Worldviews and Mission
What is the connection between worldviews and mission? How can understanding worldviews help us to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19)? Several years ago I spoke to about one hundred teenagers about Jesus and the big five worldview questions. And they didn’t want to leave when the dinner bell rang!
Many people today think that Christians are ‘nutters’. It’s very hard talking to people about Jesus in a predominantly secular culture. Let’s be honest – mission is really tough. No-one enjoys the cold contempt of the secular person when you start talking about the Crucified King of creation – Jesus Christ. Secular people live as if there is no God and they are often baffled and bemused by Christian faith.
This might seem strange to many but it’s actually much easier talking to Muslims and Hindus about Jesus. Yes – they will disagree with you when you say that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life but they don’t stare at you as if you are barking mad. They are often more than happy to have a discussion with you. They take you seriously.
Hard evidence also suggests that we don’t pass on our faith in Jesus to our children. Recent research by Dr. David Voas of Manchester University suggests that Christian belief in the UK is in terminal decline. Christian parents are only 50% successful in passing on their religious convictions to their children. Parents with secular beliefs are completely successful in passing on their unbelief to their offspring.
How can we respond to this enormous challenge? I will explain a new approach to mission and Christian education and then show how it works with a practical example.
It is very powerful to get young people to understand the five big worldview questions. We know how James Bond, Fijian cannibals and football fanatics would answer these questions. Let’s now show how this worldview stuff impacted my ‘best lesson ever’.
Several years ago I was asked by my school (a Catholic independent school) to teach RE to the entire sixth form every Saturday morning in a session which lasted 70 minutes. No other teacher was willing to do this and to be frank it was a bit of a nightmare. My assignment was to teach the basics of the Christian faith to predominantly secular teenagers. Young people who live as if there is no God. Sometimes I used to wake up in the middle of the night (sweat pouring down my face and legs) crying out to God – “Help me Lord, I can’t face Saturday. Take me now!” God refused to answer my prayer.
I struggled with this assignment for several years and gradually I began to get on top of the challenge. I introduced video clips from television and film, told funny stories, played pop songs and even did my impression of Tom Jones. And I enjoyed a modest if unspectacular success until I learned an incredible and unexpected lesson through adversity.
My colleague and good friend David Jones (not his real name) suggested that he should share the burdens of the grave yard slot by lecturing the sixth form about his New Age understanding of Jesus based on the bestselling A Course in Miracles. At first I was aghast and I tried to stop this happening. You see this understanding of Jesus and God is profoundly heretical. I was a broken, tormented man. How could I allow my friend to indoctrinate the entire sixth form with his unbiblical and unorthodox views of our Lord? And yet that teaching year ended up with the best lesson I have ever been involved in.
Let me explain myself. A Course in Miracles has sold more than 1,500,000 copies. In 1965 a psychologist from Columbia University, Dr Helen Schucman, began to receive messages from a ‘spirit’ she believed to be Jesus. She wrote down all these revelations and eventually this became the contents of A Course in Miracles.
Using our five worldview questions we can summarise the contents of the Course thus:
Where am I?
Everything is really God. The universe is divine.
Who am I?
We are ideas in the mind of God. We are part of God.
What’s gone wrong?
We have forgotten that we are part of God. We live in a false dream world of material reality. We have the false belief that there is a real world populated by people, animals and plants. Sin and evil are also part of the illusion.
What’s the solution?
We must wake up and leave the dream world. We must reown our divinity and intrinsic innocence. Jesus and other saviours will help us do this.
What happens after we die?
Just as a rain drop ceases to exist when it hits the ocean – so do we. We become fully absorbed in the divine.
For roughly twenty five Saturday sessions the entire sixth form listened to David explaining this Gnostic worldview and to me explaining where I thought he was going wrong. And much to my surprise they were transfixed, engrossed and fascinated. David would say that the world was a creation of our demented egos and I would explain that the world had been made by and through Jesus Christ (Col 1:16). He would assert that sin and evil didn’t really exist and I would say “Hang on David – Auschwitz really was evil!” He would insist that Jesus did not have a body and I explained the biblical doctrine of the incarnation (John 1:14) and the resurrection of the body (1 Corinthians 15). He contended that the death of Jesus had nothing to do with sin and I opposed this with familiar biblical teaching about atonement and sacrifice (1 John 2:2).
You could say that we were like two grunting, sweating Sumo wrestlers slugging away at each other. This is what you say about Jesus. This is what I say about Jesus. Did this work? Twelve minutes into the lunch break of the final session no-one wanted to leave the lecture hall. No-one moved. No-one was embarrassed and no-one complained about the instruction. Many of the young people were amazed by David’s strange and outrageous statements and they thanked me for my biblical teaching. Very few of the young people present were committed Christians and yet they had listened attentively for many hours to a debate about Jesus.
Notice that by joining in this debate I was teaching the entire sixth form about Jesus and no-one complained or got upset with me. The worldview approach allowed me to really engage with one hundred young people. The worldview methodology allowed me to understand David’s Gnostic distortions and to correct them with biblical teaching.
Young people are fascinated by the big questions of life if they are presented in the right way. The worldview approach gives us a new methodology that really works. Teach people the five worldview questions. Explain to them how Buddhists, Gnostics, consumerists, Nazis and materialists understand the world … how they understand Jesus. It’s much easier then and also far less embarrassing and threatening to talk about the biblical view of Jesus. The Bible comes alive when it is contrasted intelligently with non-biblical alternatives.
Conclusion
Many Christians are ineffective in their witness because they know little or nothing about worldviews. They lack wisdom and insight about the opposition. What do they do? They keep repeating cliches about Jesus in a cultural vacuum. They do not engage with people. On the other hand a worldview approach allows us to really engage with people without the painful cringe factor.
