{"id":454,"date":"2015-10-27T15:34:26","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T22:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.wordpress.com\/?p=454"},"modified":"2015-10-27T15:34:26","modified_gmt":"2015-10-27T22:34:26","slug":"getting-out-of-the-leave-it-to-beaver-age-of-evangelism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kingdomrice.org\/2015\/10\/27\/getting-out-of-the-leave-it-to-beaver-age-of-evangelism\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting out of the \u201cLeave it to Beaver\u201d age of Evangelism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"litb_cleaver_house_w_cast_1024\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in the old summer days of my childhood, I had ample time to watch old reruns and “Leave It to Beaver” was the most memorable of them. The show provided me a glimpse into a time capsule from another age and time. It was so interestingly foreign and anachronistic. Everyone had a mom, a dad, a single family ranch-style house in a suburb, and a car. Everything was neat and tidy and of course, everyone was white. I’m guessing everything was closed on Sundays so everyone could goto church and Sunday school. \u00a0That’s not my world here in the Bay Area. A lot of people don’t own cars. Single family homes are rare, and with all the garbage and homelessness on the streets, things are not so neat and tidy. But there’s also tremendous beauty, mostly because of the people who come from so many diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, orientations, and more. focusing in on ethnicities, I’ve gotten to know just a fraction of them through many conversations and cuisines. Here’s a graph of the ethnic population in my world, people I never saw in those old Beaver reruns.<\/p>\n

\"125199C9-6355-4948-A55B-B8E0F0D83BC9\"<\/a>(graphic courtesy of YWAM-San Francisco)<\/p>\n

I remember learning that there are 60 ethnic groups in the Bay Area that come from places where there is no church. \u00a0During the “Beaver” days, missionaries were sent into the world. Today, much of world has come to cities like mine.<\/p>\n

Too many Christians are trained to “evangelize” in a way as if we were still in the Beaver era, <\/strong>as if\u00a0we were still\u00a0living in the pre-civil rights 1950s.<\/strong> This worked effectively in past generations when many of the popular Gospel presentations were written before immigration opened up in the mid 1960\u2019s to waves of immigration from the East. Trouble is, many Christians are not even aware that their approach is rooted in that bygone era; for a large majority, there is no other known option. So we keep sharing a Gospel that\u2019s very propositional, one that assumes an individual sense of self, one that assumes an authority of Scripture, and one that appeals to guilt. In other words, the very way we share the Good News invisibly says, \u201cthis is a Western gospel.\u201d At its worst, this approach says \u201cyou are welcomed if you’re like us culturally.\u201d Perhaps it\u2019s no wonder why the church in China did not grow phenomenally until after all the Western missionaries were removed when the China turned communist. For cultures that don’t relate to the West, they face unnecessary thresholds to the Gospel.<\/p>\n

This problem of a Western approach is compounded by an age-old rural approach to the Bible<\/strong>, and henceforth, a rural approach in our methodology. This approach is losing grip in the context of today\u2019s world, where the world’s majority are now living in cities. Consider the skyrocketing number of people who live in cities over the past one hundred years (https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/urbanization<\/a>):<\/p>\n