Part 6: “Story Telling” (“Word Pictures”) Can Be an Effective Evangelism in Today’s Postmodern World—and Here’s Why“
Christians have always had the challenge of communicating the Gospel to succeeding generations in a relevant and compelling way. Cultures are not static. They are living organisms that constantly undergo dynamic change. No time in history has Western culture undergone such radical changes as it has in my generation. The world of the latter half of the 20th century was far different in ethics, religion, and social behaviors, from the world of the early 21st century.
For centuries, Western culture viewed truth as objectively true, adhering to the laws of logic, and attainable. Today, Western culture is rapidly abandoning this traditional “modernist” view of reality. Instead, it is moving toward a postmodern view of reality where truth is relativistic, subjective, and unattainable. Why? Because absolute truth no longer exists in most areas of knowledge—so they say.
Communicating the Gospel or apologetics as a set of propositional statements of truth (facts that can be checked out and verified; truth that applies to everyone) is becoming increasingly ineffective with postmodernists. Past generations of evangelists based their apologetic tactics primarily on Enlightenment thinking. They used logic and the scientific method to verify truth—conclusions based on a preponderance of evidence and rational thinking. But today’s generation has not been raised in a modernist culture and often rejects reason and objectivity in favor of feelings and experiences. Communicating the Gospel with postmodernists will often require an additional approach.
Today, many evangelists suggest that Christians include storytelling (what I call “word pictures”) to illustrate and perhaps even defend Christian truth claims. As British evangelist Nick Pollard put it:
“[W]e can (and must) work within the methodology of postmodernism if we really are going to reach people in this culture. Two major characteristics of postmodernism are of particular importance to us in evangelism: (1) the emphasis on questioning and (2) the displacement of propositional truth in favor of stories. If we are to be effective within this postmodern culture, then, our evangelism must involve the appropriate use of questions and stories. This is not actually anything new; it is the way in which Jesus taught. He made use of questions, often answering one question with another. And he told the greatest stories of all time.” (Evangelism Made Slightly Less Difficult; How to Interest People Who Aren’t Interested)
Next Week’s blog will explain this concept further, along with a description and example of “word pictures.”