D.A. Carson, has some fabulous principles and insight into 21st Century communication as pastors. I am listing his four recommendations for shifting our thinking and preaching processes. He mentions that there could be many more. The entire article is worth the read right here:
1. It has become more difficult to get across what the Bible says about sin. When more people lived in a world where “right” and “wrong” were widely perceived to be transcultural categories, it was easier to get across something of the enormity of violating the law of God.
2. The current focus on narrative preaching has rightly broadened the older emphasis on discourse passages from the Bible. If it helps us better handle all the genres of Scripture faithfully and responsibly, it will be to the good. If it merely tips us from one cultural preference (viz., discourse) to another (viz., narrative), we have not gained anything. Indeed, because narrative is intrinsically more hermeneutically “open” than discourse, the move may merely contribute toward moving us away from truth. How much better to remain faithful to biblical truth yet simultaneously focused on Scripture’s existential bite.
3. Because for many people in today’s word, “faith” and its congnates refer to one’s personal, subjective, religious choice-a choice abstracted from any pretentions of public truth-it does no good to encourage people “to believe” unless one explains what “to believe” means, how important the object of belief is (see 1 Cor. 15), and how faith and truth relate to each other. Many such links were simply presupposed by our hearers several decades ago. Few of the links are today culturally presupposed.
4. The structure of apologetics needs to change somewhat. A great deal of the earlier intra-evangelical debates about presuppositionalism and evidentialism were themselves parasitic, in whole or in part, on the subject-object distinction as it developed in the modern period. That debate today takes on a raft of new emphases with the move to various kinds of postmodernism.
