Free Aaron Renn Subscription

And thoughts about Evangelism in the Negative World

At a recent conference, I was very pleased to see our Church body’s resident Church Demographic Trends Expert begin his presentation with an explanation of Aaron Renn’s Three Worlds of Evangelism hypothesis [TWoW]. Renn’s TWoW hypothesis is an important insight to understand for anyone interested in the future of the church.

I happen to be the owner of three gift subscriptions to Aaron Renn’s substack, which I will give to the first 3 people who email me at Resilient@cwlk.church with the subject line “Pick Me!”

Aaron’s basic premise is that the American public’s view of Christianity has shifted from one in which Christianity was viewed as something positive → to something neutral → to our current world in which Christianity is viewed as fundamentally negative.

From Renn’s article:

• Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.

• Neutral World (1994–2014): Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.

• Negative World (2014–Present): Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.

It is Renn’s contention that the Negative World requires different evangelistic strategies than the Positive or Neutral Worlds. He advocates for something similar to Rod Dreher’s Benedictine Option, which is a retreat from the World. It is an option in which churches build separate, parallel institutions and networks.

Our Church’s lead Demographer accepts Renn’s hypothesis, but has a different strategy for evangelism in the Negative World. He makes a perfect case for an evangelism based on personal hospitality. As a model, he shares how he and his wife dedicate a certain number of evenings to neighborhood hospitality, crafting the best cocktails their pagan neighbors have ever tasted. It’s a great strategy, but it's proving challenging to get pew-sitting Lutherans to break out of the mold and engage their Negative World neighbors. Lutherans, it turns out, are fairly timid creatures who prefer to leave the evangelizing to the clergy class.

Highways and Hedges

I would like to propose an additional strategy, which I will dub “The Highways and Hedges Approach.” I get the name from the King James translation of Jesus’ Parable of the Wedding Banquet, in which a king becomes frustrated that no one will accept invitations to his son’s wedding banquet. In the parable, the kingdom’s respectable people “ […] paid no attention [to the invitations] and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them” [Matthew 22]. So the king instructs his servants to seek “anyone they can find,” gathering the good and the bad alike from the highways and the hedges.

For our church, the Highways and Hedges approach has meant reaching out to the recovery community. Like the king in the parable, we’ve invited the respectable people of our community and found a certain percentage of them just aren’t interested in our little Sunday morning celebrations. Yet, anywhere from 10-40 Highway and Hedges people arrive in white vans from local sober living homes, perfectly content to worship with us.

And I think there is room to do more. In the coming months, I will be reaching out to other WELS churches to invite them to join us. Imagine what we could accomplish with a team of mentors who walk alongside individuals in recovery as they transition out of sober living situations and into the complex world of employment, housing, and bills.

Or think about what could happen if we had a Sober Living Liaison—someone who could standardize the methods and procedures we use to cultivate great relationships with Sober Living Homes, not just at our Laveen campus, but at our church’s second campus and at Heritage Lutheran in Gilbert. We have pieces of the strategy in place, but we need someone to take the reins and further develop it.

Or imagine if someone were to head up our Welcome Basket program and make connections with local businesses, allowing us to continue offering our welcome baskets full of toiletries, socks, and underwear to formerly homeless people when our $4,000 grant runs out?

These ideas will have ripple effects. When communicated to the pew-sitting church member, they will serve as encouragement. For gospel-minded Christians, seeing the church serve in this way can be a real shot in the arm.

For the business community—whether or not they decide to join us in blessing people with welcome baskets—learning about our strategy can spark a sense of curiosity. Like the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, they will ask themselves, “Who are these strange Christians who not only provide for the needs of the poor, but invite them to join their church as full members?”

Epilogue.

Someone once said, “The future is here; it’s just distributed unevenly.” We could say the same for the Negative World. It’s here with both barrels blazing. But there are still pockets of the Positive and Neutral Evangelical worlds across the nation. They can be found in neighborhoods, communities, and in the hearts of every American. So some of the old techniques will continue to work. [Heck, if I still drank, I’d let our church’s lead demographer make me a cocktail.]

But my pastor recently said this about Resilient, “it is [our church’s] single biggest way to reach people who have little to no church background.” So, now that we've found a strategy that works, we're going all-in on this winning formula.

With all this talk of banquets, we need a good “come to the table” song to close out the reading experience.