Podcast: How Has Evangelism Changed in the Post-Christian West? (David Dockery)

November 25, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How Has Evangelism Changed in the Post-Christian West?

In this episode, Dr. David Dockery talks about the new challenges that shifting norms and rapid cultural changes present to young Christians and how we should seek to engage unbelievers in the post-Christian West.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:00 - As Goes the University, So Goes the Culture

Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

David Dockery
It’s a joy to be with you, Matt. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Matt Tully
I think it goes without saying that we’re living through a period of time of really incredible cultural change that’s related to our political division and situation, global realities and instability around the world, economic challenges, and then a whole slew of cultural ideas and norms and sensibilities that have really changed a lot over the past couple of decades. And all of that stuff is even heightened by the technology that we all have, even in our pockets now, where it seems like change just comes faster and faster all the time. And I think all of that change can sometimes make the task of evangelism and apologetics today feel even more intimidating than maybe they already typically do and have in past generations, especially for the average Christian who’s trying to keep up. Can you resonate with that sense of, Wow, things are changing fast, and I don’t always know how to think about that?

David Dockery
I think the twenty-first century has been characterized by rapid change. I think if we reflect on the fact that we’re now a quarter of the way through this century, it feels like there’s been more change in the first twenty to twenty-five years than we saw in the whole last half of the twentieth century, if not even more so. And a lot of it is driven by technology. A lot of it’s driven by the global aspect of the world in which we live now. It feels so different to most of us, I think. The world that we took for granted hardly exists anymore, and so we want to try to contextualize the responsibility of evangelism that belongs to those who are followers of Christ for this world in which we live.

Matt Tully
In a little bit we’re going to talk about some of the unique apologetic and evangelistic challenges that face the church today. But before we do that, I want to start out by talking about what you mentioned there—students in higher ed—the world that you’ve spent most of your career working in. And it’s often said that as goes the university, so goes the culture. It’s a sentiment that I think gets at the unique cultural power that centers of learning often have in our society. Sometimes ideas that are first incubated on a college campus, even ideas that seem extreme initially, can oftentimes spread out of that campus and become more mainstream in the broader culture. Just to kind of start us off, have you seen that to be true? Is that just a boogeyman that is often talked about, or is that actually happening?

David Dockery
No, I think that’s reality. I think things that were almost silent and certainly quiet, minority conversations taking place on college campuses fifty to seventy-five years ago are more dominant things today. Many of the issues that we deal with regarding life, human sexuality, understanding of freedom, individual emphases versus community—all of those kinds of things were gelling and bubbling up if you go back to the 50s and 60s in the middle of the twentieth century. All of that would change the way we think about life, culture, relationships, engagement. We’ve had to reflect on those things deeply, I think. It is true that what happens on a college campus is pretty much downstream from what happens later on in culture. Things are birthed and then you see them. And that’s true whether it’s a public institution or a private institution, a more secular institution or a church-related or Christian institution. You can say that as true, as a generality, that there are different initiatives flowing out of those things, and sometimes they come together to clash and sometimes they become the things that are soon taken for granted as those college students breathe that air. And then by the time they’re forty-years-old, that becomes the norm for their particular context.

Matt Tully
So why do you think it is that these higher educational institutions, these centers of learning, have such an influential power over our culture?

