First-century tips for reaching the 21st-century pagan

Richard Cunningham has been in full-time Christian work for the past 18 years.

He spent most of the 1990s as evangelism trainer at UCCF. He is attached to the staff team at St. Andrew's, Oxford, where he acts as director of evangelism. Areopagus Ministries was formally launched in March of this year. EN caught up with him to quiz him about his vision and plans.

EN: Richard you've just gone public with your work under the tag of Areopagus Ministries. What is it, and what's in the name?

RC: The term is lifted from Acts 17.16-34 where Paul, in Athens, was examined about his preaching by the Areopagus Council. Paul was accused of babbling unintelligibly about foreign gods. These dignitaries took it on themselves to judge whether his ideas were fit for public consumption. Remarkably, Paul, confronted by the sceptical leading thinkers and academics of his day, walked out leaving a large number of his inquistors intrigued. Some were even converted.

EN: So this is an important touchstone for you. But it was 2,000 years ago. Why is this important in our contemporary scene?

RC: Luke's account of Paul in Athens describes a switch in method. Paul had originally come from the local synagogue where he had been speaking about Jesus and the resurrection. But the punters in the marketplace found the same message incoherent. So the Athenians said: 'Hey, babbler, you'd better come before the Areopagus and explain yourself'.

Paul, in response, initially dropped his language of Jesus and the resurrection, and instead homed in on Athenian culture; their religious shrines, their philosophy and literature. He used their own poetry to expose the inadequacy of their religious ideas and practices. He immediately found contact points and moved them towards where God wanted them - to Jesus and the resurrection. So in the market place of our own day we should be speaking Athens-style and not Jerusalem-style. And if we are to engage with 21st-century pagan culture we must start where they are rather than wishing them to be where we are.

EN: Is basic preaching from the Bible not the best way to evangelise in our culture?

RC: We know that faith comes by hearing, but often ideas intrude that obstruct people from hearing the 'plain and simple gospel'. So the task of communication is not just articulating Bible verses or Christian shibboleths; it's persuading people in categories and idioms that they're familiar with.

The persuaded ones

EN: How did you arrive at these convictions yourself?

RC: In Acts we see Paul persuading, arguing and proving. These are very strong verbs denoting vigorous discourse. In fact, the people who are converted are described by Luke as 'the persuaded ones'. So this is just a normal pattern of Christian proclamation.

More personally, as a teenager, I took part in an open air meeting at London Speakers' Corner. I first had significant intellectual doubts when befriended by an atheist called Alex. He ostensibly came to listen to the Christian speakers, but was really there to trip us up. To cut a long story short, he asked me such probing questions that a whole series of doubts began to present themselves. At the same time I'd been asked to become president of my Christian Union. So I asked Christians on my summer camp network if they could help me. They told me I probably had unconfessed sin in my life.

EN: Did you?

RC: Well I'm sure I did. But even after examining myself I still had these doubts. But a staff worker from UCCF gave me a reading list from C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. I became excited that Christianity was really true; not just 'true for me'. I became a 'persuaded one' - again! Then I invited a whole load of my friends to join me for a discussion group called 'agnostics anonymous'. And through this I saw five of my friends converted.

Past and present

EN: You alluded to using the categories of the marketplace rather than the categories of the synagogue. Why now particularly? Is it relevant at our moment in history in a way in which it hasn't been relevant before?

RC: Right now we are de-Christianised like never before. So, central categories like wrath, redemption, forgiveness, and sin, are no longer immediately recognised. And many commentators argue that 21st-century Western culture is very similar to the first-century Greco-Roman world. There is a single language - English - which gives us a sort of global village to spread ideas quickly through the mass media. Almost overnight we have a very pagan, sensual society far removed from the one that our Christian forebears in the 19th-century would recognise.

EN: Isn't this 'apologetics'? And isn't apologetics rather wordy and intellectual? We live in a touchy-feely kind of age. How will Areopagus have an impact on today's hedonistic and sensualist culture?

RC: We mustn't capitulate to our increasingly sensualist culture by removing all the content from the gospel. But just because we have seen bad apologetics, that shouldn't mean we should be shy of a good apologetic; a word back where we find both contact points and confrontation points.

Areopagus programmes

EN: So much for theory. What is Areopagus Ministries actually doing?

RC: We've come up with the strap line 'Confronting Secularism in Campus, Church and Continent'. This highlights the three domains of outreach that we address.

EN: So tell us about 'Campus' first.

RC: I'm convinced that the best way to reach pagan students is to invite them to a lunch bar. This means going to where they are in the middle of the day and making it easy for them to hear. So we go centre-campus and provide lunch. We then put on a talk with a provocative title like, 'Has Christianity done more harm than good?' We pitch an issue where they instinctively already have an opinion.

Hundreds of non-Christians will come to an event like that. But, there are very few Christians in ministry who are really confident and competent to take that opportunity. So for the past five years I have been teaching a group of about 60 how to give those talks. We want eventually to have 250 trained speakers. The programme is called Christian Persuaders, and we have been deploying the speakers and matching them up with the Christian Unions which host the events.

Beyond the fringe

EN: OK, that's the Christian Persuaders programme. What else does Areopagus Ministries do?

RC: What is true of the university scene is also true of church. When I started my present job as director of evangelism I was warned by a number of mature Christians that evangelism doesn't work in our church.

EN: Did they hand you a redundancy notice at the same time ...?!!

RC: What they meant was this. They were not comfortable in inviting their non-Christian friends to an otherwise enjoyable occasion which is then mugged by a Christian epilogue. A wine-tasting, for example, with a comment like 'you don't judge a wine by its bottle, therefore don't judge Christianity by the church'. I'm caricaturing here ...

Since those on the fringe of church are a diminishing rump, how do we draw in those who are beyond the fringe? How do we put on events that give Christians confidence to invite their far-off friends? So the events we put on, rather than presenting Christianity as a bolt-on, look at a lively topic asking questions like, 'Does Christianity have any explanatory power? Is it coherent? Can it transform a real human situation for the better?'

EN: Does this work?

RC: We've had record numbers attending, non-Christians have felt really comfortable, and there have been supper parties spinning off to continue the discussion. We call this programme 'Making Sense of Life'.

EN: The third domain you mention in your publicity material is 'Continent'. Please expand.

RC: Over the last 100 years or more, church attendance has diminished in Europe, while in the rest of the world it has increased.

We want to re-engage Christian leaders in Europe in the task of evangelism. People flock to European universities from all over the world; what they receive is liberal secular humanism. We thought that Areopagus could contribute by identifying key apologists, key theological teachers and key pastors, and inculcating them with convictions to help them give a word back to secularised European society.

EN: How?

RC: Through a conference called the European Leaders Forum. We have just completed our second conference in Sopron in Hungary. The vision is to re-establish a platform for robust outreach across the whole continent. This won't happen unless we learn to interweave three major strands of gospel communication into a compelling persuasive approach to evangelism.

EN: What three major strands?

RC: Expository preaching, systematic theology and apologetics. All these disciplines need each other's strengths. So we had prominent teachers like David Jackman running the expositors track, and Don Carson leading the theologians track. Ravi Zacharias led the apologetics side. We are generating best practices in gospel communication. These will then be used at the coalface of outreach from the local church.

EN: Perhaps you can report back to our readers on this conference.

An Areopagus Ministries prospectus is available - contact Steve McGowan, Areopagus 2003 Appeal Director, email mcgowan.bosshouse@btopenworld.com or tel. 020 7403 5430.