One of the emerging church’s foremost figures, US evangelist Brian Mclaren, challenged the Lambeth Conference earlier this week to speak the Gospel into the world’s ever-changing cultures.
Mclaren said he had come to the Lambeth Conference to speak to the more than 600 bishops and their spouses “on behalf of the people who never show up in your church, … who are never part of your community, the multitude of people who have been created in the image of God, but who have never known the redeeming of the Spirit of God through the Good News of Jesus Christ”.
He argued that religion had “orphaned” emerging culture such as materialism and technological development, and failed to answer questions raised by the “hurricane of change” in the modern world.
Mclaren went on to present his view of evangelism in what he defined as the pre-modern, modern and emerging worlds. He said that evangelism in parts of the world that are experiencing a shift from pre-modern to modern may seem “effortless”, but churches in the modern world are “static and declining” and “evangelism is hard to come by”.
“You might say that evangelism is almost non-existent because the Christian faith is, to be very frank, almost non-existent,” he told the audience, gathered at the University of Kent, in Canterbury.
Mclaren, who was previously voted one of Time magazine’s top 25 most influential evangelicals, also told the bishops that they needed to ditch “internal institutional maintenance” and focus instead on the “outward mission” of making disciples among all people. That, he said, was “our only hope of saving the church from division, diversion, implosion, irrelevance and triviality”.
Mclaren remained positive about the “wonderful” and “creative” ways that Anglicans are making disciples around the world, including the Church of England’s Fresh Expressions initiative to develop new ways of being church.
