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Paul hit the nail on the head when he said, "We dared to tell you about the Gospel even in the face of strong opposition".

This could not be more pertinent today.
Society has arrived at a place where morality is subjective and your morals may not be the same as mine.

Even in the church we have developed a therapeutic religion, where clear moral standards are set aside in favor of ethical ambiguity and broad tolerance of each other's choices. Where tolerance rules, love becomes sentimentality, nobody is called to repentance, and the Cross of Christ becomes unnecessary. It's possible, according to the new religion, to have pluriform truth. You have your truth; I have mine. We'll pretend God doesn't care what we believe as long as we get along with each other.

So how do we reach a society that no longer recognizes the need for a Savior, who thinks the church is no longer relevant?

Remember you are dealing with people who don't know the basics of Christianity and have a negative concept of it. It makes no sense to them and it impacts them if you come on too strongly and ask for a commitment to quickly. Count conversations rather than conversions.

An area I keep failing to remember. When most people think of evangelism, the word "arguments" comes up—arguments for the existence of God, arguments for the uniqueness of Christ, arguments for the inspiration of the Bible. For postmodern people, anything presented as an argument is less persuasive because arguments suggest a message of conquest rather than a message of peace. Postmoderns are so assaulted by advertisements and political messages that for a message to be important and true, it must come in a form other than argument.

Also, we have become good at boiling the gospel down into little four-step outlines. Modern people love diagrams; it's all about engineering. But postmodern people feel that truth comes as a mystery, a story, and a work of art; truth is more like poetry than engineering. This forces us to ask if we have a clear understanding of what the gospel really is. If, for hundreds of years, we have turned the gospel into a problem-solution mindset or series of arguments, we must ask how that may have distorted our understanding of the gospel. In many ways, the modern evangelical gospel is a message about how to not go to hell. When you step back and ask if that's really the gospel from Jesus' perspective, it's pretty hard to answer yes.

To become the kind of church that we long to be, we may have to accept people who don't dress right, don't talk right, don't smell right, and don't think right. If we're not willing to let them belong before they believe, they will never believe in our church. Because if a group says we will only accept you if you agree with us, it sounds like any other worldly group. What people are looking for is a group that accepts them regardless of whether they conform. That becomes one of the validations of the gospel.

It is important to "dare to everyone about the Gospel" using whatever means possible, despite facing strong opposition that is more evident today than ever before.

From Building Church Leaders, a resource to train leaders, published by Leadership Journal(c) 2001 Christianity Today International.