CONVERSION IN A POSTMODERN ENVIRONMENT
The May issue of Theology, News and Notes is about "Conflicting Understandings of Christian Conversion." Brad Kallenberg's piece on conversion in a postmodern environment is particularly good. Link

A SAMPLE:
...However, the change of conceptual schemes from modern to postmodern involves not simply retooling old crowbars into more effective ones; the mechanical view of evangelism is itself a modern metaphor that needs replacing. How now are we to think about evangelism? Perhaps postmodernism can school us away from the "how to" to the "to what." In other words, the crucial question for the church to ask is not “How are we to convert the unsaved?" but "To what are we asking them to convert?"...

While I hesitate to say we've grown slothful, I do think that churches may be losing their distinctiveness due to our inattention. In part, our problem can be traced to the fact that we have been bewitched by the myth that the best way to reach the unchurched is to translate the message into terms that anybody could understand. This is a particularly modern myth. In Hendrikus Berkhof's apt illustration, the church since the nineteenth century can be likened to a boat traveling down the river of time that attempted to clear the shoals of modernity by lightening its load. One by one, the items of scandalous particularity (the deity of Christ, the resurrection, etc.) were emptied out of the cargo bay. But alas, now the boat is empty, evacuated of any distinctive content.

Of course evangelicals quickly point out that Berkhof's analysis describes the history of Protestant liberalism and, after all, everyone knows that membership of liberal churches is on the wane. In contrast, effective evangelistic strategies must be found, or so it is claimed, by studying churches that are growing. But sadly, one finds among many megachurches the very same "user-friendly" strategy employed by liberal churches of the last century. What will be the fate of these churches?

Fortunately, there is more than one way to skin a cat. If there is a communication gap between the followers of Jesus and their secular counterparts, and this gap cannot be closed by translating the gospel into "secularese," then perhaps the gap can be closed by raising the level of fluency of the secular hearers so that they can understand the gospel on its own terms.

Perhaps now we can see why some are downright cheerful about the end of the mechanical age. Postmodern philosophy may open up ways for us to see evangelism in more living and organic ways. Specifically, postmodern insights about the nature of language help us appreciate that genuine conversion is tantamount to learning the Christian language from a community that participates in the mind of Christ by co-participating in their form of life and practices...