Again I have heard a number of people explaining how we need to get involved with the younger part of our society and evangelise them at source (i.e. schools, colleges, leisure and the like) but I have a question with this, and it is this:
If we catch fish how will we clean them and what do we think we will be bringing them back to?
It is superb that we are going to target particular people groups but that's not a new thing now is it?
It is excellent that we are coming up with multimedia, flashing lights, relevant music and conversation but again that's what the coffee bars of the fifties did and where are those from that generation?
Telling is easy and inculturation (I hear the mumbled words of Paulo Freire and notice, once again, the cover of 'Pedagogy' as it calls me to delve inside once more) essential. Understand the language of the people group and using their language translate the Gospel truths from where we own them to a place where they receive them.
And when we win them, what do we bring them back to? A place where cultures clash or co-exist uneasily (and perhaps by those who were there first, unwanted)? We need to change our language and become wonderfully different to those places and people around us. I think a quote (from 'Pedagogy) that I had on my wall when doing some postgrad stuff back in the nineties might suffice here:
“The multitude is always in the wrong.”
So come one people - let's be different and do it the way we used to in the first century and present the values, standards and attitudes that make us a wonderful minority and our faith a wondrous minority sport - and keep doing it until the pool is fished up and the nets need no more mending because the fisherman and the Carpenter are reunited around a table to feast and sing Hallels.
Praise to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit who builds the Church, holds it in His hand and empowers it through His Spirit.