David Dockery
They’ve been that way for decades, if not centuries. What we know as the modern university goes back to the twelfth century and the founding of the medieval universities in which the very best and brightest—a very elite group of people—were able to come, almost all of them connected to the church. And we still know of some of these institutions today—Oxford, Cambridge, University of Paris. Some of these kind of institutions had dominating influence because of the professors who were there—their brilliance—and the quality of students who could come. And then they would go and influence the church, society, and culture of their day. And then with these centers of learning came publication opportunities, which echoed this beyond the campus and gave others opportunity to read and think and reflect on what was going on. And so the echo effect through the publications plus students multiplying themselves, you began to see changes. What we know as the Protestant Reformation, which we celebrate on October 31st every year, took place at the University of Wittenberg. We often talk about Luther nailing the Ninety-Five Theses on the church house door, but he was a university professor at the time that he did that, and those conversations that led to that were swirling, not in the church so much but in the university. And then it was through the university, through Luther and Melanchthon, that the ideas of the Reformation began to spread. And so both in society and in the church this has been the case. To talk about it more in Christian terms, there’s never been a case where the gospel has been extended and churches have been planted and the gospel has been able to be saturated into a context and then passed on to the next generation without some kind of educational entity following it. If you follow even the early modern missionaries—William Carey, Adoniram Judson—shortly after they were there, they planted schools where they were in addition to churches. When the Puritans and Pilgrims came to this country, they began to start schools. And so you have Harvard in 1636 and Yale in 1701, and it continued to grow thereafter. So schools have been vitally important for educating the next generation and preparing them not only for what is happening now but preparing them for what is forthcoming. Colleges and universities tend to live twenty years ahead of everyone else, trying to prepare those students for what’s coming down the road. And that has only multiplied and accelerated and been exacerbated by some of the things we mentioned earlier—technology, globalization, and the amazing way that knowledge is now available. Information is so widely available to people.

Matt Tully
It can be so easy in these conversations about the impact of higher ed on our culture to think in more recent terms. We can think of a lot of, at least to theologically conservative Christians, a lot of negative examples, the negative impact that higher ed has had on our culture. But as you pointed out there, if you go back a little further, we see just the incredible connection between the spread of Christianity and the spread of distinctly Christian worldview ideas with education and schools and seminaries. Do you think that’s still happening today? You’re the president of a seminary. You’ve been the president of another seminary before that. Do you think that Christian schools are having a culture-shaping influence today?

David Dockery
I think they are having an influence on the Christian culture. I wish we were having a greater influence beyond that. I think because of the rapid change of the past decades, to which we keep referring, I think many of us find ourselves—or hear of others or watch and observe—more of a defensive posture sometimes. This is also a New Testament idea of guarding the gospel. It’s echoed many times in Paul, particularly in the pastoral epistles of guarding that which has been entrusted to us. And so because we see the rise of secularization, 30 percent or more of people in North America now claiming to be religiously unaffiliated, or Nones, as they sometimes are called by the sociologists. We realize how different those statistics are from a Gallup poll of 1965. And so I think we find ourselves still influencing the church, but somewhat in a defensive posture. And so even one of the purposes of the publication of Confident Witness is to encourage those students to be salt and light and take that gospel witness into that culture, and to realize that it is our responsibility to do so generation after generation.

11:13 - How Does Culture Today View Christianity?

Matt Tully
In the book, two of your coauthors, Jim Denison and Mark Legg, refer to the era when Billy Graham, for example, was doing all these revival crusades. They say that that era, that effort, represents “a golden age of Spirit-led opportunity.” It was a time when the general public thought very highly of the Bible. They thought highly of Christians, generally. They thought highly of the church even. That’s something that seems amazing to us, I think, in our day today. And although there were obviously lots of problems in culture and society at that time, as there always are, it seems like in general American culture was more amenable to the claims of Christianity than it is now. How would you summarize the difference between that past generation, when it comes to how the culture viewed Christianity, and how the culture views us today?

