Today’s Social Path to Faith
It is not just our media which is becoming social. An increasing number of voices are pointing out that the extraordinary success of Facebook, Twitter, and the like are actually a visible symptom of a much larger trend. Just like Facebook is helping transform the internet from a sprawling, opaque mass of unrelated contents into relationally meaningful networks (what is being called Internet 2.0), the way people are approaching life and faith is changing too. It is becoming more social, less individualistic, and more about belonging than believing or thinking.
Two umbrella trends can help us understand this phenomenon and the way it impacts people’s path to faith and how we should minister to them.
CULTURAL FRAGMENTATION
Our Western cultures, especially in major cities, are no longer homogeneous like they used to be. They are splintered into many subcultures, some of them overlapping according to ethnicity, family upbringing, political ideology, socioeconomic status, religion, or lifestyle choices. For a young person looking for a way into this massive conglomerate, they see not one but several possible paths, each more or less visible and credible according to their social networks. This cultural fragmentation also leads us to develop fields of trust: we distrust the complex world “out there,” its wars of interests and narratives, and come to trust people and institutions. When we develop close, personal contact, faces and voices can be discerned from among the massive crowd.
THE RISE OF EMERGENT ADULTHOOD
Increased financial pressures, longer years of education, delayed marriage, and other trends have formed in the last decades a new, intermediate type of young adulthood. Whereas perhaps three generations ago most people transitioned from adolescence into established adult life (a stable career, marriage, children, owning a house) fairly directly, today’s emergent adults stay single, professionally and geographically flexible well into their twenties and thirties. “Rather than being settled,” writes sociologist Christian Smith in his major study on the spiritual lives of emerging adults, “most of them understand themselves to be in a phase of life that is free, fluid, tentative, experimental, and relatively unbound.”¹
This means that the previous basic social unit, the nuclear family, is not only interrupted by a long hiatus between when one’s leaves home and forms a new family but often gets relativized into numerous arrangements: living together, breaking up, being a single parent, sharing an apartment with friends, moving back to the parents’ house. And what is the basic socializing unit in this phase of life? The tribe of friends in shows like in Friends and Sex in the City, complemented first by extended circles of friends that remain liquid as people move in, move out, get together, break up, and second by ideas- or affinity-based fellowships circling around hobbies, cultural and social interests, or religious beliefs. Young adults band together with others who are also feeling their way into life and into more lasting identities, forging a social approach to self-discovery.
What do these trends mean for the way people approach faith today? For the people who did not inherit it from their upbringing, it means they will approach it socially. If the gospel is to become more than one more narrative among so many, hidden in a complex and distrusted landscape, it will get a serious hearing only if it is incarnated into one’s field of trust by a known face, a close relationship. Such a relationship will then open the way for a group to show how the gospel can be lived out and why it is plausible, even in an ever-changing landscape. Embodying the gospel concretely and attractively causes us to want to embrace that faith as our own. Unless the gospel can be made visible and real through a person and a group, it will stay foreign; unless one can feel a way to belong to it and see intelligent people believe and articulate it, it will stay implausible, questioned by a landscape where belief in God and active faith are counter-cultural.
I’d like to highlight three implications of this social path to faith for our urban mission.
Belonging > believing > behaving: Many church leaders would much prefer people to arrive at their door already believing the gospel fully and living according to it. More traditional churches actually behave this way, letting people feel they are incorporated into the body only if they already believe (having come to faith outside of the church, through a friend, tract, evangelistic crusade, etc.) and already behave “Christianly,” at least with visible sins shed away. But people considering faith today need to feel a sense of belonging before they come to believe and “behave.” With this in mind, a “cold” medium like a tract, a website, or an unknown speaker won’t have the gravitas or rapport to make a person rethink their beliefs (unless they are undergoing a serious personal crisis). In fact, the very act of belonging could be the most influential factor leading to belief and behavior.
