We need to get out more:
What was Paul doing in Athens anyway? He had been run out of the last town he was speaking in and was waiting for his mates to come and get him. In the mean time he was out walking the city, tourist map in one hand and a digital camera in the other. He was waiting for his friends and in the process he was out finding coffee shops, wine bars and restaurants for lunch. He was doing the tourist thing in Athens!

So many of us stay home or hang out with other Christians, the more we do this the more our passion for the lost is blunted. Our zeal to see people connect with eternity is dulled and our fervor to reach the lost is reduced and our voice to the world becomes muted!

We need to get out more and see people walking around; we need to start conversations with people and connect with them. [Random acts of generosity to show Jesus is alive]

We somehow feel that religious convictions are a personal issue and never to be shared in public. We’ve been taught it’s not polite talk if we mention our faith or our relationship with Jesus. How demonic is that?

Many in the church live in another world, another time and another century. They speak another language, dress in a fashion that no longer relates. I am not talking about a “trendier than thou church” but the church has remained helplessly immobile because they have failed to shift it communications paradigms and as a result has been made redundant to the predominance of society today; they are relegated to the past, boring, irrelevant, meaningless and extraneous to today!

I admit that communication in a 21^st Century context is elaborate, if we seek to truly touch our world we will need to understand the world we live in so we can speak to them.

Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor wrote in their new book “A matrix of meaning: Finding God in Popular Culture,” these startling words;

“We embrace pop culturebecause we believe it offers a refreshing, alternative route to a Jesus who for many has been domesticated, declawed, and kept under wraps. As the Christian church has often adopted the role of moral policeman, pop culture has assumed the role of spiritual revolutionary, subverting and frustrating those religious authorities who desperately cling to black-and-white answers in an increasingly gray world…We believe a bold, ancient, radical Christ stands on the sidelines of the culture wars, waiting "with arms wide open," eager to engage our hearts, our minds, and our culture.”
[A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Popular Culture]

I believe that you can’t reach a world whose culture you hate, abhor  and separate yourself from it – Richard Leonard is a Jesuit priest with a PhD in Film and Theology and he writes in his book, “Movies that Matter: Reading Film Through the Lens of Faith”:

"Given the power of media, becoming conversant with its mixed messages is an essential tool for Christian life. This involves the process of enculturation—discovering where Christ is already active within a given culture. Enculturation has traditionally been about uncovering Christian resonances in faraway places and exotic rituals. Yet the risen Christ sends us out to our media-saturated culture [of the 21^st Century] as well, and in it we labor with Christ to expose the signs of God’s saving love already present there.”

He continues; “We cannot speak to a culture we do not know or one we despise… [or one we are afraid of] we have to learn its language and discover how Christ has already gone ahead of us, enculturated in some of media’s values, stories and style."

Here is the crux of the 21^st Century church; Jesus has already gone ahead of us into the world and there are many signs of His presence there. There are present in this world tens of thousands of indications He has gone before us preparing hearts to respond to the message of salvation.

He is the same yesterday today and forever. 

His intent is that NOW through the church the wisdom and love of God should be made known!