Mission in post-modern Britain must begin with sharing and demonstrating more love, says evangelist Laurence Singlehurst, of Cell UK.
“What motivated God’s mission? Why did He send His Son?” asked Singlehurst, at a Christian Resources Exhibition seminar on mission in post-modern Britain. The answer, he said, was simple: “Love.”
“The most important question we need to ask ourselves about evangelism is ‘what should be our motivation?’ Love.”
He said on Friday that the huge cultural shift in Britain since the 1950s away from a Christian moral framework to a secular humanist and pagan foundation demanded a similar shift in evangelistic methods.
“Our world has moved on and yet in many ways the church is still trying to win the nation using the same old methods of 1952 and we are a little bit surprised why they don’t work,” he said.
“‘Sin’, ‘repentance’, these are not words and phrases that mean anything in our culture today. It’s like speaking Japanese. It is a style that no longer works. We live in a different world.”
Christians have become a minority group, he acknowledged, in a society that no longer believes in a single truth. “They believe what they can experience. They believe what they can touch. They believe what they can see.”
Singlehurst remained positive about the long-term prospects for mission in Britain, however.
“I believe that if we do mission in the same way that we did in the 1950s, we will just die and pass away. But if we are prepared to walk with the Holy Spirit in a new adventure and see new ways to reach out I believe we can still turn this nation around,” he said.
“If we are prepared to do some hard work and engage with our communities then I believe we can see something wonderful take place.”
He stressed that mission had to take the love of people as its starting point.
“For so long evangelism has been a method,” he said. “We keep coming up with a new method. But I felt God say to me that evangelism is not a method, mission is not a method. It is a question… and the question is this: How big is your heart? Do we love people? … Do we care?
“I believe the foundation to our mission is more love, more care, more connectedness to people. We need to see people in a new way.”
Singlehurst argued that mission in a post-modern world had to move beyond the ‘truth first, love second’ approach to mission of the 1950s.
“In a post modern world I believe mission is ‘love first’. Gain some authenticity, build some relationships and then share what you believe,” he told the audience. “Because in our world people don’t want to believe what you believe until they know how much you love and care.
“And the church needs to walk in a new way,” he continued. “We need to reach out in a new way. We have got to be like Jesus. We have got to be incarnational. We need to be authentic.”
Connectedness and authenticity had to stay together, stressed Singlehurst.
“We have to be connected to our world. We need to love our world. But at the same time we need to be authentic because if we are just connected and just the same, we have a problem. If we are very holy and totally disconnected, we have a problem.”