The importance of church planting: People’s increasingly social path to faith means that, as we are noticing, mass approaches like crusades, conferences, TV preaching, and street marches are becoming less effective in reaching nonbelievers (even though their importance in gathering, nurturing, and strengthening believers continues). Friendship evangelism, too, though a crucial part of the process, is becoming less sufficient on its own unless the friendship leads to belonging to a larger group like a church or fellowship. The evangelistic approach which seems to best address people’s social approach to faith is the planting of new churches: proliferating numerous circles of belonging and articulation of the gospel which can befriend and make space for a person to consider faith next to believers who embody and explain the gospel.
Open and warm communities: People’s social path to faith also means that a specific kind of church will be most effective at reaching people today: a church that is open, warm, relational, and sensitive to the fears and doubts of nonbelievers. It takes a specific congregational dynamic to do that; instead, many of our churches have an ethos that keeps seekers away, however strong our professed interest in reaching them may be.
If a seeker’s path to faith in urban contexts today is essentially social—if they need to belong before they open themselves to believe and behave differently—how can our churches reach out and bring them? What are the practices our churches can incorporate to contact, befriend, and assimilate nonbelievers?
Here are a few concrete features of a socially intelligent church:
OPEN NETWORKS
A group’s tendency is usually to close in on itself and attend to its own needs. This social dynamic is reinforced by the somewhat hostile contexts we minister in, especially in the urban centers of global cities where our small(ish) communities may be tempted to become hubs or shelters in a massive sprawl of unbelief. We want to meet and reinforce to ourselves that we believe, what we believe, and why we believe, and this is instinctively done in a safe environment segregated from the outer context. Too often our churches become closed networks, wanting to see others embrace Christ but doing nothing more than hoping and expecting they will automatically show up at church. This dynamic will not make the essential effort to befriend and invest time and energy in nonbelievers, nor will it show signs of welcome, interest, and embrace when they do come. Rodney Stark has found in his study of the rise of early Christianity that the early church was especially good at remaining an open network: attentive to the surrounding needs, serving nonbelievers, and welcoming them warmly.² Some concrete practices to help us keep our churches socially open are:
Hosting a selective number of meetings: Have a limited number of weekly church activities—including for leaders—that allows members time to befriend seekers, invite them for dinner, and go out frequently to build new relationships.
Utilizing varied spaces: Meet not just in the temple or on “your turf” but in a host of environments: squares, parks, pubs, and homes. This will not only let people come in contact with the church in ways beyond “official” services, but it will also help believers look beyond the walls of the church and develop a larger vision for the city. “I am quite sure, too,” wrote Charles Spurgeon in a chapter on open-air preaching, “that if we could persuade our friends in the country to come out a good many times in the year and hold a service in a meadow, or in a shady grove, or on the hillside, or in a garden, or on a common, it would be all the better for the usual hearers. The mere novelty of the place would freshen their interest and wake them up.”³
Regular social activities: Have regular activities that are purely social like picnics, playing sports, and watching movies to which people can invite newcomers for the first time. This provides space for people to become acquainted with the group and start to belong.
Constant encouragement and modeling: Reinforce a socially-open ethos by commending and thanking concrete examples of those who befriend seekers; do so in sermons, through studies, and one-on-one.
TRANSLUCENT BORDERS
A closed community’s borders are fairly clear and substantial: it is obvious who is in and who is out. Theologically, peripheral issues become important, too, to demarcate us from society and from churches that believe differently. In a socially open community, however, borders are translucent: there are people with different degrees of spiritual maturity and an openness to embrace even people who believe differently but are open to journey toward Christ. This brings a high level of diversity and ambiguity which only mature leadership can manage.
A multi-religious outlook: To give an example of what to avoid in a multi-religious outlook: in a recent small group meeting at church, a long-time believer attending for the first time started criticizing a number of other religions, only to find that there were followers of these religions right there next to him. A church that is open to seekers where they feel safe to explore the gospel without being judged for their current doubts or different beliefs will, at first glance, almost seem like a multi-religious group. Bible studies can become a curious clash of presuppositions that come to interact around Scripture; it is a beautiful and electrifying dynamic, and we strive to welcome and affirm seekers, giving them space and time to work on their doubts.