David Dockery
I think the entire cultural context was shaped by the Judeo-Christian view. What the sociologist Peter Berger used to call the canopy that kind of rested over culture. But then his writings were always filled with this idea that the sacred canopy is disappearing, and what do we do with what he called increasing trends. He always stressed three things: the move toward secularization, privatization, and pluralization. And so where religion or Christianity continued to have staying power, it still tended to be done toward privatization. And so what became a public affirmation or a public acceptance soon became something very private and privatized. Robert Putnam calls it “bowling alone”—that move toward privatization. And so we keep those things to ourselves and don’t necessarily share them with others. And so I think that in the combination of these various trends, there’s always been some sector, some issue, some movement that has seemed to be in conflict with the church and with the gospel. Once you get past Pentecost in the book of Acts, you begin seeing that. And Peter and John are in big trouble by the time you get to Acts 4. So it didn’t take very long for that opposition to come. But what feels different today is that it’s not one thing; it’s this multiple, multi-faceted combination of things coming from seemingly every direction. And that makes it feel very different, I think, for Christians, particularly younger Christians—high school, college age, young adults. They did not know and did not experience the "golden years" of the Billy Graham era, in which there was at least respect for and appreciation for. In the late 1940s, Mr. Graham goes to Los Angeles, and The Los Angeles Times covers that amazing crusade. And then less than a decade later, 1957, he goes to New York, and they pack out Madison Square Garden night after night after night, week after week after week. And everybody who’s anybody in the most significant city in the world—in New York City—wants to be at the Billy Graham Crusade. Whether they want to respond or not, whether they do, they want to say they have been. It was a cultural event to be a part of. Now it’s a cultural event to avoid, to not be seen with, and it certainly feels different for the generation coming along.

Matt Tully
It seems like there are two ditches for us as Christians today. On the one hand, we can act like and we can think that the cultural resistance that we sense when it comes to our faith is completely unprecedented, that all past generations were in a purely golden age with no issues before, no persecution, no resistance. And that’s obviously not true. As you said, every generation has had issues in the prevailing culture that were pushing against faithful Christianity. But it seems like there’s also the other danger of underestimating the significance. You mentioned young people today. Someone growing up as a young person in a biblically faithful church, in a home where they’re taught to respect what God’s word actually teaches, they could very easily start to feel that they’re at odds with the prevailing culture in almost every major area, and there really is no relief from feeling like they’re constantly at odds with the prevailing culture. I think that is probably a bit of a new dynamic that we need to understand and appreciate as we think about young people.

David Dockery
Yeah, and we have to help people not to fall into either side, because when you fall into either side, you tend to become reactionary to whatever comes next. And the church in a reactionary mode is rarely a good thing. We need to be responsive, but not reactionary, and we need to always be listening. Great theologians have said we need to have the Bible in one hand and they used to say the newspaper in another. No one reads the newspaper anymore, but maybe a computer screen or your phone or however you intake that kind of information so that you’re following it and exegeting Scripture and exegeting the culture at the same time to make sure you don’t overreact to either, and to make sure that we’re learning from the culture and not missing what’s going on, but make sure we’re seeing culture and interpreting culture through the Scriptures, not the other way around. Because then we began to devalue the authority of the Bible, and we lose our theological compass. And before long, we lose our life compass.

17:19 - Feelings over Facts, Opinions over Arguments

Matt Tully
Many people will say that we’re currently living in a culture that values feelings over facts and opinions over arguments, and maybe even personal stories over even the notion of objective truth. People often refer to our era as a post-truth era. But Christianity, as we know, is a religion that is at its core making very clear truth claims. Truth claims about God, claims about the world, claims about us as humans, as creatures. So how do we reach a culture and how do we start to approach a culture that has, in so many ways, abandoned the whole notion of objective truth?

