Conservatively Churched  By Rick Presley   A Review of Radically Unchurched Alvin L. Reid (©2002, Kregel Publications, ISBN: 0-8254-3633-8)

 

The first thing the reader needs to bear in mind when paging through Alvin Reid’s Radically Unchurched is his intended audience. Frequent visitors to Next-Wave, The Ooze or even Youth Specialties will find that the book lags far behind the curve of what has been called the Emergent conversation. However, for churches which have barely recovered from making the transition from the Ozzie and Harriet 1950’s to the All In The Family 1970’s, this book is so far out ahead of their curve that it brands Reid as the radical rather than the “unchurched.”

 

Reid’s heart and passion are evident. He cares deeply about the cause of evangelism and its demise in evangelical churches, particularly among his own Southern Baptist contingent. He has taken on the unenviable task of attempting to infuse a generation of paralytic pew-potatoes with a proselytizing zeal to reach our current culture with the message of the gospel. Even worse, he is trying to awaken those who are thoroughly immersed in the evangelical sub-culture to the needs of the “radically unchurched” – people he describes who “have no clear personal understanding of the message of the gospel, and who have had little or no contact with a Bible-teaching, Christ-honoring church.” (p. 21) This book provides an effective litmus test for determining how conversant we are with current cultural conditions.

 

The first part of his book attempts to describe who these people are, how they live and the need for reaching them. While the descriptions are fairly shallow and represent mere cardboard cutouts of real people, he is correct in stating that our churches today are not reaching them. Much of Reid’s appeal for evangelistic excellence echoes the message that most of us raised in the church have heard all our lives. The message may be urgent, but it sounds like the same tired appeals pulpit-pounders have been advocating since the days of Billy Sunday. Most troubling about this section is that so much of Reid’s overview seems to come second hand instead of from personal experience. One would expect that the Bailey Smith Chair of Evangelism at Southeastern Seminary would have many more personal experiences to share. In fairness to the author, the primary purpose of this section of the book may be to create an awareness that the radically unchurched exist, rather than providing a thorough demographic or sociological description of who they are.

 

Part two provides a catalog of ministry methods for reaching the radically unchurched. This is the book’s greatest strength and also its most glaring weakness. Like a catalog, it provides a nice “product mix” of ideas from which to choose. What it fails to provide is a cohesive strategy for building a sustainable outreach ministry for reaching the radically unchurched. It gives us a nice selection of “what to do” but barely any discussion of how to maintain long-term evangelistic effectiveness to overcome the dual obstacles of inertia within the church and resistance from a postmodern pluralistic culture.

 

The biggest unstated assumption of the book is that we need to invade the current culture, rescue the ones we can reach with the gospel and then quickly conform them to the Christian sub-culture in our churches. If that is our goal, then this book provides an excellent guide on how to do it. Reid provides us with tools for changing the window dressing in order to engage culture, without upsetting comfortable Christians. He resembles the kind of missionary who goes to a foreign country and witnesses to the natives wearing his western clothes and maintaining his western ways and native language. He has inserted himself into the culture but he hasn’t adapted to it. More importantly, such a missionary hasn’t translated the gospel to the native culture and adapted it in a way that speaks to the people around him.

 

This is most obvious in his approach to the arts, particularly the dramatic arts. In the midst of identifying drama as an effective means of getting the gospel across to a modern society accustomed to television, movies and theater, he offers these cautions:

 

·                                Drama can take one’s focus off the Word

      ·                                Those in the dramatic arts are tempted to preserve the artistic form of drama and forget that it is a tool

      ·                                The dramatic arts can consume enormous amounts of the body’s energy.

      ·                                By nature drama tends toward entertainment over instruction. (p.163-165)

 

While these cautions are sound, they obscure the fact that they apply to much more than the dramatic arts. How may preachers or vocal musicians take the focus off the word, preserve the form of their performance, forget that it is a tool, consume enormous amounts of the body’s energy and tend toward entertainment over instruction? Whenever you hear someone say of a preacher, “That was a nice talk or lesson but it certainly wasn’t preaching,” you know that that person was expecting to be entertained, not educated. One gets the sense that Reid is writing for an audience for whom anything beyond the status quo is suspect. The unchurched may be radical but his ideas and presentation are not.

 

Perhaps the most disquieting element of Reid’s book has more to do with the attitude than the substance of what he covers. Undoubtedly, he did not intend to send this message but his silence speaks much louder than anything he says. The overarching message of the entire book is that evangelism is an end in itself. This impression may be because he is writing for people who don’t need to hear the case for evangelism and already know the reasons for reaching out to their neighbors with the gospel. However, the impression the book gives is that if evangelism is not an end in itself, then its end is to get people in church. This isn’t wrong but as a purpose for evangelism, it falls far short of the Good News of a life-transforming message that Jesus entrusted to us. The book discusses what people are saved from but speaks very little about what they are saved to. Missing from the book is the message that the radically unchurched are people first and that they are in need of authentic relationships with God and his children.

 

An example of this misplaced focus is his section on servant evangelism. Reid literally wrote the book on this topic (Servanthood Evangelism, www.lifewaystores.com) and gives it a good treatment. However, every example he cites is a case of individuals going out singly or in groups to “do” servant evangelism. It was part of a plan, a program, or a strategy for reaching the unchurched and in its own limited way it was effective - people were saved and the gospel was put in the hands of people who didn’t have it. What it did not do, or if it did, it wasn’t mentioned in the book, was to create Christians whose lives were characterized by a heart for servanthood. Serving others was something these Christians did on special occasions rather than becoming an integral facet of their character and Christlikeness.

 

Jesus, by contrast, didn’t come to this earth to “do” servant evangelism. He was, in his very nature and character, a servant. He did not come to be ministered to but to minister and give his life. What the radically unchurched look for are not people who can “do” servant evangelism, but people who are committed to serving others on an ongoing basis. They look for husbands who love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it, workers who relate to their employers and colleagues with a servant’s heart that genuinely asks, “How may I help you?” and neighbors who relate to one another in compassionate, genuine concern.

 

Reid clearly has a heart for the gospel or else he would not have written this book. He also has a handle on evangelism and training people to adopt effective methods for reaching out to those around him. He provides some excellent first steps for people who want to leave the comforts of complacent Christianity and reach out to those around them. Unfortunately it does very little to shock the church out of those staid sensibilities or challenge people to live radical lives of authenticity and impassioned evangelism. Radically Unchurched is good as far as it goes, but there is much road ahead. Perhaps the best use of the book is to serve as a barometer for those who pick it up. If you find the book is full of novel, exciting, unexplored opportunities for evangelism then you need to seriously evaluate how deeply you are immersed in the Christian subculture and out of touch with the mainstream culture. On the other hand, if you read this book and find almost nothing new and very little that you haven’t tried, then you are clearly someone who is keeping up with the most current trends of reaching the radically unchurched.

 

by Rick Presley