Martín y Hazel Frost Nuestra Vida en Argentina

This is a true story. Or two true stories, depending on how you look at it.

The way they tell the story in Kanto (East Japan) goes like this: Did you hear about the pastor who drives a BMW? No, seriously, there’s a pastor in one of the Free Evangelical churches in Kansai (West Japan) who goes around in this lovely, luxury BMW. I mean, I don’t know how much they pay those guys in their churches but you’d think they’d have more important things to spend it on than luxury cars. The rest of us make do perfectly well with our beaten-up old second-hand cars. A pastor in a BMW? It just sends the wrong impression.

The way they tell the story in Kansai goes like this: Did you hear about the pastor who drives a BMW? No, seriously, there’s a pastor in one of the Free Evangelical churches near here who goes around in this lovely, luxury BMW. What happened was that he had an old car, and he made do perfectly well with it, but the ladies in his church couldn’t stand it, so they clubbed together and bought a car, registered it in his name, and presented him with it, pretty much against his will. The reason was that their husbands were all businessmen and executives, and when he went to meet them to share the Gospel with them, they wouldn’t take him seriously because of his beaten-up old second-hand car. It just sent the wrong impression.

Lord, forgive me for the time that I’ve made judgements about people without knowing all the facts. Or realising that I can’t know all the facts.

I walked past a cult church today. Well, OK, “cult” is a subjective labelling. I walked past a sect today. I was out with Caitlin wandering through an area of town that was new to me, and came across a sign on a building proclaiming “Jesus Christ!” Once again, I wondered what I was doing here as a church planter - Japan already has a local church and there are a reasonable number in my area - until I realised that the church was one that I had been warned against by a local pastor here.

How do you tell when a church becomes a sect? The obvious answer is in its teachings, and yeah, this one in particular is pretty off the wall, but in general it’s not so easy to say; there’s a huge diversity within Christian teaching and the boundaries are fuzzy. It’s easy enough to use proof texts from the Bible to pull down other Christians and call them nasty names, but I can’t help thinking that isn’t what the Bible is for.

But there is an easier way to tell. A sect is sectarian; it’s a church that has decided that it already has as much of the truth as it needs, and that it need not learn from any other Christians. We’ve got the Bible, we’ve got the Holy Spirit - we don’t need anything else. It’s a misunderstanding of that same Bible which always talks about greeting one another, teaching one another, learning from one another, having mutual concern for one another, encouraging one another and submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, but there you go. That’s what a sect does: it rejects the gift of one another that God has given us. So because it thinks it doesn’t need to learn from other Christians, it closes itself off, to the point at which it simply doesn’t have the opportunity to learn from any other Christians, and so will never know when it’s becoming idiosyncratic or heretical. In that sense, ecumenism is a mark of the Church. Churches that don’t work with other churches are sects.

I suppose the logical conclusion of this is that an awful lot of Evangelical denominations are sects. Hmm.

I’m told that it’s like a paradigm shift - either you get it, or you don’t. It’s hard for us to explain what it is we do here to those who don’t get it, and it’s painful and tiring to feel just as misunderstood by Christians as by non-Christians. You expect non-Christians to not get it. But Christians, no matter how much they talk and even teach that “Church isn’t a building, it’s a people”, still get mighty freaked out when you don’t have a simple answer to the question “where do you go to church?”

We don’t go to church. We are church. For where two or three are assembled in my name, I am there among them.

And there’s the other classic one, “which church do you go to?” Well, there’s only one, isn’t there? Or is Christ divided?

I’m not even trying to be smart-ass. We do have a regular group of people that we meet with and worship with and pray with and read the Bible together with, but it’s not on a Sunday morning and it doesn’t even have a name. We’re toying with the idea of giving it a name partly so we don’t bend the minds of other Christians we meet, but equally we’re toying with the idea of not giving it a name because, well, some minds need bending. But the nature of my job means that I go to a different church every Sunday, whether it’s because I’m asked to preach or because I’m visiting local churches to build up good relationships with the pastors precisely so that they don’t wonder who these strange missionaries are who don’t even have a regular Sunday morning church community.

Because that’s how it works here. You belong to one church, you are a member of that church, you turn up to that church every Sunday morning and there will be a register taken and if you’re not there, you’re liable to get a phone call from the pastor wondering where you were. Visiting another church of your own denomination is OK, at a pinch; visiting another church of another denomination is right out. And so someone even asked us this morning, “is there another church you’re supposed to be at?” Implication: you’re not supposed to be at this one.

