Connect with changing society

Posted: 9/02/05

Connect with changing society

By Jocelyn Delgado

Communications Intern

DALLAS–The key to effective evangelism is knowing what God is doing so Christians can discern it and become part of it, popular author Leonard Sweet told the Urban Training Institute of the Southwest.

Sweet described emergent cultures, focusing on how Christians can connect with an ever-changing society by opening up to systematic, simultaneous and symbolic ways of thinking.

People are trained to make evaluations based on their parts, but in an urban society, churches need to think systematically and look at the big picture, he said.

“Everything we touch, we basically turn into toasters,” Sweet said, describing the mechanical, industrial approach to understanding reality.

Christians need to recapture the biblical narrative and move beyond an analytical approach that has “toasterized” the Scripture by reducing it to nuts and bolts.

“The Bible wasn't written in verses; it was written in stories,” he said. In the toaster world, simultaneity was a contradiction, Sweet said. “We are living in a world of simultaneity, where opposite things are happening at the same time, and they are not contradictory.”

The more people see pictures of the Grand Canyon online, the more they want to go bungee jump it, Sweet said. This is a culture of extremes.

As technology advances, people are exposed to the world through a computer screen.

The biggest challenges churches face is bringing extremes together without losing their identity, he said.

Sweet suggested participating in programs such as Habitat for Humanity, which connects people who are well-housed with people who are homeless or living in inadequate housing. The poor leave the experience with a new home, and the more affluent gain a better understanding of how other people live.

“In many ways, the Christian spirituality is built for this kind of culture that we're going into,” Sweet said, pointing out the Bible says to love God with all your heart, mind and soul.

Because the church worships the creator, members should be bursting with creativity, but they're not, he asserted. People outside of the church are creating music and films to reach people.

When Bach wrote his sonata, the church called it saloon music, and now the church loves it, Sweet said.

“The time to hear the Spirit speaking through the sonata is not when the culture no longer exists. … It's to hear the sounds speaking when they're going off,” he said.