UnChristian
The Barna Group does surveys and research on Americans’ attitudes toward Christianity and religion in general. They publish and send out e-mails about their research from time to time and it could be helpful for preachers and Bible class teachers to be on their e-mail list. Their president, David Kinnaman with Gabe Lyons teamed up to present some results of some of their research in a book titled UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity …and Why it Matters.
As Christians closely following the pattern in the New Testament, we ought to be interested in what the average American thinks the very moment we mention, “I’m a Christian.”
The book focuses on the six main responses the typical American has toward “Christianity” and how Christians can answer. Those six responses: Christians are hypocritical. Christians are always wanting to tell people what to do to be saved. Christians are anti-homosexual. Christians are sheltered. Christians are too political. And Christians are judgmental.
This suggests that the cashier at your grocery store, when you mention you are a Christian or imply that you are a Christian, might very likely have one or more of these images flash through his/her mind. Are they true? How do you feel about being labeled in that way?
Kinnaman and Lyons begin their book with this statement: “Christianity has an image problem” (pg. 11). This “image” problem does not stem entirely out of ignorance. Most of those in the survey grew up in “church” or have close friends who are Christians. They are not totally “out of the loop.” Additionally, the vast majority still believe in God and still believe in Christ as Savior. They just have a seriously negative, stereotyped, image of Christianity.
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So, they have made stereotyped assumptions about us. Are we making similar assumptions about them? Are we being unfair to them in “pigeon-holing” them? Most of the sample on which Kinnaman and Lyons did their research are sixteen to twenty-nine year olds – the so-called “Millennial” generation. I am as much interested in reaching “baby boomers” with the Gospel as I am the millennial generation. Yet, in some ways it seems that my thinking is more in line with the baby boomer generation than the millennial generation.
How do I get into the mindset of the millennial generation, to know what they are thinking, to know how to present the Gospel to them? UnChristian was written with that goal in mind. What does Christianity look like to those outsiders? I’m interested in knowing.
Paul writes in Colossians 4:5, “Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity.” He also wrote in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23, “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I may win more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, so that I might win Jews; to those who are under the Law, as under the Law though not being myself under the Law, so that I might win those who are under the Law; to those who are without law, as without law, though not being without the law of God but under the law of Christ, so that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all men, so that I may by all means save some. I do all things for the sake of the gospel, so that I may become a fellow partaker of it.”
In Kinnaman’s words, this generation “think[s] Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what it was meant to be” (15). I believe that leaves the door wide open for us to present nondenominational Christianity that seeks to live out the teachings of Jesus in the 21st century in a real and authentic way.
–Paul Holland
