Pt. 4 Metamodernism: Telling the Gospel Story

Part 4 of an essay on metamodernism, Christianity, and the church

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The transformational stories of Jesus’ church must also be heard as Jesus is active in His church to change hearts, transform lives, and love others through the hands and hearts of his followers.

How do we Tell His Story?

In Matthew 28 and Acts 1, Jesus delivers a call to all Christians embodying evangelism and disciplemaking. Yet, with the advent of metamodernism how we bear witness to Jesus may need to adapt and change. The gospel challenge in modernism was introducing others to truth they did not know. Likewise, the gospel challenge in postmodernism was introducing people to truth they didn’t know they could know. Bringing the gospel message to a metamodern culture is calling others to a truth that is true and a hope that is real and eternal. Metamodernism claims that truth and hope are tethered to a grand narrative of the moment. As the narrative changes, truth changes. Hope is redirected toward the new grand narrative of the moment. The church, speaking to a culture of narratives, will need to tell Jesus’ gospel story and the story of the church today. The gospel story from Genesis to Revelation must be told as the greatest of all narratives proclaiming truth that is certain. The transformational stories of Jesus’ church must also be heard as Jesus is active in His church to change hearts, transform lives, and love others through the hands and hearts of his followers. To cut through the hopeful hopelessness of metamodernism, the church will need to tell stories of God’s current activity in the world and of a Hebrews chapter 11 hope that is certain.

The cultural shift to metamodernism is young. The concept of metamodernism is vast, and the term metamodernism is used to describe similar concepts in different disciplines. Focusing on Vermeulen and van der Akker (2010) best addresses the cultural changes that may impact the Western Christian church and telling Jesus’ story. For Christians, it is less important to agree or disagree with metamodernism than it is to understand metamodernism. The grand narratives of metamodernism provide obstacles such as changing relative truth and opportunities to invite others into the grand narrative of God as they taste and see that God is good. As the world becomes more global and more digital, telling Jesus' story is more important and urgent than ever before.