A clear theological core: To allow for this diversity of beliefs and not let it spiral into confusion or heresy, a clear understanding of the gospel needs to be reinforced constantly, clearly, and yet sensitively to non-believers. If a socially closed church needs to patrol its theological borders and reinforce uniformity, a socially open church needs to be so confident of its theological core that it is not threatened to welcome people with different beliefs. The gospel should be presented continually as a creative, respectful interaction with the worldviews, doubts, and beliefs of the urban context.
Active pastoral care and discipline: It also takes active, one-on-one pastoral care to deal with this kind of diversity. We have to clarify any confusion that comes along the way, apply the gospel to specific situations people are in, and challenge them to leave behind patterns of sin and take the next step toward spiritual maturity.
INCLUSIVE PREACHING
Socially closed churches specialize in dramatic conversions: the quick absorption of someone undergoing a crisis from the outside to the inside, usually in an intensified emotional environment. But what about the majority of city dwellers who are not undergoing a crisis but are rather affluent, relatively content, and emotionally stable? It takes a certain kind of discourse to address them in our preaching and through all church communications: inclusive, nuanced, and gradual.
The vocabulary of a journey: Whereas the decisive, “Are you in, or are you out?” mode of communication may work with people in crisis who are open to radical change, it distances people who feel “just fine” but may be open to considering a new perspective gradually. For these people (the vast majority of those around us), we need to develop a vocabulary of a journey that helps them reimagine the world in light of the gospel and invites them to take gradual steps toward Christ. The language of a journey puts greater stress on the direction we are headed than the specific state we are in at the moment which allows skeptics the space to consider the gospel at their own pace. We should emphasize movement along the journey more than clear-cut states of being.
Inclusive language: Churches that feel threatened by the city develop an us-versus-them mentality that exalts “us” and denigrates “them.” To address and include people who have not yet embraced Christ, however, our language needs to be inclusive and respectful of those who do not yet believe and affirms the validity of seekers’ anxieties, fears, ambivalence, and desires to keep their distance. This kind of preaching helps seekers feel they belong—that we are on this journey together—and gently invites them to take their next steps. It is backed by a robust theology that honors people with doubts and does not make them feel dumb, ignorant, or sinful.
Assumption of intelligence: If we assume that people are dumb and manipulable, our preaching will reflect this assumption; we will try to pressure and bully people with the strength of our personality, the passion of our rhetoric, the emotiveness of our anecdotes, or the authority of Scripture. We will preach with a sense of superiority, and people will be able to tell. In urban contexts where people are well-educated, widely traveled, and avoid authoritarian figures, this approach instantly distances people. But if we assume that they are intelligent—and they really are!—and invite them to consider the scenarios of the gospel, acknowledge their doubts, answer their objections, and respect their decisions, they will feel honored and will draw closer. We may fear that we’ve lost the superior ground from which we could pressure their wills, but we will actually be closer to them, and they will be more open to hear what we have to say.
As we respectfully listen to nonbelievers today and seek to reach out to them, I believe our own understanding of the gospel is enriched as well. Their social path to faith reminds us of the importance of the theological category of presence: of Christ’s incarnated presence in our midst, of the inner presence of the Spirit, of the Christian presence in the city as a signpost and embodiment of the alternative reign of God—as Lesslie Newbigin envisioned, this sense of presence as the embodiment of “local congregations [which] renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognize that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society.”⁴
Recovering the social aspect of faith in Christ helps heirs of the Enlightenment like us rediscover the importance of belonging to Christian maturity, to remember that to belong to Christ and to one another characterizes the people of God as much as cognitive belief and practical behavior. Thought and behavior are tremendously important, but outside of a relational community, they rarely happen. But when our love for one another is visible and enfolds those who Christ loves, Christ’s presence is manifest (Joh 13:32).
Notes
1. Christian Smith and Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56.
2. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (New York: Harper SanFrancisco, 1997), esp. chapter 4.
3. Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1954) 257.
4. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 232-233.
About the Author
René Breuel is the founding pastor of Hopera, a church in Rome, Italy, and author of The Paradox of Happiness.