By way of introduction, we are reading “The Lion’s World,” by Rowan Williams (OUP, 2013).  It is a transcription of three lectures he gave during Holy Week 2011 about C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books.

I had expected to skim the introductory part of the book and plow into the “meat” of it to find things worth talking about, but I only made it a few pages before this caught my attention:

“Lewis [was] dealing with a public who thought they knew what it was they were disbelieving when they announced their disbelief in Christian doctrine.  The same situation is even more common today.  It is not true that large numbers of people reject Christianity – if by ‘reject’ we mean that they deliberately consider and then decide against it.” (I’m reading this on my Kindle, so can’t give page numbers)

I had not thought of the challenge of evangelism in this way before.  Working in New York, we were accustomed to thinking of it as a “missionary field.”  It was a commonplace to talk about the high level of biblical illiteracy and the proportion of the population that had never even been in a church.  We assumed that we were starting from zero, but perhaps that was not quite accurate.  Our culture is littered with reminders of Christian influence – Sunday closings, dry counties, churches in prominent downtown locations in cities and towns everywhere.  Being unchurched in a post-Christian society is not quite the same as being naïve to the Christian message.  This has implications for how (and what) we communicate.

I’m a great fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.  In them, he appropriates a riotously eclectic assortment of myths and folklore, modern cultural stereotypes, literary references, the triumphs and irritations of technology, and mashes it all into story lines that move at breakneck speed.  They flatter the reader who notices bits of Shakespeare or Platonic philosophy flying past, but should not be mistaken for careful introductions to those or any other topic. 

Something similar happens in the popular approach to the Christian story.  Almost everyone knows the general outline well enough that its key elements can be reduced to shorthand.  Lacking the full “back story,” the average person nonetheless takes those bits of the story and plugs them into other narratives – Christians and Christianity become agents of oppression, the Church is at best quaint and at worst toxic to the modern self-actualized soul, God becomes bitter and boring in His solipsism and total lack of irony.

Over time, this comes to represent the extent of what people “know” about Christianity.  No wonder they don’t come on Sunday.  (The ham-fisted attempts at proselytizing by many who claim to speak for Christianity don’t help either, but that’s another story.) 

This is where I am supposed to lay out my bold four-point plan to transform how we get the message to the unchurched but not unaware.  I wish I had one.  About all I have to fall back on as an opener is an appeal to mystery. 

Williams refers to an understanding between Lewis and Dorothy Sayers (a complex evangelist if there ever was one!) that there is value in stories in which the Christian message is “latent.”  Some would argue that in the Narnia books the religious content is scarcely hidden – Phillip Pullman certainly seemed to get worked up about it.  Others have criticized them for being too inconsistent and unsystematic to serve as wholesome catechizing literature – a Google search produces some hilariously shrill Evangelical critiques.  Maybe both extremes miss the point.  I’m willing to give latency a try.  How about you?