David Dockery
I think that we learn from the apostle Paul in Acts 17 and begin with people where they are. And we recognize people do live in this experiential context, and that they, for the most part, are yearning to share that experience with others. Most people don’t enjoy the sense of individual isolation—the privatization gone to extreme. They want to live in community. And so I think what we offer is that the Christian faith creates this wonderful dynamic. We call it koinonia—fellowship. A sense of belonging is what I think people are looking for. And helping people find that sense of belonging through relationships with believers. So we have to develop relationships in new and fresh ways, be willing to open ourselves up to sharing our own journey and our own struggles and identify with these folks. So I think there are three big questions that people continue to wrestle with, and sometimes from generation to generation the order of these changes, but right now I think helping people find a sense of belonging tends to be the leading question. If you go back to the 1960s or 1970s, the question was more about who we are, more of an identity question, and trying to figure that issue out, which is also an important part of developing Christian worldview and understanding the big picture. That’s an important question, but I think it’s secondary to the belonging question. But helping people to get to one of those two questions—Where do I belong? How do I fit in? Who am I? How do I relate to this big world in which I find myself?—helps us get to the truth question. So we want to ultimately get to the truth question. We can’t ignore it, because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and to ignore the truth question is not to get to Christ. And so we want to get people ultimately to him, to point people to his wonderful message of salvation by grace through faith alone and the good news of the gospel that our sins can be forgiven and we can have a relationship with the Creator God. But we get to the truth question through the belonging question or through the identity question rather than going straight to the truth question, because people are usually not ready to hear it because we do live in this so-called post-truth world. But we cannot punt on that issue and think, Well, we’re in that kind of world, and so we won’t talk about those things. You soon aren’t talking about the gospel and are losing the very essence of the gospel. And whatever gospel you have is a different gospel than what we find in the New Testament itself. But I think we can always recognize we don’t have to get there first. Going through the relationship, belonging question, helping people struggle with the identity question—all of those are ways to get to Christ and to the truth question.

Matt Tully
And it stands out to me that those questions around identity and around belonging and purpose and meaning are things that Christianity does have answers for. The Bible does speak to those things. And so often maybe we can have too short of a time horizon in our mind as we think about the work of sharing the gospel, of building a relationship, and ultimately bringing someone along to the Lord. Another related question to that. It seems like in previous generations, maybe even not that long ago, when it came to apologetics and evangelism, we would often think in terms of rational arguments, of sharing evidence that supported things like the existence of God or the reliability of the Bible or the resurrection of Jesus. And so a big part of apologetics is making arguments and highlighting evidence. And yet today, again, it seems like our culture is, as you said, so focused on things like self-determination, on self-fulfillment, and even on just maximizing pleasure that people aren’t interested in arguments. People aren’t interested in evidence. What they really are interested in is the fact that we said, “No, you can’t have that kind of a relationship. No, you can’t do that kind of thing with your body.” And that right there is a huge stumbling block for them. So what advice would you give to Christians when it comes to navigating the different emphasis and the different preoccupations that exist today?

David Dockery
I think there’s a chapter in our book written by Hal Poe, who is a Crossway author in addition to his chapter in this volume; he wrote this three-volume biography on C. S. Lewis. He writes a chapter in our Confident Witness book on C. S. Lewis’s approach to apologetics. And what he describes for us is not an approach or the approach, but multiple approaches that Lewis took in various settings. Sometimes as the medieval professor at the university, and sometimes as the author of the kids stories, and sometimes as the voice of Christianity on the BBC in the middle of wartime. And so he looks at all of these various ways and avenues through which Lewis was able to tell the gospel story—always getting to the point of recognizing Jesus Christ as Lord, but getting there through different streets, different avenues, coming at it from different directions. And so I think our apologetics has to be more versatile, more flexible. Make sure we are answering questions that people are asking, not trying to answer questions from previous centuries or maybe even previous decades. The purpose of apologetics is to make a defense for Christianity and an explanation for Christianity, doing so with grace and respect for those with whom we encounter (1 Pet. 3:15). But we don’t want to be answering a question that is not the question of this day. We want to be trying to answer this question in this context. So I think it requires a new sense of learning to listen well, to, as I said, exegete the culture as well as to exegete the Scriptures. A book that was written a few years back on evangelism said, “How will they learn to hear the gospel unless we learn to listen?” And so I think we have to listen first, understand, and then go in the direction. Realize what hat we need to wear. It doesn’t mean that we’re duplicitous in any way. We’re not sharing something different; we’re sharing it in a different way for a different audience, a different context, and trying to answer the question that is being asked. So you have to listen for the question. I think sometimes it’s our responsibility to recognize that sometimes we’re called to be a thermostat and sometimes we’re called to be a thermometer. So there are times in which we need to be very clear and say, “This is what Scripture says. This is the Christian truth.” There are other times in which we need to measure where we are. The thermostat is set on 72, but the thermometer outside is measuring 47, and so we’ve got a 25 degree difference to make up to get from here to there. And so the dynamic in the conversation, the dynamic of the apologetic task is to be both a thermometer and a thermostat at the same time. We never want to give away the truthfulness of the gospel. We never want to set that aside. But I think getting there requires a deeper sensitivity, a deeper understanding, a greater willingness to listen and learn than ever before. So I think Christians in the twenty-first century need a new sense of humility. We’re not stepping back in any way. I hope we have greater courage and greater conviction than ever before. But we need to come with a sense of humility in that we are participants with those in whom we are trying to share the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Matt Tully
That’s such a good word and such a helpful metaphor of a thermostat versus a thermometer. Our task and apologetics is both. It’s both of those things. To proclaim boldly what the temperature should be—the truth—but also to be sensitive and just aware of what’s actually being thought about, what people are believing and understanding. And make sure we understand it correctly. I think sometimes it seems like we can jump to conclusions, perhaps, and even have previous generations’ worldviews in our mind and not maybe do the homework we need to do to understand the person sitting right in front of us.

