What kind of person is more open to the gospel? To ask this question is not to imply that gospel is only for certain types of people, but to affirm what everyone observes, that some people seem to be more receptive to following Jesus than others.
Is it just a matter of timing? Certainly timing plays its part. Far more people become Christians in childhood and adolescence than in adulthood. And adults are more open to a new perspective when their lives are in transition or in crisis.
Apart from these factors, another variable often overlooked is cultural diversity. John Drane, in The McDonaldization of the Church, describes seven cultural identities, some of whom are ripe for engagement with Christians in finding true life in Christ, while others will remain hard to reach. The full list is worth careful study, but I want to highlight the group that Drane thinks is the most promising for the church’s evangelism, spiritual seekers.
“We live in a time when the overt search for spiritual meaning has never been more intense than it is now,” Drane observes. If that is the case, it may seem odd that the church is not flourishing. Instead, these spiritual seekers look everywhere except in the church for an enlarged experience of life that includes spirituality.
Why the avoidance of church? Some of these seekers have prior experience in church and they found it wanting. Drane’s conversations with non-Christians who are “into” spirituality flatly insist that the church is unspiritual, an incredible indictment and worthy of soul-searching among Christians.
What do they mean? To the extent that Christian faith is presented as a set of doctrines and ideas, those who are hoping for an experience with God find the church’s message distracting. Drane quotes Leith Anderson, in A Church for the Twenty-First Century: “The old paradigm taught that if you have the right teaching, you will experience God. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will have the right teaching.”
Second, spiritual seekers find too many in the church who seem content to limit their experience with God to a formal worship service, when what the seekers want is a holistic integration of all their weekly activities into a seamless reality. Well, that is a trenchant critique, since Christians admit that at its best, the Christian life should touch every aspect of our being.
John Drane thinks that of all the cultural types, the spiritual seekers are the most easily reached population, even though this will require the church to make significant shifts. After all, we already affirm that the essence of our faith is life with God, not just correct beliefs, and we agree that this should evidence itself in a daily abiding in Christ. If we can get our act together, we will have much to offer a cultural group that is eager for what Christ provides.
