A New Apologetic for a Post-Christian World

The modern era was a time when rational arguments and logical reasoning was the primary way of convincing nonreligious people to turn to Jesus. Those days are gone and those methods of helping nonreligious people find and follow Jesus are dead. In the place of those methods is a new apologetic characterized by human aesthetics, imaginative expression, and inspired living.

This new apologetic makes more innate sense to the faithfully skeptical than the circular arguments and facts about Christianity that they have come to justifiably scrutinize. This scrutiny is largely based on the observations they make about Christians not the facts about Christianity. For the church to most faithfully engage today's skeptic, it must move away from an apologetic based primarily on reason and logic and inspire people toward exploring God through the recognition and participation in the story of God.

This new apologetic is interesting to skeptics and explorers of the Christian. This new apologetic heightens the senses of everyday people in everyday life, legitimizing the gospel and kingdom life for all who see, touch, hear, taste, and smell it. Gladhearted disciple making is the new apologetic. We need to embrace it, or the gospel story will remain nothing more than something for skeptics and explorers to scoff at, disparage, and explicitly dismiss. The Christian church is God's promise and God's plan to serve the world. Gladhearted disciples, therefore, are to be the agents of such an apologetic. The sanctifying church must become the kingdom society that helps its current and future adherents turn innate missional instincts into outward missional expressions and embodiment.

Where Missional Instincts Come From

Missional instincts are found within each one of us. God fearer or not, the native impulse to help someone who is in need (whether acted upon or not), to smile at the sight of two people in love, to weep with another in a time of remembrance or loss, and to shout for joy alongside another in a moment of celebration unequivocally comes from the missional instincts born into the heart, mind, and soul of all of humanity. We are heirs of the examples above as well as a host of other emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, and social native impulses. Each one of us has been created in the image of God. Missional instincts come from within wholly because they were breathed into each one of us when God chose to imaginatively and outwardly express what was a native impulse from within. It was the native impulse of God that birthed humanity and creation.

To be created in the image of God simply means that we bear something of God's likeness—God's nature, splendor, wisdom, and morality. We resemble God. Therefore, we are God's promised and planned medium in which to deliver the enduring message of peace (salvation) and justice that works itself out through hope and healing to the shattered world around us.

We best comprehend and actualize the image of God through three key lines of thought—natural, political, and moral. Each of these three concepts uniquely provides a divergent angle in which to explore accurately what it means to have been created in the image of God and to live into that actuality.

We've been created with spirit, just as God is spirit. Unlike God (the Father), however, we have also been created with flesh in which to hospitably accommodate our spirits. John Wesley once alluded to the idea that God did not create humanity as merely matter and out of a meaningless, unintelligent clump of mud, but as a spirit just like God. We've been created in the natural likeness of God. We have missional instincts because we share the natural likeness of God.

This natural likeness means that in our spirits we've been created with the wisdom and understanding that allows us to know evil from good, the desire or will to do the good we know, and the absolute freedom to choose between a life that follows God or an anthropocentric life characterized by self-satisfaction, narcissism, and a host of other indulgent and ignorant traits.

Along with being created in the natural likeness of God, we've also been created in the political likeness of God. Humanity is not only in relationship with one another but also in relationship with the entirety of the created world. We've been formed to participate with God in caring for humanity and for the natural world. We have missional instincts because we share the political likeness of God.

We've also been designed in the moral likeness of God. We've been decidedly and distinctly created to worship God with truth and the righteousness of our lives in order that we might reflect the holiness of God. We have faithful instincts because we share the moral likeness of God.

The natural, political, and moral likeness in which we've been formed and are being formed is precisely where the innate desire to live faithfully is born and takes up residence. With that said, it is imperative for gladhearted disciples to help nonreligious people notice God's likeness within them; it really isn't about how far skeptics are from God but rather just how closely they've been created to resemble God. This truth begins to shape a new way of apologetics. It isn't reason, and it isn't truth as told by us that captures the heart of the nonreligious person. It is, instead, the connection to the missional instincts or native impulses that helps close the believability gap—the space between dogma and everyday religion where we find Jesus-centered mission.

Hence, the desire to do right, to live wholly, to be about the things of God takes residence within each one of us. It is this inner disposition and our posture that guide us toward becoming people of intentional mission. Likewise, it is expressly the instinctual mission that guides gladhearted disciples to live out God's story through missional expressions of hope and healing.

What Missional Instincts Involve and Imply

To be missional, gladhearted disciples is to participate in God's...