Coram Deo Video Transcript
The following is an unedited and unproofed transcript of a video in the CoramDeo.com Basics Course.
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Lesson 3: The Power of Story – Worldview Basics
Introduction
Presenter: Darrow Miller
Scott: Darrow, I feel like you teach on worldviews in a way that very few people do. It’s not an abstract concept. It’s not head knowledge or doctrine. It’s very practical. It’s the thing that has real impact, real consequence in our lives and in our cultures. This next session is called The Power of Story. Talk a little bit about the concept of worldview and what that means for you, how you unpack that in this session.
Darrow: Well, my understanding of worldview occurred when I was with the L’Abri Fellowship. I’d never heard the word or phrase worldview before. I didn’t know worldview existed. I’ll never forget an evening with Udo Middlemen a German lawyer. We were having supper together one evening in his home. In the middle of the conversation, Udo turned to me and he said, “Darrow, Christianity is true even if you don’t believe it.”
Well, I’ve been a Christian at that point for 13, 14 years. I’ve been discipled in Campus Crusade for Christ in Young Life. I’ve been involved in a conservative evangelical church. I’ve been to seminary. I had been taught that Christianity was true because I believed it and here’s somebody telling me it’s true even if I don’t believe it. It caused a crisis in my faith. I didn’t sleep for two nights. I finally realized what he was saying to me and what he was saying is that Christianity is true even if no one in the world believes it. That was profound revelation to me.
I came to realize that though I had been a Christian all these years, I wasn’t thinking like a Christian. I was thinking like a secularist. I had grown up in the United States, been to public schools, watched television, watched movies, learned the language of secular materialism. I had a born again heart, but my mind was not born again. That was a shock to me and it was at that point that I came to realize that I had a worldview and it wasn’t a biblical worldview, but it was shaping everything about my life.
In our case coming from the West, I had a born again heart, but an atheist materialistic mindset. Today young Christians in the West, they don’t have a modern mindset. They have a postmodern mindset and it influences everything they think about life including what it means to be a Christian, what the church is, what the role of the church in society is, all of these things are being shaped among the young in the West today by postmodernism, the older Christians that are our age in the West by modernism and the people in the developing world largely by an animistic framework.
Scott: It’s something you catch just by being a part of the culture.
Darrow: That’s right.
Scott: If there’s not a discipleship on the part of the church at that level, there’s no change.
Darrow: There’s no change and that’s why coming to understand not only the concept but the power of a worldview is so important. It’s the reason that we need to disciple people not just in the spiritual disciplines, but we need to disciple people at the level of culture because if people are not discipled at that level, they can have a born again heart, but the mindset of the culture is what dominates their life.
Bob: I think that this lesson on worldview is probably one of my favorites. I think one of the reasons it’s one of my favorites, Darrow, is that I watch the faces of those that we teach and it’s in this lesson that they begin to wake up.
Darrow: Yes.
Bob: Worldview is such an esoteric word.
Scott: Mm-hmm (affirmative), very abstract.
Bob: For some reason, God has given you the ability to be able to take this concept which is very broad and make it so clear and simple and it gives a classification system that allows the student to be able to understand their worldview, these are the others, not with 54 varieties, but it summarizes so that you can really grasp the concept of worldview and look at the comparisons of what the end consequences are of holding those various worldviews and I’ve seen the lights go on so many times. I love it.
Sometimes kids study worldview and they come out with not really understanding what worldview is about or what the differences in different worldviews really are.
Scott: They think it’s a statement of doctrine, like if I just memorize these 10 points of doctrine then I must have a Christian worldview, and yet what they function off of, what functions in terms of their decisions in guiding their life is something very different.
Bob: This is an important lesson.
Darrow: I remember having a man from a seminary call us at the Disciple Nations Alliance because he was putting together a worldview, sort of a worldview catalogue of the different organizations that were working in worldview. He’d never heard of the DNA, but his son was working as a missionary in South America and he was very familiar with what we taught and the impact of what the DNA was teaching, how it was impacting people in South America and his son said, “You need to call these guys at Disciple Nations Alliance.”
He called and we chatted on the phone and he said, “I have talked to several hundred people who are leaders of organizations that focus on worldview.” He said, “You are doing something different.” I said, “What is that?” He said, “You make worldview practical.”