In the artsy Highlands area of Louisville, Kentucky, theres an art gallery thats created a big vibe from its quality of showings. The gallery is actually an evangelistic outreach of the Sojourn, a mission church originally aimed at postmoderns. The gallery gives us an opportunity to reach out to our community, says Daniel Montgomery, pastor of Sojourn.

The church meets on Sunday nights. People tell us all the time that we dont look like a church because the congregation is filled with tattooed and pierced-out people, mostly in their early 20s, says Montgomery. Rather than using seeker services, we use our worship service as a way to build up believers; we think its evangelistic because they see how we love God.

He used to show film clips in the service but found that emerging generations are so inundated with images that they dont respond as well to clips as Baby Boomers.

Montgomery does a straight expository sermon, but the church does offer the Lords supper every week. We need to do the dirty work of getting to know people and learning to speak their language, says Montgomery.

In a remote area of Alberta, Canadanear Banff National ParkWayne Snider serves food to a postmodern crowd. He says his ministry is relationship-driven, but it took some time for the young people to develop trust. They werent used to someone who wasnt after something, says Snider. Theyd ask, What do you want?, and Id reply that I was just trying to show them Gods love. Snider says many of the postmoderns he encounters have rejected the traditional church. As a result, They dont have a clear concept of sin. They have a very subjective morality. Theyll say, I do drugs, and I sleep with my girlfriend, but I dont see anything wrong with that. Snider says his response to this is to talk to them about an emptiness in life, that void in their being.

Celebrating the Lords supper every week is not uncommon in a postmodern church, because young people want symbols and sensory experiences in worship, says Kent Keller of Kendall Church in Miami, Florida. They like to smell and feel the experience. Citing social commentator Neil Postman, Keller says one way to understand postmodernsand their non-linear thinkingis to imagine a deck of cards. In the past, we could be certain of the order of the cards. For instance, if you revealed a king followed by a queen, it was logical to assume the next card might be a jack. With postmoderns, the deck has been shuffled and you have no idea whats coming next.

Aaron Harvie at Riverside Community Church in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, says hes found postmoderns want the message straight-on with no frills. We give them the truth in all its power and rawness, and weve seen a greater response to that than when we used to deliver it in a flashy package.

In a postmodern church, according to Bill Bruenle, church planting missionary of Paradise, California, The pastor serves the community. He facilitates their giftedness, cultural propensities and ethnicities. He leads by supporting what God created them to be. Conformity is seen as antithetical to community.

When ministering to postmoderns, Church Planting Strategist Brad Sergeant suggests:

• Approach postmoderns as a mission group. Find out their beliefs and behaviors, where there is common ground with scripture, and develop a strategy from there.

• Go slowly and develop a model that can self-adjust as the culture changes.

• Redefine success as church faithfulness over church growth.

• Design an intercultural and multi-generational church.

• Ask the questions, What kind of church will your kids or grandkids attend? and How do we begin to move toward being that church?

Christians in America can no longer evangelize using only the Bible if they hope to reach people living in a postmodern nation, Southwestern Seminary Professor Frank Harber told Baptist Press. If you go to someones house and you knock on their door and you try to share with them the gospel and the only presentation you know is six scriptures from the Bible and they say, I dont believe the Bible, then what? The days of lazy evangelism, when Christians could present the gospel with the Bible and no supporting evidence, are gone, says Harber, who teaches evangelism.

Examining Romans 1, Harber says God has revealed himself to humanity and that Christians can use three principles drawn from the text to help people find God. First, people should look up Romans 1:18-20, which says, God is clearly seen.

Then say: If you want to know if theres a God, simply look through a telescope. The universe is a marvel of orderliness, and when you look out at this incredible cosmos, what you see is not the remnants of an explosion but the results of a gigantic God.

Second, people searching for God should look around the world of nature. Look at the 11 million species of this planet. Look at a microscope and see a microscopic world that boggles the mind, he says. Nature is preaching thousands of sermons every day. Cant you see that nature is preaching about the clearly seen God?

Third, people searching for God should look inside. There are no true atheists, Harber says, because Romans makes it clear that everyone knows God exists. Atheists, he says, are those who have suppressed the truth. In a world of growing relativism, Christians need to act on the fact that people want more truth, not less truth, Harber says.