communicating today

"It is much more comfortable, of course, to go on speaking the gospel only in familiar phrases to the middle classes. But that would be as wrong as, for example, if Hudson Taylor had sent missionaries to China and then told them to learn only one of three separate dialects that the people spoke. In such a case, only one group out of three could hear the gospel. We cannot imagine Hudson Taylor being so hard-hearted. Of course he knew men do not believe without a work of the Holy Spirit, and his life was a life of prayer for this to happen; but he also knew that men cannot believe without hearing the gospel. Each generation of the Church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

In a parallel way we are being as overwhelmingly unfair, even selfish, towards our own generation...The reason often we cannot speak to our children, let alone other people's, is because we have not taken the time to understand how different their thought-forms are from ours...So what is said in this book is not merely a matter of intellectual debate. It is not of interest only to academics. It is utterly crucial for those of us who are serious about communicating the Christian gospel in the twentieth century."

-Francis Schaeffer, Escape from Reason

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