Our community here in Auburn/Opelika is changing rapidly, both demographically and culturally. We are also growing in our influence across the State and beyond. It doesn’t take more than a casual drive through town to notice the changes, which raise important questions for the Church as we seek to fulfill our role in God's mission today.
Lesslie Newbigin, perhaps the foremost missiologist of the 20th Century, said in his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society:
“Authentic Christian thought and action begin not by attending to the aspirations of people, not by answering the questions they are asking in their terms, not by offering solutions to the problems as the world sees them.
It must begin and continue by attending to what God has done in the story of Israel and supremely in the story of Jesus Christ. It must continue by indwelling that story so that it is our story, the way we understand the real story.
And then, and this is the vital point, to attend with open hearts and minds to the real needs of people.”
Allowing the story of Scripture to shape our loves and actions, we want to attend to the real needs of the people in our community:
Beginning over a year ago, the seminary launched a multi-phase research project to address questions like these. In phase 1, we conducted a basic quantitative study looking primarily at the U.S. Census and other readily available published population data. We will be releasing key information from this report in the next few blog posts.
We’ve now entered into phase 2, which is a qualitative study relying primarily on interviews with people who can offer insightful perspectives on our community, including a range of people from leaders at the center of things to people on the margins. We are recording these interviews and we began releasing them on our
podcast November 3rd. We plan for this phase and podcast series to carry us through the summer.
Sometime next year, we hope to enter phase 3, in which we plan to interview scholars who have published work on cultural and worldview trends in North America and bring those works into dialogue with local leaders to understand how those macro-trends affect the hearts and minds of people in Auburn and Opelika.
We want to turn the whole project toward God in prayer, asking him,
“What are you up to here? What would it look like for your kingdom to come here as it is in heaven? Given the particularities of our context, what role do you have for the Church here? What particular cross must the Church bear here if we are to faithfully bear witness in life and word to the cross of Christ?”
The larger and longer-term purpose is that this project will help foster conversations, relationships, and partnerships between Church, ministry, and community leaders for the good of the whole community.