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Evangelism and Popular Culture: Reflections and Questions from an International Study Process

Abstract This article reports on the work and the deliberations of the United Evangelical Mission's Working Group on Evangelism and Popular Culture. Working with rough heuristic categories, the group identifies Protestantism's discomfort with popular cultural expressions and finds it rooted in Protestant history and modernist cultural theory. Using a postmodernist approach that looks at ways of meaning making in popular culture, the group calls for theological discernment and the identification of the work of the Holy Spirit within popular cultural expressions. Following J. K A. Smith, liturgies are identified as shaping human identities. Secular, thick liturgies are often far more influential than Christian thin practices. Popular culture is a mirror of groundbreaking social change, but classical Protestant churches still follow the organisational principles of the 19th century. The group argues that to evangelise within popular culture, these churches will have to change their shape and structures, becoming missional but not consumer-driven. ********** It can be observed in Protestant churches all over the world that young people complain about traditional worship services being boring and outmoded, and that they leave the church altogether or move on to Pentecostal and charismatic congregations. At the same time, Protestant churches find it increasingly difficult to evangelize young people who are not yet Christian believers. Within the governing bodies of the United Evangelical Mission (UEM), a communion of 36 churches in three continents, (1) this observation has led to intense discussions about the relationship of evangelism to popular culture. In 2008, the UEM governing bodies decided to set up a small working group on this issue, giving it the task of looking at the existing evangelism work of UEM member churches in regard to popular culture and assisting churches in developing new approaches. This group consisted of four persons: Christina Brudereck, (2) a theologian, poet, writer and evangelist who works on the fringes of the Evangelical Church in Germany; (3) Kisuba Kateghe, a pastor and leading evangelist of the Baptist Church in the Center of Africa, (4) located in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; Endri Sulaksono, a painter, photographer, art teacher and missionary from Java in Indonesia, member of the reformed Christian Church in East Java, (5) and former co-worker of Operation Mobilisation; (6) and this author. Between 2010 and 2012, our group went for exposures in the Rhine-Ruhr conurbation in Germany, in Malang and Surabaya in East Java, and in Dar es salaam in Tanzania, looking for popular culture(s) in each place and searching for churches, congregations, Christian groups and individuals who engage with these cultures. What is popular culture? When we started our work, we realized that we had to come up with at least a broad definition of popular culture. "Culture," of course, is a vague term. (7) As a working supposition, we decided to look at what people engage with when they relax and enjoy themselves, and particularly at cultural expressions that seemed popular among young people, but that pastors, church workers and church leaders were uncomfortable with or openly hostile to. Their bias was often based on value judgments--popular culture was described as immoral, consumerist, manipulative or simply dumb. (We realized how much we had internalized such value judgments when, for example, we found ourselves on stage, very uncomfortably, next to scantily-clad young singers on a private Indonesian TV station's popular music show--we had just wanted to observe, but the producers were so interested in what we were doing that they decided to have us interviewed during its live broadcast.) In Africa and Asia, we often heard that popular culture was "Westernized" and would destroy authentic traditional culture and values. Pastors worried that youngsters even in the remote Tanzanian Usambara Mountains were fervent fans of Bayern Munich or Manchester United, and adolescent Javanese were more familiar with Disney cartoons than with Wayang puppetry. …