Foundations for Christian Mission, Mentor's Guide, MG04

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F O U N D A T I O N S F O R C H R I S T I A N M I S S I O N

the mega-church phenomenon that emphasizes the resolution of the problems of the individual, the explosion of para-church ministries all tailored to helping individuals overcome their personal issues and problems, and the mass exodus of many from the Church, psychologically speaking. Many today ignore church membership, seeing church attendance as either unnecessary or only relevant if it addresses particular needs of the individual and/or family. Churches have responded to these trends, becoming more like religious department stores than living communities. What do you make of the “privatization” of Christian experience? Does the promise of God for a Savior for the world allow itself to be easily personalized, or do our current trends of hyper-individualized Christianity represent a departure from the “people of God” emphasis in both Old and New Testaments? What is the most effective language in which to communicate the Gospel to the lost culture today? Guilford Dudley III argues that the language of myth is the language we must recover. Dudley is not using this term to mean unhistorical tales of the gods, but the kind of total life and world story that dare to explain all of life and the world in its drama. “A leading figure in American Protestantism has frequently told the press: ‘With the decline of Christianity, it is necessary to travel light. I want to get rid of as much theological baggage as I can.’ That laconic remark typifies an attitude that is growing among Protestant churches in this country. In their zeal to arrest the so-called decline of Christianity, the churches are showing an alarming readiness to jettison all concepts and language that do not immediately conform to what they have judged to be the canons of modernity. The language they have abandoned most willingly and with least discrimination is symbol and myth. This decision has put them on a perilous course, leaving them adrift and even farther removed from genuine communication with our culture. They are misassessing the culture, and limiting both the meaning of modernity and the language of the Gospel. This book is a study of how much is at stake in the very mythic language which the churches are hastening to disown, and indeed how hard that language dies in the heart of our famished culture. For even though mythic language seems to have been banished from the official parlance of the church, it has reappeared in major works of literary art that give testimony to its vivifying power” (Guilford Dudley III, The Recovery of Christian Myth. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004, p. 13). Although written in the late 60s, Dudley’s work prophetically argues The Recovery of Christian Myth

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