“To them [people in today's culture], Christianity isn’t normal. This is really important to realize, and if you aren’t sensing this in our emerging culture, you might be too enclosed in your Christian network and subculture to fully see what’s happening.
If you are a baby boomer or of an older generation and were born into a Christian home, you probably have relationships with people who still share values and beliefs that are more in line with a Judeo-Christian world, and you might not see the change in emerging generations. If you are younger, were raised in a church, and surround yourself socially only with Christians, then you might not notice this as strongly either. And so it’s important that we think like missionaries. Instead of viewing our towns and cities as Judeo-Christian and feeling that everyone needs to automatically adhere to what we believe, we need to act like missionaries do when they enter a different culture. When missionaries enter another culture, they listen, learn, study the spiritual beliefs of the culture, and get a sense of what the culture’s values are. Then may try to discover what experiences this culture has had with Christians and what the people of the culture think of Christianity. Missionaries in a foreign culture don’t practice the faiths or embrace the spiritual beliefs of that culture, but they do respect them, since the missionaries are on the other culture’s turf.“
They Like Jesus but Not the Church by Dan Kimball
