You may or may not be surprised to know that the insular character of modern conservative church life is one of the chief reasons people reject the gospel. If you are really interested in helping people find Christ you will expand your borders beyond the default comfort zone. As Isaiah said, “Woe to you who are at ease in Zion.” People need saving, and closing ourselves off from them and their ideas is a sure way to get them to ignore us.
We permit football (the modern equivalent of bloody gladiator sports) into our Christian homes, not only because it will get people saved if they realize some of the players are Christians, but because we like it. To shut off science because it somehow sullies our Christian thinking is a bit hypocritical. Some of you may also shun the sports arena. That’s fine. I admire your purity. But Jesus went where the people went. He didn’t sit in the Temple and wait for people to come to him.
“The most common examples of this I saw were the many young adults who had come from more conservative parts of the U.S. to take their undergraduate degrees at a New York school. Here they met the kind of person they had been warned about for years, those with liberal views on sex, politics, and culture. Despite what they had been led to believe, those people were kind, reasonable, and open hearted. When the students began to experience a change in their own views, they found that many people back at home, especially in the churches, responded in a hostile and bigoted way. Soon they rejected their former views along with their faith. The elder brothers had turned them into younger brothers.
We discovered, however, that younger brothers were willing to come to our church because they saw that we made a clear distinction between the gospel and religious moralism, and that provided an opportunity in which they could explore Christianity from a new perspective.” Page 68 and 69 in the book “The Prodigal God” by Timothy Keller of Redeemer presbyterian Church in Manhattan.