Sunday, November 20, 2005

Apatheists

Eddie Gibbs in Leadership Next brought a new term to my vocabulary - Apatheism. Defined on Wikipedia as a portmanteau neologism (a haplology combining apathy with either atheist or theist) for the position that God may exist but is of no real importance to one's daily life. Gibbs says that today's church leaders need to train God's people to reach this growing group. They are not theists, nor athiests, but apathetic about either side - they just don't care what you think ... and some of them may even be "christian." The wiki listing goes on "Apatheism is not synonymous to atheism, but is rather a particular form of agnosticism, in the sense that it holds that the question whether or not God exists may be meaningfully asked, but is not worth asking." I think we are going to have to train Christians in new ways of evangelism. The old arguments won't work with these postmoderns. They may grant us the argument ... it doesn't mean they'll believe. Hopefully we have lives that demonstrate something worth considering. What a challenge for the future!

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