The ability to understand the meaning of words is essential for effective communication. That’s not only true in order to understand different languages, it’s also true when speaking to people of different geographical locations, and even different generations. Here in Australia we talk about our car batteries going flat, but if you said that in America they would wonder if you had driven over your battery. In America batteries go dead, even though they were never alive to begin with!

In the same way when we talk about God in our post-Christian culture many people will wonder who we’re talking about. Many of the words that we are so familiar with, and think everyone els

e should be familiar with, like sin or repentance or salvation, just aren’t part of people’s vocabulary anymore. The truth is that the Western world is becoming increasingly secular. In fact, our culture isn’t just Post-Christian, it will soon be Pre-Christian, with the majority of people having no idea what Christianity is about.

How do we make the gospel relevant in that context? Of course the gospel is always relevant, but how do we present the gospel in a way that our contemporary culture can understand it. I’ve just finished reading Ken Ham’s book ‘Gospel Reset.’ He makes the point that we need to change how we present the gospel, and he compares Peter’s method in Acts 2 with Paul’s in Acts 17.

Peter proclaimed the gospel to a predominantly Jewish audience, who knew what the Bible taught about God the Creator, about sin, and the need for atonement. The point of Peter’s sermon was to convince them that Jesus is the Saviour, the one who atoned for their sin through his death on the cross, in order to reconcile them with God.

But we are proclaiming the gospel, not to people familiar with biblical ideas, but to people who have no foundational knowledge of the God of the Bible, or of sin, or many other things we take for granted. We are ministering to people like those Paul ministered to in Acts 17, the Greeks in Athens. They knew nothing of the Creator God, or sin, or their need for salvation, and so Paul goes right back to basics, in fact he goes right back to the beginning, and introduces them to ‘the God who made the world and everything in it. (Act 17:24)’ Paul says the gospel is ‘folly to Gentiles, (1 Cor 1:23)’ because they don’t understand it, in much the same way people don’t understand it today.

Like Paul we need to communicate the gospel in ways that the world can understand. We can’t presume they know anything about the Bible, God, Jesus or sin. We can’t presume they know what we mean when we use words like justification, redemption, or atonement. In Jesus’ parable of the sower (Mt 13:3-8) there were different types of ground on which the seed fell. Some was hard, some was stony, some was choked with weeds, while others was good. In the recent past we could assume there was lots of good soil, but today the ground is getting increasingly hard. As Christians we can’t just keep scattering seed hoping that it will take root, we need to do some soil preparation, we need to plow the ground, so the seed can take root in people’s hearts.

One of the ways that we make the gospel relevant in our culture is to engage in dialogue with people’s worldviews and ask why do they believe what they do? But often the gospel becomes relevant when people can see the difference the gospel has made in our lives, when they see it works, particularly do we actually love the people we’re sharing it with. The gospel becomes relevant when we become relevant!