Getting Back To Basics

Rediscovering Our Foundations in a Post-Christian Culture

Introduction

It’s funny, but over the past few weeks I’ve had multiple people tell me that they are beginning some Christianity 101 courses in their churches. I’m not sure if something is in the water, but this seems to be happening all around, and it really piqued my interest. We have worked hard at creating a culture in our church plant where there are no such thing as stupid questions, just stupid people who don’t ask questions. Christianity is weird, the Bible is weird, and so if it doesn’t provoke questions then perhaps we are not reading it right! In our context in rural Ireland, there is a knowledge about faith and tradition, but in the past few years it has been in stark decline. People have drifted away from tradition yet have not lost their curiosity for God and the Bible. This leads to amazing insights and questions in our community groups like, “Why did Pharoah find an elderly Sarai attractive?” And, “Did snakes used to have legs?” And “Why are the disciples so stupid?”

Great questions like that…yet, it also has led to explaining things that make me pause. At times like it feels like defining a term by using the term itself. I found myself struggling to explain things like justification, grace, repentance, without leaning on my Christianese. As our church has developed over the last seven years, God has been developing me too. In fact, He’s been taking me back to the beginning of my journey of faith where I didn’t really know anything either!

This situation signals something profound for me. I think we've entered a stage where Christianity's basic vocabulary has become a forgotten language, even in historically Christian societies. The assumptions we've built our teaching upon have quietly eroded. But rather than lament this, I think this is a wonderful opportunity for us to really reconnect with the beauty of a faith we have perhaps overcomplicated.

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The Gift of Starting Fresh

For generations, Christian educators could assume certain baseline knowledge. The average person might not have been a devout and regular church goer, but they knew the Christmas story, understood the basic outline of the story of David and Goliath, and grasped biblical morality's general themes. This cultural Christianity created shared vocabulary, a common grammar that made deeper conversations possible. We could talk about books of the Bible like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John without explaining that these we’re members of an up-and-coming boy band. We are still the grandchildren of Christendom. We might have rolled our eyes at our parents and their parents on how they handled things, but we still talk the same language.

Today's reality is starkly different, and we can hear the complaints all around us.

Sunday school attendance has plummeted!

Public education has largely removed religious literacy!

Immigration has brought beautiful diversity but also religious plurality that challenges any assumed Christian baseline!

I have heard people use these reasons (OK, let’s be real here; excuses) to try to explain why it’s hard to share our faith. However, could it actually be that we are leaning on a privilege we have enjoyed since Christendom? We find ourselves teaching intermediate concepts to people who lack elementary understanding – and in many ways it’s not their fault. I began to notice this trend in quiz shows. The questions that were of high value, or appeared the most difficult, were often Bible questions. And I loved the garnered attention when I answered the $250,000 question in seconds as people thought I was some sort of savant for knowing that Moses brother was called Aaron. But if unchecked, we can blame people for not being enlightened like us, and we miss entirely the notion of grace that we too have received in abundance. It’s like blaming the soil as per the parable for not being ‘good’ enough. Or we turn to the new voices of Christian values such as Jordan Peterson and movements like the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), and celebrate them speaking about Jesus and the Bible. However, on careful examination it appears to me that this is a desire to return to the Kingdom values of Jesus while sidelining the repentant heart transformation that is the pre-cursor to this. The bedrock of a changed society is not a changed political regime, but people with changed hearts.

But here's what strikes me: this isn't necessarily a crisis. It might be a blessing for us, albeit a challenging one.

When I first encountered this reality in my own church context, my instinct was defensive. How could people not know these things? But as I watched people grapple with incarnation, redemption, and grace without assumed knowledge's baggage, something unexpected happened. They asked questions I'd never considered. In fact, they asked questions that I had rarely heard mature Christians ask.

