out in the public spheres, and, at worst, opposition.

At the theological level, the church needs to gain more consensus on how the church and Christian faith relate to culture. There is still a lot of conflict between those who want to disciple Christians for public life, and those who think all "engagement of culture" ultimately leads to compromise and distraction from the preaching of the gospel. What makes this debate difficult is that both sides make good points and have good arguments.

At the practical level, even the churches that give lip-service to the importance of integrating faith and work do very little to actually equip people to do so. Seminary only trained us ministers to disciple people by pulling them more out of the world and inside the walls and ministries of the church. So how does a church actually help its members in this area? Leaders who want to get started should look at Redeemer's Center for Faith and Work.

2. We need a renewal of apologetics.

There is a lot of resistance right now among younger evangelical leaders toward apologetics. We are told we don't need arguments any more because people aren't rational. We need loving community instead. But I think this is short-sighted for two reasons...
(Click here to keep reading)

1. The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S.

In an interview, sociologist Peter Berger observed that in the U.S. evangelicals are shifting from being largely a blue-collar constituency to becoming a college educated population.

His question is, will Christians going into the arts, business, government, the media, and film

• assimilate to the existing baseline cultural narratives so they become in their views and values the same as other secular professionals and elites?
• seal off and privatize their faith from their work so that, effectively, they do not do their work in any distinctive way?
• or will they do enough new Christian 'culture-making' in their fields to change things?

2. The rise of Islam

How do Christians relate to Muslims when we live side by side in the same society? The record in places like Africa and the Middle East is not encouraging! This is more of an issue for the Western church in Europe than in the U.S., but it is going to be a growing concern in America as well.

How can Christians be at the very same time a) good neighbors, seeking their good whether they convert or not, and still b) attractively and effectively invite Muslims to consider the gospel?

3. The new non-Western Global Christianity

The demographic center of Christian gravity has already shifted from the West to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The rising urban churches of China may be particularly influential in the future. But the West still has the educational institutions, the money, and a great deal of power.

What should the relationship of the older Western churches be to the new non-Western church? How can we use our assets to serve them in ways that are not paternalistic? How can we learn from them in more than perfunctory ways?

4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel

The basic concepts of the gospel—sin, guilt and accountability before God, the sacrifice of the cross, human nature, afterlife—are becoming culturally strange in the West for the first time in 1500 years. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, it is time now to 'think like a missionary'—to formulate ways of communicating the gospel that both confront and engage our increasingly non-Christian Western culture.

How do we make the gospel culturally accessible without compromising it? How can we communicate it and live it in a way that is comprehensible to people who lack the basic 'mental furniture' to even understand the essential truths of the Bible?

5. The end of prosperity?

With the economic meltdown, the question is, will housing values, endowments, profits, salaries, and investments go back to growing at the same rates as they have for the last twenty-five years, or will growth be relatively flat for many years to come? If so, how does the Western church, which has become habituated to giving out of fast-increasing assets, adjust in the way it carries out ministry? For example, American ministry is now highly professionalized—church staffs are far larger than they were two generations ago, when a church of 1,000 was only expected to have, perhaps, two pastors and a couple of other part-time staff. Today such a church would have probably eight to ten full-time staff members.

Also, how should the stewardship message adjust? If discretionary assets are one-half of what they were, more risky, sacrificial giving will be necessary to do even less ministry than we have been doing.

On top of this, if we experience even one significant act of nuclear or bio-terrorism in the U.S. or Europe, we may have to throw out all the basic assumptions about social and economic progress we have been working off for the last 65 years. In the first half of the 20th century, we had two World Wars and a Depression. Is the church ready for that? How could it be? What does that mean?

Copyright © 2010 by Tim Keller. Used by permission.
Check out more content from Dr. Keller at Redeemer City to City.

Resurgence Literature

Re:Lit is a ministry of Resurgence. There you will find a growing line of books to help guide the resurgence of the new reformed. Find out more.