A Gospel Approach for Postmoderns

We hear a lot about postmodern people these days, and how difficult it is to get the message of Jesus across to them.
One worker in college ministry in the States has come up with a simple way of doing this. James Choung believes that young people are well aware of something being wrong with the world. They may not call it sin (at least not before they become Christians), but they know that things are awry.
On one hand we have beauty and perfection and wondrous design; on the other we have ugliness and mess and distortion, things that upset our sense of balance in the world, and make us realise – even if we won’t say it – that things aren’t what they should be.
Choung’s simple way of taking people from that point of dissatisfaction through to belief in Christ can be drawn on a paper serviette.
First he talks about the longing in our hearts for a world that’s free of wrongdoing and evil and other garbage. People have an understanding that things aren’t the way they should be, and can easily agree that the thirst for a more perfect world may well be evidence that such a world has existed, or will exist in the future.
At that point they need to face the fact that in spite of their best intentions they all contribute to the mess in the world; no one is free from guilt in this regard. Their unwillingness to help others, to clean up the problems they create, to refuse to do good when they could - and a host of other things – all show that their failure to love others is also a failure to love God.
Choung says we still need to ask people to “repent” – literally, to change their mind” or to have a new way of thinking. They have to let their selfish lives die with Jesus – so they can have a new life of loving Him and their neighbour. Choung says, ‘That’s a huge call to faith for this generation.’
Jesus often simply said to people, Follow Me. He didn’t require them to be without sin before they did so; he wanted them to be willing to change. That’s the step postmoderns often want to skip: having realised the wrongness of things, they think they can get straight on and make things right on their own – without any help from Jesus.
But Choung tells them that only Jesus can put to death the selfishness of their lives. Without Him, moving onto ‘saving’ the world is just an empty dream.
The fourth step in his diagram is also important: once they accept Jesus, they need to see that He’s sending them on a mission; He’s not just giving them eternal life without any need to call others to Him. And within that call are all the areas of mercy, justice, acting rightly that Micah talks about.
On the surface, Choung’s approach isn’t particularly radical. Helping people face their understanding of a world gone wrong is maybe a slightly different but more ‘user-friendly’ starting point. It obviously works.

An article on Choung and his four circles appears in the July 2008 Christianity Today. It can be found online.