Wells on Postmodernity

Desiring God held their most recent conference "The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World" from September 29-October 1. Though I did not get to go to the conference, I have downloaded the messages (you can too.) and plan to offer a thought or two from each message.

If you are not familiar with David Wells (not that one, nor this one...but this one.), he's incredibly brilliant and has a very sharp wit. His book Above All Earthly Powers was the inspiration for the conference.

Wells kicked the conference off with his message, The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World. Wells calls the listener to delight in the "all-ready-not-yet" tension; that Christ is seated on the throne now but He is not yet manifesting all His authority in the world. As Wells lays out, this impacts the way we counsel during suffering, our motivation for seeing the world improve and obviously gives us our hope. Wells shares that much of the history of Christianity involved people being afraid of persecution. In the west, we do not fear not surviving, but we fear not succeeding. Our audience may not want to hear of a Christ above all, but our only message is of Christ as unique, central, indispensible, and supreme.

Though it was not a main point, in the midst of discussing the implications for seeing Christ's supremacy today, Well's mentions those who dilute this message to be less offensive. It's not that they change doctrine, it's just that they avoid certain teachings, to avoid alienating the post modern mindset. People interviewed the non-churched, found out they wanted to hear, and don't want to hear, and chose to determine their teaching by these findings.

However, 20 years later, Wells shares the result:

45% of Americans consider themselves to be born again.

Yet, less than 9% have a minimal understanding of what it means to live your life as a disciple.

In giving the unchurched what they want, all we have done is moved unregenerate people into our church building, but have not seen them submit to Christ.

Referencing statistics by Thom Rainer, Wells exposes what was wrong with asking the unsaved what they would tolerate hearing from a church. The problem? They are not our goal. If an unregenerate person is asked to give their unregenerate opinion of what they are looking for in a church, you simply increase the population of unregenerate people in our church. (If they even check out your church, which most do not, despite asking their opinion.) However, if one were to interview the recently converted, and were to ask them what it was that brought them to church, then you hit your target group. Your goal is to see people come to saving knowledge of Christ. Therefore, we shouldn't be interviewing those who don't know Christ yet, but rather, we should be interviewing those who recently made that transformation, and we should find out what things helped them do so.

Do you know what those people (recently converted and new to church) say brought them to church? According to Rainer's findings:

90% say the preaching

88% say they came to hear doctrine

In our attempt to preach a "more acceptable" Christ, we actually fail to give the lost person what he is truly seeking. But Wells continues by reminding the conference that even if the research were to show otherwise, we only have One Christ that we can preach; the Christ who is above all earthly powers. For that is the Christ of the Scriptures.