I See Thy Self

A Challenge of Ministry in Our Secular Society.

The first church I ever served with as a minister was a little country church in Arkansas, nestled in the foothills of the Ozarks. This was a good place for me to start learning how to preach and help encourage people to live as followers of Jesus.

In short, what I love about ministry is getting to share with people what I believe God is doing in Jesus Christ and encourage them to follow Jesus. Whether this happens while preaching during a Sunday worship gathering or sitting across the table from someone while enjoying a cup of coffee, this excites me. Nearly twenty-five years since preaching for that small Arkansas church, I’m still seeking to follow Jesus and praying that I can encourage others to follow Jesus too.

Yet, a lot has changed between then and now. Back then, nearly everyone I met shared the same foundational religious beliefs. That is, we believed in God, and by God, I mean the God we read of in the Bible, who ultimately reveals himself in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. We regarded the Bible as God’s inspired word and useful for teaching us how to live as God’s people (cf. 2 Tim 3:16-17). Today, such religious beliefs are not a given.

People I meet may or may not believe in the existence of God. And even if they ascribe to a theistic belief, they’re understanding of who God is may greatly differ from my own. For some, the Bible is an ancient collection of religious writings, but its significance for instruction about matters pertaining to God and life isn’t any greater than any number of other religious writings. But perhaps the most significant change is the centering of self as the goal of fulfillment.

The centering of the individual self coincides with the age of secularism that we live in. In reality, the centering of the individual self was taking shape long before I was even born. It’s just a reality that I am becoming more aware of while serving in ministry. So the other day, as I was reading Andrew Root’s The Pastor in a Secular Age, these words seeming jumped off the page:

The tightly organized forms of paleo- and neo-Durkheimian religion have exploded like a massive star. In the post-Durkheimian dispensation, we live inside a supernova effect, where a massive buffet of frenetic spiritual options is set before us, none formally ruled better than any other, yoga as significant as communion, Martian chat rooms as important as the preached word. Whatever speaks to you is worthy of exploration and commitment until it no longer does. Divine action is opaque, not because religion and spirituality have been darkened, but because the light of the nova explosion is so intense and inner-directed that a vision for divine action becomes washed out.¹

That’s a wordy paragraph, but what Root is describing is the secular context that ministry takes place in. With people centering the individual self, a great chasm has grown that separates the sacred and ordinary, obscuring transcendence because people are so focused on the immanent where the individual self resides. In the centering of the individual self, what becomes the goal is what is good for the self. So, as Root observes with his comparison of yoga and Martian chat rooms to communion and preaching, whatever seems good is the path that people will pursue. It doesn’t matter if such a pursuit is actually good, right, and true, because what matters is what people have determined as good for their individual selves.

I see this challenge even within Christianity, in the way that individual believers might select which church to be a part of or choose not to be a part of a local church. If a person isn’t “feeling it” at church, or perhaps the worship just doesn’t speak to them.

Well, I’m not complaining, and even if I was, it wouldn’t help because complaining isn’t going to change the reality of the secular society we live in. However, I am trying to understand the implications for ministry in the context of such secularism and the centering of the individual self. This is why I am reading through Andrew Root’s three-volume set Ministry in a Secular Age (Faith Formation in a Secular Age, 2017; The Pastor in a Secular Age, 2019; The Congregation in a Secular Age, 2021).²

To be quite honest, though I have some idea, I’m not sure what all the implications are yet. What I am sure of is that the reality of secularism and the centered individual self exists in Urban, suburban, and rural populations across America. So a big challenge of serving in ministry is how to help people who are focused on the immanent self begin to see the transcendent work of God in Jesus Christ.

1. Andrew Root, The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need God, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019, 143

2. For those who are quite ambitious, see also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.