"Why would God become human?" Not "How?" but "Why?" The question cut through centuries of theological discussion and landed at the heart of the matter. This wasn’t a theoretical question from an academic philospher, but from a new follower of Jesus who just wanted to know. Without comfortable assumptions that everyone knows this is important, we're forced to articulate why it matters. And how we stumble at times! However, this stripping away creates space for genuine discovery. When we can't rely on cultural Christianity to do foundational work for us, we must return to the source itself. We rediscover why these truths captivated the first believers, why they were worth preserving, why they still matter. We stop imagining Christianity through our Western eyes and begin tentatively entering the world in which it was written. This was never more apparent when discussing Genesis with an Indian couple as my 16 year old son grew nervous over the question of arranged marriages, all while they completely connected with the lived experience of the biblical narrative, warts and all.

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Rediscovering the Basics

What are the "basics" of Christianity? The question itself reveals our predicament. Different traditions would answer differently. It’s one of the reductionistic ways I learned about brand Christianity. I didn’t know how a Methodist was different than a Baptist, so I bought a poster from a local Christian bookstore that was almost like a cheat sheet. Baptist baptise believers, Anglicans baptise babies. Simple! Yet, more often than not these reductionistic tropes actually cause more confusion, and even division. However, we wear them as a badge of honour. In our context, very few know the distinctives between Presbyterian, Baptist, Independent, Methodist.. etc. etc. etc. And in a lot of ways, these don’t matter. And herein lies the issue for us…

Stripped of denominational distinctives, what remains?

Perhaps we begin with the simple yet profound claim that reality is not meaningless, that behind everything we see, touch, taste, smell and feel stands a personal God who creates, sustains, and ultimately redeems. This isn't a philosophical proof but a lived conviction that shapes everything else. God exists. And as I realised as a 21-year-old atheist, is that if He exists then it has some major implications for my life! When we assume this knowledge, we miss the wonder. When we must explain it from scratch, we're forced to reckon with its implications. We often start with the ‘doings’ of Christianity when we are called on to explain it. These doings are important, but we must not skip over the Being that we first understand to make sense of these doings.

Consider Jesus Himself. Cultural Christianity has domesticated him into a familiar figure. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, a first-century life coach with good moral advice. A babe in a manger, or someone who’s resurrection kind of interrupts our lives on Easter Sunday before we return to the sport and chocolate. Perhaps in the desire to make Jesus relevant, we’ve actually missed how counter cultural and interrupting He is. What’s more, we are surprised when people respond positively to His interruptions. When we strip away assumptions and encounter him fresh in the Gospel narratives, something startling emerges. Here is someone who claims divine authority, who speaks of judgment and mercy with equal intensity, who promises both comfort and disruption. The Jesus who emerges from careful, foundational study is far more compelling than the Jesus of cultural assumption. There is a saying in Ireland that sharing the Gospel is like ploughing granite. This is just not true. When there is genuine space for random questions about the Bible and our faith, people open themselves up to it. I call it reverse evangelism – people want to know more, and they pursue us with curiosity. I have laughed so much in our community groups as we’ve wrestled with these things. I remember leaving a cliff-hanger in the story of Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Esau, to which a lady asked, “Is it ok if I read ahead tonight to find out what happens?” In our normalisation of Jesus and our faith, perhaps we’ve not moved on from the basics, perhaps we’ve lost them.

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The Challenge of Translation

This work isn't merely academic, or the work of theologians, it's deeply practical and relatable to all. How do we translate concepts forged in ancient contexts for contemporary minds? The challenge isn't just a linguistic or anthropological one but conceptual. What does "sin" mean to someone who's never heard of the term moral absolute? How do we explain "salvation" to people who don't feel lost? Even in Ireland, we can talk about sin as rebellion, but we are quite fond of those when faced with overwhelming and malevolent authority. Rebellion becomes a positive thing. It has been said that if you want us to do something, tell us we can’t do it. I had such an interesting conversation about this cultural similarity to a friend of mine from Texas. (You can tell me if this is accurate or not!)

We need to understand what we mean when we are describing these things, not necessarily parrot them from theology books or even church history from different contexts. What surprises me, is that this has always been the pattern for a church that is missionary since its formation by Christ and empowering by the Spirit. Translation and incarnation has always been the thing. The early church faced similar challenges. Paul's letters reveal a missionary grappling with how to communicate Jewish concepts to Gentile audiences. His approach wasn't to water down the message but to find new metaphors, new entry points. He spoke of adoption to people who understood Roman legal systems, of athletes to those familiar with Greek games, of slavery and freedom to those who lived in an empire built on both.

