Essentials For Our Millennium    pt 4,       By  Carl McMurray

 

    In this series of articles we are considering the kind of world that we live in today and I am operating on the premise that although human nature changes very little, the environment that shapes our attitudes and responses has changed a great deal.  We are no longer living in our grandparents world. We may not even be living in the world our parents grew up in.  How shall we communicate with the 21st century unbeliever then?  Well, that is part of the point of this installment in this series.

 

   You see, we live in an informed world.  Without even thinking about it, I have access to the weather reports in N. Alabama where my parents are along with the latest report from Chicago where my daughter lives Smyrna, TN, where my son and his wife live.  Depending on what home page you mark in your PC or which “widget” your Mac has on it’s desktop, they can listed alongside the Anderson weather and over the top ten movies playing as soon as you turn your computer on.  This is in addition to the top local headlines, stock market figures, international news, etc. We have instant access to more worldwide information than we can effectively process.  The result is that we know more and care less about events than any people in history!

 

   Another effect of the above technology is that people have developed a desire for current knowledge.  We want to know what’s happening now, not yesterday.  We want live pictures of hostage situations in our own towns and bombs falling on the other side of the world.  What does this mean to the church and how will it impact our presentation of the gospel?

 

   Mainly, it means that we must be “informed” also.  We must know more about the music people are listening to, the books they are reading, and the latest fake doctrine blowing across the land.  How else can we be “all things to all men?” It also means that we must be aware of new communication tools and methods that people are using and becoming accustomed to.  The days of knocking doors and offering to show a filmstrip consisting of slides and a cassette are gone. These things have been replaced with computers, media-projectors, DVDs and downloadable MP3 recordings.

 

            We can cry about expenses and what worked in the fifties all we want, but if we are going to present the gospel to an informed world we are going to have to be informed ourselves.