David Dockery
I think we’re called to be the light of the world, to reflect Jesus, who is the light of the world, and we’re to be salt and light of the gospel. If you walk into a very dark room, and people are in a dark room, if you walk in with a candle or a small light, their eyes are attracted. It’s almost like a magnet. They come right to that light. But if you come in with a bright search light shining on them, they wince. They turn their head. They close their eyes. They’re not ready to receive that. And so I think we have to understand that the world is a dark place right now. Paul said it was in his day. In Philippians 2:14–16 he encourages the Philippians to be light in the midst of a dark and perverted generation. So we walk into that darkness, but we want to radiate the light of Christ in a way that draws them to the light, not repels them from it.

28:19 - Are You Optimistic About the Church’s Witness in the Future?

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question, as you think about the young people, the young men and women that you’re interacting with every single day, many of whom who will go on to be pastors and church leaders throughout our country and even around the world, are you optimistic or more pessimistic about the church’s witness and and the task of evangelism in the decades?

David Dockery
Contrary to some, I’m very hopeful. I hope it’s not naive. I don’t think it is. It’s not Pollyannish. I think it’s a recognition that the Christians coming along—that eighteen to twenty-nine-year-old group. They’re still in a very formative stage, but they’re going to be the leaders of the middle of this twenty-first century, and they recognize the world in which they live perhaps better than we do. And they come with a greater sense of understanding that you cannot assume or presume upon the Christian faith, and that it requires a renewed sense of conviction and courage to live out their faith well and faithfully and effectively. But they also come with an idea that Christian faith requires both verbal witness and a winsome lifestyle. And so they want to combine those things. I think that my generation, and I recognize I’m getting old, but I think my generation tended to think we could do just the verbal witness, and then there’s kind of a reaction to that—they will see our good works, they’ll be attracted to us, and they’ll figure out the gospel somehow.

Matt Tully
Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words. That sentiment.

David Dockery
Yeah, that famous false statement from St. Francis. But I think this generation understands the necessity to walk and talk together. I’m very hopeful. I love being around students. I’ve been privileged to be a part of Christian higher education now for more than four decades, and I love the students. But I think this generation of students has a cultural awareness and a conviction about the gospel that’s a cause for us not to lose heart at all, but to be hopeful for the next generation.

Matt Tully
That’s a good word, and we do pray towards that. Dr. Dockery, thank you so much for spending some time with us today and sharing about this hopeful vision for the future that you have.

David Dockery
Thank you. It’s a privilege to be a part of the Crossway family.

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