Adrian Warnock Interviews Nancy Pearcey

Adrian Warnock interviews Nancy Pearcey, author of the award winning book Total Truth, in this post.  Adrian did an excellent job with the interview - he had some good questions and Nancy came through with some terrific answers.

Here's one good question and answer that I think are particularly helpful.

Adrian

: It may interest you to know that I work full-time for a commercial organization but am part of the regular preaching team of my local church. Does it surprise you at all that so many of my readers tend to initially assume that as I am a preacher I must be full time for the church? Do you feel that having preachers who also work out there in the real world will help the church interact with our culture?

Nancy: Absolutely. This was not such an issue in a pre-industrial society, where life was more holistic. But modern societies are split between public and private realms, with things like religion and church relegated to the private arena--demoted to something you do in your leisure hours, with no more status than a personal hobby. As a result, it has become remarkably difficult for Christians to know how to integrate their faith with their work and professional lives. Religion almost inevitably becomes therapeutic--focusing on the private realm of family, relationships, personal piety and moral behavior.    

For pastors, this means it has grown increasingly difficult to maintain any realistic sense of ideas and trends in the secular world or to teach their congregations how to interpret those ideas within a biblical framework. Many pastors would benefit from spending at least some time on the other side of the public/private divide, in order to experience firsthand the incredible tensions faced by most ordinary Christians every day.

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Also, in case you missed it, Catez at Allthings2All interviewed Nancy here. 

And, if you want to hear an interview with Nancy instead of just reading it, my new friend Keith Plummer has an interview with Nancy (as well as alot of other folks) at his site Pensees: Faith Seeking Understanding.  You can go directly to Nancy's interview by following this link.  And oh by the way, Keith is now blogging at The Christian Mind.  Be sure to check him out.

Comments

[Keith]

I really appreciate your mention of Pensees and The Christian Mind. Thank you very much, David.

By the way, Nancy has agreed to join me again either next month or in early September. As soon as a date is secured the information will be posted on both sites.

[The Dane]

Jolly One ~

This - the idea that pastors need to "maintain any realistic sense of ideas and trends in the secular world" - strikes me as something far less necessary or helpful than many of us Christians might imagine.

First of all, we should admit openly that there is nothing new under the sun, the any experience one person lives is merely derivative of the experiences of those before and around him. So really, the "cloistered" life of the pastor who is a full-time minister is not rendered useless nor even hampered by the fact of his occupational segregation. A full-time minister is just as likely to be able to speak intelligibly and wisely to the problems facing a corporate whipping boy as the pastor who also works in the corporate mailroom.

Next, if we progress down the dangerous path of imagining that the pastor needs to grasp existentially the aspects of his congregants cultures, we run into sizable dilemmas. If a pastor seeks white-collar employment in order to better empathize with his congregants, he is ignore the unique experience of those who subsist in the restaurant business. If he seeks employ in the restaurant business, he is missing out on the struggles unique to public school teachers. And truck drivers. And professional athletes. And homemakers. How can a pastor possibly relate to the unique experience of mothers as he will never in all his life be able to be a mother? The thing is - none of these experiences are as unique as we would like to imagine them. Each are analogous to each other in that the struggles inherent to each are inherent, in some form, in the others. Even in the day-to-day experience of being a full-time minister. This is why Christ is said to be able to sympathize with us all - though he was never a mother of three stuck in a dead-end job in the forty-year-old diner on the outside of town.

The thing is: "relevance" is a sham. The gospel IS relevant by its very nature. To proclaim the gospel and its exhortation is to be entirely relevant to whichever culture, group, society, or target audience happens to be in front of you. The message is the same whether speaking to a woefully single twenty-year-old internet geek or a forty-five-year-old twice-divorced woman who has been passed over for promotion in her job five times running because of a glass ceiling.

To promote individualizing the gospel (making it relevant) as much as has been done in recent years is dangerous in that it confuses the average citizen into believing that a pastor (and by extension, Christ) cannot understand him unless he's walked a mile in his shoes. We've lied to ourselves, telling ourselves that our shoes are unique - our shoes are special - and have forgotten the simple truth that we all wear the same shoes and my problems are her problems are his problems are my problems.

[Michael Fosetr]

The Dane,

You said:

"The thing is: "relevance" is a sham. The gospel IS relevant by its very nature. To proclaim the gospel and its exhortation is to be entirely relevant to whichever culture, group, society, or target audience happens to be in front of you"

Relevance is an issue of the way we communicate and not of the content of our message. The gospel is relevant but the way we communicate is often very irrelevant. We should be able to take different more relevant approaches with different cultures. There are many examples of this in the scriptures. Paul preaches differently to Greeks than to Jews (Acts 17).The four gospels were written in a way to be particular relevant to a certian group (Matthew was directed at Jews more so and Luke at gentiles). There are many wonderful examples throughout history such as Hudson Taylor who brought the gospel to China because he became more relevant.

We should by all means avoid trying to make the gospel more relevant. That is hersey. But we should try to communicate the gospel to others as clearly as possible which will require us to understand there culture and be...yes thats right...more relevant.

[The Dane]

Michael, I see what you're saying but I think that in light of how vastly pluralistic our society is - perhaps moreso than even ancient Roman society - that any targeted preaching to a specific cultural experience ends up making our words irrelevant (to varying degrees) to everyone who isn't a part of the target audience. With that in mind, I think that a better tact would be to look for universal human themes - the things that everyone, no matter their society or station - share in and use that as your point of relevance. That way, both the message and the means are unchanged and able to reach any audience.