The actual title of Todd’s presentation was Relational Evangelism, but I think it perhaps would be a bit more helpful to think of this within the shift from the modern worldview to the postmodern. It used to be that within the modern mindset there was this demand for experts. Churches happened to be the places where people would go for to get expert advice on all things spiritual, religious, etc. At this time, though, there is a shift in how a lot of people are thinking, in that they don’t demand this expertise anymore.

Todd (who is the president of Alpha) made an interesting observation that the more traditional, conservative Evangelical a church is, the more difficult it is for the Alpha program to work. For instance, if someone came in who has grown up in a pantheistic family, where everyone had subjective morals and smoked pot together, the knee-jerk reaction would be to whip out the cult-apologetics Bible and beat them over the head with it. In this increasingly postmodern culture, this would be unacceptable. How much more do we need to be able to listen, hear, and connect?