A Critique of Cultural Change by David W. Henderson The church has a problem. The eternally timely message entrusted to her no longer easily finds a willing ear. According to Henderson, the solution lies in first understanding how our world thinks and then, starting from where people are, getting them to see "the functional relevance to their lives of the actual relevance of our message". In high school speech classes we were taught to "know your audience." Being a careless high schooler, I didn't really care what he meant, but in the end it made sense (once I decided to actually think about it). You wouldn't use sock puppets to explain math to accountants; you wouldn't use in-depth power point presentations to explain math to first graders. With this in mind, why do many Americans still try to talk about Jesus using the methods they used thirty years ago? Why do we use Christian "jargon" to explain Christianity to those outside the faith? Henderson argues that modern American Christians must change their approach to sharing faith to adapt to modern America. The outline of Henderson's book is simple: examine a particular aspect/mentality/value of modern Americans; then gives ideas on how a Christian might share eternal life with a fellow American. Henderson's writing is simple and fun. He gets right to the heart of the American mentality, then illustrates it with descriptions of scenes from famous films, personal anecdotes, jokes, etc. Overall, Henderson does the modern Christian a great service by writing “Culture Shift.” Jesus told Christians to tell others about Him ("Go therefore and baptize all nations...") and Henderson can help us along the way through this bookHenderson identifies six "cultural shifts" in our culture's thinking and values Western holds. These changes have become observable over the past twenty years. These include the shift to a consumer mentality that has penetrated almost every aspect of our lives, the shift to communicating primarily through images rather than words, an obsession with the self and personal needs, the virtual exclusion of God from public consciousness, the predominance of a self-serving, ends-justifying, crowd-conforming morality, and the politically correct but self-contradictory toleration of all equally valid but uniformly meaningless points of view as objective standards of truth. However, apart from the apparent length of such After analysis, the emphasis of this book is on how to concretely respond to the secular market mentality.