How do we share the gospel in a post-Christian culture?

As our culture has increasingly become post-Christian (a culture where the Christian faith and worldview no longer has a dominant influence in society), how does our approach to sharing the gospel need to change? Dhati Lewis, pastor of Blueprint Church in Atlanta GA, offers his insights in this video.

An edited transcript follows.

Many Ways to Present the Gospel

If you, like me, when you became a believer, there were so many different people who came at you with the lots of different gospel presentations. Lots of things, whether it’s the four spiritual laws, whether it’s the bridge, whether it’s the Three Circles that we use at Send Network.

There’s all these presentation, there’s all these things. But it’s like you feel like none of them are working, you know, especially in this kind of postmodern world that we’re living in; postmodern generation. And one of the things that I like to think about when we when we talk about the gospel, I really think it’s that the problem is that our version of the gospel is a very truncated version, a very a minimalist understanding of the gospel.

The Danger of a Minimalist Understanding of the Gospel

Most of our gospel presentation are focused in on one area. We identify with spiritual brokenness, right, and I think that’s the thing that we need to recognize as the core problem. There’s this spiritual poverty, this spiritual brokenness that we have between us in our maker. And I don’t want to kind of diminish or compromise that at all. But one of these that we must understand is that the gospel is the solution to spiritual brokenness, but the gospel is also a spiritual solution to other types of brokenness, both personal and systemic brokenness that we have in our day.

So when we think about the gospel, especially in a postmodern world with people and millennials and others are thinking about more than just simply kind of where they’re going to go when they die. They also are thinking about their emotional brokenness. They’re also thinking about their economic brokenness. They’re thinking about the social brokenness. They’re thinking about all of these different things that are broken both as individually and systemically that keep perpetuating. And unless we, as believers, start to understand how to address some of these broken areas holistically, we’re going to continue to lose this kind of postmodern generation.

Showing God’s Plan to Redeem Us Holistically

But the reality is that God has given us a tool. He’s given us ways to address and to identify, and so this is why with the three circles that we use, we talk about, we start with God’s original design. And as we see God’s original design, we recognize that because of sin we live in brokenness. The problem is that because of the squiggly line that comes out of that brokenness is spiritual.

But it’s also emotional, it’s economic and its social. And it kind of holistically needs to be addressed. So what we need to begin to look at it is, what does repentance and believing in the gospel—how does that address these areas of brokenness? Before we go, repentance, at the very foundation, is from the Greek word, “metanoia.” What that means is that it means to change. We need to change the way we see brokenness and it’s brokenness in all those areas, and then we need to repent, and then we believe the gospel: the person and work of Jesus. Of how He was in person who taught about the kingdom of God, preached a message of repentance, but he was holistically healing people as well as he was doing it. And so when we’re going to talk about ministering to a postmodern generation, it is important for us to recover and pursue God’s holistic design for spiritual, emotional, economic, and social brokenness in our day.

Aaron Armstrong

Aaron Armstrong is the Brand Manager of The Gospel Project, and the author of several books including Epic: The Story that Changed the World, Awaiting a Savior, and the screenwriter of the documentary Luther: the Life and Legacy of the German Reformer. Follow him on Twitter.

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