We need similar creativity today. The Trinity might be better understood through relationships than philosophical categories. Sin might be more accessible through human flourishing than legal frameworks. Redemption might resonate more deeply when connected to contemporary concerns about healing and restoration. Holiness, in the lens of justice. Of course, we need to be careful when doing this work, but let’s not avoid it due to that risk.

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The Immigrant's Advantage

Here's where changing demographics in our countries might become not just a challenge but a gift to the church. Even where we are in rural Ireland, immigration has made our town look a lot different than it used to. Our church family is an exciting and beautiful mix of Irish people combined with Zimbabweans, Brazilians, Americans, and South Africans. Immigrants from different religious traditions often bring fresh perspective to Christian concepts. They often lack the cultural baggage that makes certain ideas seem "obvious" to those raised in historically Christian contexts. I've watched a former Hindu woman engage with God’s will with theological sophistication that belies her newness to the faith. Yet, more than this, she is wanting to learn not just to know, but to live in joyful obedience to God. This diversity doesn't threaten Christian teaching it enriches it. When we're forced to explain our faith to people from different backgrounds, we often discover depths we'd forgotten. Translation then becomes rediscovery for us, as we discover anew the beauty of our.

Rediscovering Christianity's foundations isn't just about getting facts straight. It's about recovering the transformative power of these truths. Cultural Christianity often reduces faith to moral teachings and comforting platitudes. We hear it in how we have slipped into teaching kids, little moral lessons and calls to be like Daniel etc. When we strip away assumptions and encounter the raw material of Christian faith, we discover something far more radical and transformative.

The early Christians didn't just believe different things to the cultures around them, they lived differently, they were different. They created alternative communities, challenged social hierarchies, and offered hope in a world marked by despair. Their faith wasn't just intellectual assent but embodied practice, they were followers of the Way. When we rediscover the basics, we're not just learning doctrine, we're being invited into a way of life. This requires vulnerability from teachers and students alike. We must admit that our assumed knowledge might be incomplete, that our cultural Christianity might have obscured as much as it revealed. We must be willing to be surprised by familiar stories, challenged by ancient truths, changed by the encounter.

Moving Forward

The early church had no Christian culture to rely on. No Christian books to recommend, conferences to attend, or albums from the latest worship group to share. They had to articulate their faith from scratch, show its relevance to diverse audiences, and demonstrate its power to transform lives. They succeeded not by assuming knowledge but by bearing witness to the truth of the resurrected Jesus. Their example suggests that our current situation might actually be more conducive to authentic faith than the comfortable assumptions we've lost.

So how do we proceed? We must first resist the temptation to lament what's been lost and instead embrace what might be gained. We must return to our original sources, study the Scriptures, understand the historical contexts that shaped Christian thought, so we can understand the spirit and sentiment behind them. And we must become skilled translators, finding new ways to communicate these truths to our context.

Most importantly, we must remember that Christianity's power has never resided in its cultural dominance but in its ability to transform lives. Christendom is dying, and let’s be honest, it wasn’t that great in hindsight. Rather than wishing we could go back in time to the 1500s or 1900s, we might realise that we are not going far back enough. When we strip away assumptions and encounter faith afresh, we might discover that what we thought we'd lost was never really ours to begin with. What remains are the core truths that have sustained believers across cultures and centuries, and these might be more than enough.

The blank stare of the confused seeker isn't a crisis to be solved but an invitation to be embraced. It's a chance to rediscover Christianity not as a part of our cultural heritage but as a living faith, not as assumed knowledge but as transformative truth. In our post-Christian age, we have the opportunity to become missionaries again, not to distant lands or foreign fields but to our own communities, not to foreign peoples but to neighbours who often demonstrate a hunger that we have lost in our theologising.

The foundation may be crumbling, but perhaps what we're building was meant to rest on something more solid anyway.

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Before You Go

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