The congregational model leads to an incredibly low view of Church. Even though we may recite the Apostle’s Creed every Sunday (“I believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church”), for all practical purposes, the local congregation is the Church. That’s all that people can see. And so when we blunder in with a high view of Church and this crazy idea that the Church is the body of Christ universal and that anyone who is a friend of Christ is a friend of mine, and I’ll meet with two or three other Christians, or more, and that’s The Church constituted right there, the one with the capital letters, people still wonder what kind of Christians we must be if we don’t go to a regular church that they’ve heard of on a regular Sunday morning.

And yet how horrible it must be to be part of a church like that - to deliberately choose to lock yourself into the same group of people every week, to hear the same set of preachers preach the same set of sermons, to receive little or no outside influences, to never see how anyone else does it or to feel like you’re betraying a commitment if you do, to be cut off from the wider Body of Christ, to reject the gift of one another, to close yourself off, and to get to a point where you simply don’t have the opportunity to learn from any other Christians, to never know when you’re becoming idiosyncratic or heretical.

The congregational model makes sectarians of us all.

Our mission agency is currently trying to convince us all that we need to write job descriptions for ourselves. I’m not sure what I think of this idea. I don’t feel particularly warm to it, but I don’t know if that’s just because I’m a typical gen-Xer* who prefers having freedom to being nailed down and put into a box, or because I’m against bureaucracy in general, or because I’m against managerial missiology in all its forms and I’m throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe a bit of all of the above. On the other hand, I am in favour of missionaries being self-evaluative, and thinking about whether what they’re actually doing relates to what they think they should be doing.

But there’s another reason to be in favour of job descriptions for missionaries: it helps to remind us that there’s no such thing as a typical missionary. Yeah, it’s something that we say: “I’m a missionary.” But it’s like saying “I’m an office worker.” It doesn’t communicate at all what you do. There are missionaries who are Bible translators, and some who are pastors, and some who are preachers, and some who are musicians, and some who are IT consultants, and some who are development workers, and some who do disaster relief, and get this, there are some who are not pastors or preachers or church workers in any sense, and yet they still get lumped in with this general category of “missionary”, which makes people think that they are church workers.

There are some senses in which “missionary” is a useful word, but on the whole I am starting to wonder if we’re better off without it.

There are two reasons why I’m in favour of the term as it’s currently used. The first is because it still carries overtones of Victorians in pith helmets and I enjoy appropriating and subverting stereotypes. But that’s a bit of a silly reason. The more sensible reason is that it reminds us that what we do, whatever we do, is vocational, it is related to a bigger and wider mission, and it happens as a result of God’s sending and self-sending into the world. Those are good things. They’re almost enough to make me want to keep hold of it.

On the other hand, though, I work in Japan. The Japanese word for missionary literally means “religion-spreading teacher”, which is horrible. (And OK, I know words aren’t just the sum of their constituent morphemes, but by goodness there isn’t a single one of those morphemes I’d like to keep.) Not only that, but here it conjures up the image of a particular skill-set which is just one subset of what mission is about; here, a “missionary” is a preacher, (maybe primarily a preacher) evangelist, and pastor. There is no other kind.

But I don’t want to be a pastor. I have zero–well OK, less than zero–desire to pastor a Japanese church. Yet if there’s a need for pastors in local churches, denominational leaders look at us with this wide-eyed stare as if to say “What do you mean, you don’t want to pastor our churches? You’re missionaries, aren’t you?” Now of course there are different kinds of missionary, and of course to me that question reads like, “What do you mean you don’t play the xylophone? You’re musicians, aren’t you?” But that’s because right here the cultural understanding of the word “missionary” in Japanese churches–and, I suspect, a lot of other places to–is equal to “church worker.”

Maybe if we dropped the word “missionary” and started describing what it is we actually do, that might start to change. Let’s not be senkyoshi, “religion-spreading teachers”, but let’s be kyokaikaitakusha, “church pioneers”. Maybe that would help.

Well, who am I kidding; you don’t change a culture just by changing the terminology. But at least it would mean that we could shoot back some wide-eyed stares of our own: “What do you mean, you’re asking us to pastor a church? We’re church pioneers, aren’t we?”

* Apparently at a recent convention in our agency, they had a session on working across generations, and someone said, “If you want to see how Generation Y thinks, go and look at Simon’s blog.” I feel flattered, but not necessarily convinced.

