Functional Atheism

Functional Atheism

Just a few thoughts on David Wells and Os Guinness’ advance paper for Cape Town 2010 – “Global Gospel, Global Era: Christian discipleship and mission in the age of Globalization. “

 

They do a great job at highlighting both the challenges and opportunities that globalization brings to Christian discipleship.

 

The one challenge that stood out to me the most is the lethal effect of secularization. The authors state, “Man does not live by bread alone,” Jesus said, but thanks to the brilliance and power of modern insights and techniques, no generation has come closer to the illusion of being able to do so including the ability to grow churches and conduct effective outreach on the strength of human ingenuity alone and without any genuine need for God at all.” When I read that I had to think about something that I read a while back that talked about functional atheism. Within the next couple paragraphs Wells and Guinness use the same term. Today I was teaching on Paul’s Conversion in Acts 9:1-19. The one thing that really struck me is that Paul moves from self reliance and making plans on his own, to utter less helplessness and then ultimately to trust and dependence in Jesus. In my own work as a youth minister I got to the point at one time where I was convicted that I only talked about faith but did not really trust Jesus with the things that I was doing. I was relying on my own strength and trying to do work that was not mine to do in first place. I think many Christians have stages of faith where we forget to trust Jesus and live in self-reliance. Even though we are Christians we have become (hopefully only for a short time) functional atheists. Wells and Guinness point out that there are churches that have come beset with this functional atheism. This can be seen in some of our church practices. They write, “Secularization means that in the advanced modern world we live in “a world without windows,” so that for many modern Christians, the unseen tends to be also the unreal. Thus it is possible for us to live as “functional atheists,” and in more and more of life to have “no need of God,” so that mission is driven by statistics, demographics, and the “roll out” of the Gospel to the “unreached,” rather than by the traditional passion for Christ and for “the lost.” Thus we need to reflect on our daily practices. Have we set aside our faith in Jesus and put faith in ourselves and into Evangelism techniques or something other then Jesus?

I leave it at that.