[SheepDogTrials, Scottish Festival, 2008, JAVanDevender}
Tim Keller has published an excellent summary article on a major problem presented to the church by the so-called, perhaps mislabeled, "post-modern" society. You can read it HERE.
Fundamentally, the idea boils down to this: While the church can "meet folks where they are at" (pardon the abominable colloquial phrasing), the church must never be content to "leave them where they are at." Though this is so self-evidently true you wonder why it has to be even stated, unfortunately it is not widely practiced.
Too often our evangelistic efforts, whether immediate, individual and personal, or programmatic, corporate and distanced from the personal, are mostly content to find a common ground for approach. Hence we accede to the post-modern over-emphasis on the pragmatic and relational and seek to work within that construct to nudge people towards a Christian confession.
As Keller points out, though, even after success in this endeavor we leave them with the initial presuppositions in place. We leave them with the idea that any "faith" statement is a group feature and not universally binding. We leave them with the notion that the immediate and pragmatic is all that is really important and that abstracts and propositions cannot be motivational or even desirable. We leave them at the level of "ethic" and do not argue for a contrasting world view which is thoroughly at odds with most of what they take for granted. In other words we stop well short of "radical" confrontation.
This is nothing new. This is the exact same phenomenon that, in a different form, occurred in the enlightenment. A new "truth" principle arose which was oriented against and grew out of the post-Reformation abuse (30 years war) of Dogmatic Confessionalism. The Church did not rise to the challenge of refutation then but rather, as it is doing today, in large settled for accommodation. The goal was syncretism under the banner of "all truth is God's truth." The outcome was disaster. The same general outcome looms large on our horizon today. An entire generation, as with the enlightenment, is at risk and the battle for their minds is not going well.
Like the sheep dog at work in the photo above, there is a need for the guardians of the flock to "drive" the herd to the pastures where they can safely graze. It is not enough to discover, through outreach, the lost sheep that are forlornly bleating in the bushes, despairing of hope. Once discovered, they must be brought back to the fold where, with their fellows, they may prosper.
It is not enough to make converts, we must make disciples. The Great Commission does not just say "Go"... it says "Go and make disciples..."
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