Suppose you heard this:

The UK is a white country. It is easier for those of other races to be here when Britain has confidence in its white identity.

How would you feel? How would you feel if you weren’t white? Would that make things “easier” for you? Or would it make you feel like you were a (possibly unwelcome) guest in a country that isn’t yours and doesn’t really value you.

Now that kind of argument, however bigoted it might be, does have some kind of grain of truth behind it - the majority of Britain’s population is indeed white. The majority of Britain’s population is not Christian, which makes the argument not just bigoted but a little bit silly.

But even if, even if, it were, that wouldn’t make the UK a “Christian country”. Numbers can’t. 90% of Rwanda’s population self-identified as Christian just before one ethnic group started brutally wiping out another.

Ah, but Cameron is not talking about numbers, but about values. He says that as a country we should be more confident in our sense of Christian values. But of course he says that while at the same time defunding the social care of the poor, the old and the disabled.

It is not our words that show our values, but our actions.

I get really incensed when people call Japan a “difficult” or a “slow” country. It really isn’t the Japanese people’s fault that they aren’t buying what we’re selling. It may be that we’re not selling it all that well. Gilbert Arland’s quote seems relevant:

When an archer misses the mark, he turns and looks for the fault within himself. Failure to hit the bull’s eye is never the fault of the target. To improve your aim, improve yourself.

But at the same time I will admit the equally prevalent saying that Japan is a “missionary’s graveyard”. Things just don’t happen very quickly here, or at least as quickly as we would like. It wears us down. Perhaps that just speaks about our impatience. I don’t know. What is interesting to me, though, is how different missionaries deal with this.

As far as I can tell, there are three main motives - we might even call them coping strategies. The first motif might be called the motif of faithfulness: this is where God has called me to be, this is what I am meant to be doing, I will stay here doing what I am doing until God tells me to do otherwise. I see this primarily in older missionaries, mainly because it fits right in to the Boomer generation’s culture. Boomers love the idea of faithfulness.

On the positive, this motif draws strength, patience and perseverance from the call of God. These are positive values. They are attributes that we need in a missionary. I am learning to appreciate the need for strength, patience and perseverance in mission. Taking pleasure in faithful service is a very, very important way of avoiding the burnout and disappointment of working the graveyard shift. At least, we can say, I have done my bit, and if we find satisfaction in that we are more likely to be able to continue.

On the negative, however, “faithfulness” can become a justification for a lack of critical reflection, a lack of evaluation and a resistance to change. I did my bit, and I do not expect to be held responsible for the results. It can be hard to distinguish between “I am doing whatever it is God wants me to do” and “God wants me to do whatever it is I am doing.” Do we stop to evaluate, to ask the hard question: is what I am doing actually working? On the contrary, by upholding faithfulness as a virtue, we can excuse fruitless and wasteful ministry; in fact, the more fruitless we are, the more godly we must be for persevering in the face of such adversity. To be somewhat cynical, the very last thing you need, when operating in a faithfulness motif, is success. (I said I am learning to appreciate this motif. I am still learning.)

The second motif is the motif of activity. I do not wish to stereotype, but it is often our Asian brothers and sisters that I see operating in this motif. There are many positives about it. When nothing seems to work we need missionaries who are prepared to try a range of things to see which of them will work. We need entrepreneurial missionaries, and I would love to count myself as one of them. (I’m not sure how much I do count as one.) We also need missionaries who have the commitment, the effort, the drive, the energy to face a country where more than 99% of the population have not responded to Christ. There is certainly work to be done, and the urgency of missionaries operating in the activity motif asks important questions about my own sense of urgency.

On the negative, there is a thin line between being active and being busy, and this country arguably has too much busyness already; missionaries are supposed to be counter-cultural, aren’t they? In a country where men will sacrifice their families on the altar of busyness while children go from school to juku to bukatsu, perhaps missionaries need to be pointing out the slower path.

The other, more pressing, problem with the motif of activity is that it can become a substitute both for strategy and for success. It can become mission according to the politician’s syllogism. (“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”) In a sense, it is very easy to create activity with the appearance of success. An evangelistic meeting which gathers fifty people can be a great thing to write home about - another surprisingly important motivator in the activity motif - and we need not mention how many of them are already Christians because we invited them from our churches and they felt obliged to attend, or how any of this gets followed up and fed into our church planting. The important thing is, we got fifty people to an evangelistic event! In Japan! That’s good, right?

