오래된 미래적 관점에서 보는 차세대 복음화

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to touch on the issues to evangelize the next generation in Korea and offer an ancientfuture perspective as a corrective to the missionary attempts of the Korean church to the next generation. The task of passing on faith from generation to generation is becoming central to the future of the Korean church. As statistics has shown, protestant population is becoming in decline for the last years. Also, it is seen that children and adolescents attending the church are in declineas well. It has not been the case that the churches in Korea do not show enough interest in educational ministry or not actively engage in the culture of the next generation. The Korean church has been known as the educationfocused church from its beginning. Out of consideration for this missionary task of the next generation, this paper calls to refocus the missional strategy from culturally sensitive nd entertainmentsaturated evangelism to the missional thinking faithful to the Christian tradition and community. Next, this paper evaluates the evangelistic attempts at reaching the next generation. There have been two types of evangelism for the next generation in large. One is the junior version of evangelism models for the grownups. Other is the next generation sensitive model, which is geared specifically toward juniors. Both has pros and cons. The former is good at connecting the whole congregation by involving the next generation in the church's over all ministry of evangelism. However, it may be ineffective in reaching the next generation on their own terms. The latter is good at reaching the next generation, but may be at the risk of loosing them as they grow older, since the experience they might have when they are young become distant from the adult congregation. This observation gives us two important insights,tradition and community, to the evangelization of the next generation. This paper goes further on to investigating the possible alternatives for evangelizing the next generation by searching their souls. First, it draws upon Thomas Bergler’s work on the juvenilization of American Christianity, which mourns the immature and individualistic tendency of the American evangelicalism. Second, this paper cites Christian Smith's work on spiritual condition of the American adolescents. According to Smith, juniors in the US are concerned with the religions of their parents, but are not recognizant of the essentials of the Christian faith while even they are following their parents to the church. It awakens us to the importance of the faith formation for the next generation. Third, this paper illustrates the major factors to the persistency of faith among the next generation. The study shows the importance of communal and participatory experience of the church juniors with the whole congregation. It follows from observations thus far that the missionary task for the next generation needs to borrow from the ancientfuture model of evangelism, which is centered on the building of the new family, conversion as resocialization, faith formation as participation with the communal experience, This fresh way of looking at evangelism will give us a new approach toward reaching the next generation with the absolute gospel of Christ.