And then there is the third motif, where I am personally at home, the motif of difference: the reason things have gone so slowly so far is because everyone is doing it wrong, wrong, wrong, and we need to do things in a completely different way. The positive here is that if nothing else seems to be working - and let’s face it, here in Japan right now, it doesn’t - there is an outside chance that we actually are all doing it wrong, and so we do need people who are prepared to try things in a completely different way, just in case they hit on an idea that works. We need dreamers, visionaries, iconoclasts and radicals.

What we don’t need, of course, is for them to feel so damned superior about it.

Because the negative side of the motif of difference is the sense of competition it engenders. When I act out of the motif of difference (as I often seem to do these days), I tend to feel I have quite a lot at stake. It is a very insecure mode of operation. In order to demonstrate the superiority of my New And Shiny And Different approach, I need my own methods to succeed where traditional methods have failed. And so I need traditional methods to fail. That just isn’t what mission is about.

And the more I throw out the bathwater, the harder it is for me to hold on to the baby. When it looks like everyone’s ineffective, it is too easy to dismiss many years of experience and wisdom by excessive use of what Koyama might call “straight line” evaluation. (“Yeah, but how many converts did it bring you?”) Evaluation is very helpful for ourselves as part of our own reflection, but can become a weapon when we use it against others.

And, of course, if my New And Shiny And Different approach doesn’t work, what do I do then? Do I give up on the spot?

This is where I need the strength, patience and perseverance that the faithfulness motif provides; I need the enthusiasm and passion that the activity motif provides; I need the innovation and risk-taking that the difference motif provides. I need to strive for the positives and minimize the negatives. And I need to learn to appreciate and value those who work out of motives different to my own.

I am still learning.

In which I mess around with Google visualizations.

Here are two maps. The first one shows population density in Japan:

var dataX = [ ["Aichi", 7403409, 77 ], ["Akita", 1107828, 2, ], ["Aomori", 1391834, 19, ], ["Chiba", 6122113, 97, ], ["Ehime", 1443927, 0, ], ["Fukui", 812395, 4, ], ["Fukuoka", 5054255, 38, ], ["Fukushima", 2052495, 8, ], ["Gifu", 2100375, 14, ], ["Gunma", 2012275, 15, ], ["Hiroshima", 2868756, 17, ], ["Hokkaido", 5535486, 119 ], ["Hyogo", 5586033, 104 ], ["Ibaraki", 2963990, 30, ], ["Ishikawa", 1167892, 15, ], ["Iwate", 1351890, 0, ], ["Kagawa", 1002514, 8, ], ["Kagoshima", 1717330, 7, ], ["Kanagawa", 8917182, 126, ], ["Kochi", 773436, 2, ], ["Kumamoto", 1820942, 25, ], ["Kyoto", 2628864, 63, ], ["Mie", 1875464, 14, ], ["Miyagi", 2340167, 46, ], ["Miyazaki", 1136191, 9, ], ["Nagano", 2170691, 63, ], ["Nagasaki", 1440207, 10 ], ["Nara", 1403686, 43 ], ["Niigata", 2390976, 7 ], ["Okayama", 1948196, 14 ], ["Okinawa", 1375993, 77 ], ["Saga", 855832, 4 ], ["Saitama", 7112636, 140 ], ["Shiga", 1402032, 30 ], ["Shimane", 724918, 2, ], ["Shizuoka", 3799930, 57 ], ["Tochigi", 2011276, 23 ], ["Tokushima", 794128, 4 ], ["Tottori", 595192, 0, ], ["Toyama", 1101342, 7, ], //["Tokyo", 12838435, 441 ], ["Wakayama", 1011556, 2 ], ["Yamagata", 1188229, 3 ], ["Yamaguchi", 1463077,14 ], ["Yamanashi", 870694, 10 ], ["Oita", 1200188, 5 ], ["Osaka", 8806016, 56 ], ]; google.load('visualization', '1', {'packages': ['geomap']}); google.setOnLoadCallback(drawMap); function drawMap() { var pop = new google.visualization.DataTable(); pop.addRows(dataX.length); pop.addColumn('string', 'Area'); pop.addColumn('number', 'Population'); var miss = new google.visualization.DataTable(); miss.addRows(dataX.length); miss.addColumn('string', 'Area'); miss.addColumn('number', 'Missionaries'); for (var i= 0; i < dataX.length; i++) { pop.setValue(i, 0, dataX[i][0]); pop.setValue(i, 1, dataX[i][1]); miss.setValue(i, 0, dataX[i][0]); miss.setValue(i, 1, dataX[i][2]); } var geomap1 = new google.visualization.GeoMap(document.getElementById('visualization1')); var geomap2 = new google.visualization.GeoMap(document.getElementById('visualization2')); var options = {}; options['region'] = 'JP'; options['dataMode'] = 'regions'; options['width'] = '700px'; options['colors'] = [0xffffff, 0x555555, 0x000000, 0xff0000]; geomap1.draw(pop, options); geomap2.draw(miss, options); }

This one shows where all the missionaries are:

(I've removed Tokyo from both maps because it would completely distort the information.)

Some of the guys in Miyagi could spread out a bit more, and likewise those in Saitama could go a bit further north. Hiroshima could do with a few more, and Osaka is seriously underrepresented, although Hyogo is close enough and has missionaries to spare. Nagano has the traditional summer retreat village of Karuizawa, which is why there are a disproportionate number of missionaries there, and Okinawa has a high Christian population, which is why it also has a disproportionate number of missionaries. (Yeah, I know.) Hokkaido has a big population of OMF missionaries particularly because they have a language and culture training centre there. But overall, though, it's not too bad, is it?

Answer: A qualified yes, we're pretty well spread out.

(Obviously it would also make sense to visualize where churches are but I don't have that information in a computerised source. I used Wikipedia for population-by-prefecture and the back of the JEMA Directory 2011 for my source of missionary locations.)

When I went to Bible college, we were taught about a variety of theological viewpoints, with the implication that you would pick the one you liked the look of, since, you know, we’re all Protestants and so there’s nobody to tell you which one you should choose. (Although we will happily treat you like a heretic if you choose the wrong one.) And in terms of learning to work in multi-denominational teams and whatnot, that was all very useful to help us understand each other and, hopefully, not treat each other too much like heretics.

But we were also taught about contextualization and about presenting the Gospel in ways that make the most sense to the recipient, and so now when I come back to this idea of choosing which theological camp you belong to, I can’t help thinking, “Do I only get to choose one?”

Because my friend the social activist with brief dalliances with the Communist party is far more likely to respond to the earthy, radical Jesus of the liberal and liberationist theologies than to the spiritually powerful Jesus of the Pentecostal movement. But my other friend who’s a New Age spirit medium will relate much more easily to a Jesus who is the origin and source of spiritual power than to a Jesus who’s some kind of left-wing political hack.

So as I try to present the Gospel to both these kinds of people, I more and more come to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as “the Gospel”, because Jesus is both liberator of the oppressed and source of spiritual power and a whole lot more besides, and if we only ever present the kind of Jesus that our own pet theology portrays, then not only are we doing Jesus a disservice but we’re doing people who hear about him a disservice as well.

But this idea of choosing one position and sticking to it is so entrenched in our culture - and not just in theology, but any politics and everything else: the urge to divide ourselves into opposing camps is a fundamental technique for making a complicated world more manageable - that not only are we’re almost made to feel traitors if we see any good or use in another position, but people just can’t cope if we flat out refuse to prioritize one position or another. (I remember a wonderful email exchange with a theology student who was trying to pin me down to either Calvinism or Arminianism, who was reduced to infuriated gibbering when I said “It depends on the situation!” Yeah, I choose my doctrines based on whether or not they’ll help people experience Jesus. Pray tell, how do you choose yours?)

Missiologically, we’re encouraged to contextualize and be “all things to all people”. Now then, it’s all well and good trying to contextualize the gospel to Japan, but Japan’s 120 million people and they’re all different: not just in their social groupings but in their personalities, values and everything else. If contextualization is an implicit admission that one size of church tradition does not fit all, is it not the natural next step that one size of theology does not fit all either?

Of course there is a sense in which the Gospel challenges culture and values as well as fitting into them - if we only ever preach a liberationist Jesus to politically left-wing people then they may never engage with the Jesus of spiritual power - and that’s a more general problem with contextualization. Actually this means that we have to continually encounter various facets of the Gospel which our own traditions do not emphasise in order for us to have a fuller picture of God, let alone anyone else. But can a missionary be happy to propose a picture of Jesus that is not his or her own personal understanding - or, going a bit further out on a limb, to hold multiple understandings of Gospel in tension, without privileging one or the other, and use whichever is appropriate to the time?

In short, can one be a Liberal and an Evangelical at the same time, a Calvinism and an Arminian…. what about a Protestant and a Catholic and an Orthodox? From my own faith journey, I believe so, and not only that, but if our primary allegiance is to Jesus rather than any particular theological system, I think this is the necessary end result of testing everything and holding on to that which is good, or of seeing Jesus at work in other Christians and treating them with love and respect.

I will try to interest my activist neighbour in a Jesus who stood with the poor, but I will also try to show him the Jesus of spiritual power; I will try to interest my New Age neighbour in a Jesus of spiritual power but I will also try to show her the Jesus who stood with the poor. And I myself must continue to experience both of these Jesuses, and many more besides, if I am ever to become all things to all people, so that I might win some.

A funny thing happened last week. One of the communities that we’re part of here, a deaf signing group, went on an outing. The plan was to visit a deaf school, walk from there down the hill through a temple to view the autumn leaves, and catch the bus home from the bottom of the hill. Because of having Caitlin with us, we came by car, which messed everyone up. (Rule one of Japan: Don’t be different.) So the group leader, being a good Japanese leader and so knowing that the most important thing is to keep the group together, did something very clever.

Once we finished looking around the school, she said, “Right, everyone. We’ll finish our outing together here, but of course anyone who wants to walk through the temple may do so.” Of course, everyone apart from us did. But by making sure we all started and (at least officially) finished the outing together, she made sure that, even though we were doing something different, we weren’t treated any differently from the rest of the group.

Because excluding someone from what everyone else is doing is pretty much the rudest thing you can possibly do in Japan. Fukuda says “many Japanese activities can be explained by the following fundamental proposition: Japanese people have a latent phobia of isolation… Japanese people have a fear of death, but much greater than death, they have a fear of ostracism.”

Incidentally, tomorrow we have our house church meeting and we’re going to try introducing Communion. Not everyone is a Christian. So what do you do?

Something in the newspaper the other day got me thinking about apologetics and the tradition of Christian debating. The more I think about it, the more I think that Tertullian was right: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” It seems to me that Christian apologetics is a losing proposition, for several reasons. (Some of which I’ve written about before.)

I don’t tend to go in for apologetics per se because if you’re trying to convince someone of the reasonableness of your position, you’re already on the back foot. It’s basically like trying to convince people that you’re sane - if they don’t think you are, arguments won’t help. But there is another aspect about the way that most proponents today go about apologetics that makes me think that they’re doing it wrong, wrong, wrong.

The big-name Christian apologists are, basically, modernists. Their method of apologetics is to show that belief in the God of Christianity is entirely compatible with human rationality. In other words, they are accepting the proposition that human rationality is the standard against which God is judged. This may not be particularly glorifying to God but it certainly glorifies human rationality.

They might say that they are accepting this proposition as a starting point because it is the mindset of those that they are going up against, and hey, we’re into contextualization and starting from where the other person is coming from, but you can’t be a Christian and leave that starting point unchallenged. The Christian starting point is that God is the standard against which everything, up to and including human rationality, is judged.

This is why I have no interest in debates between prominent atheists and prominent apologists. They both place their ultimate faith and authority in the human capacity for reason and logic and in the need to make rationally defensible choices. In that sense, they’re both arguing the same side.

Worse, if you do go down that road, what kind of a God can you end up with? A God who is rationally defensible may be the clockwork god of the Deists but not the surprising, challenging and sometimes confusing God of the Bible.

As I said, the rationalist approach to apologetics comes from the modernist tradition, so they are all alien species who don’t speak my language. Brian McLaren (I think) wrote that if you ask a modernist Evangelical to choose between Jesus and the truth, they will dodge the question by saying that Jesus is the truth. In other words, the relationship is important, yes, but only because it furthers me in my quest for truth. If Jesus didn’t help my quest for truth, why would I bother with him?

Surely what we should be advocating is not the question for truth but the relationship. Unfortunately, relationships are non-replicable; they’re different kind of “facts” to scientific facts, (For which see “Can a scientist love his wife?” in Swinton and Mowat’s “Practical Theology”) and not really amenable to critical debate.

I think this is one reason why we don’t see many Christian apologists in the post-modern mould - both because of a renewed sense of the mystery and otherness of God, and because of a prioritization of the quest for relationships over the quest for truth means that the debate format just doesn’t really work for us any more.