‘It’s not hard to view the world as something beautiful but somehow broken.
‘Institutions have let us down. More effort is spent on blaming others then finding solutions. And today it seems a person’s word has lost its worth. Yet if the fading of these values disturbs us, then surely they must still matter? We still admire honesty, fairness and the courage it takes to speak out against what’s wrong.’ Not the start of an evangelistic sermon (though it might well be!), but the text of a full page colour advertisement in the Telegraph Magazine for September 1 2012, for the home and business insurance firm Hiscox, whose strapline is ‘as good as our word’.
Paul and his missionary circle knew how important it was to be tuned into the heart-beat of the culture they were evangelising. ‘He reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the market place day by day with those who happened to be there’ (Acts 17.17). That was what opened the door for his famous gospel presentation to the Areopagus in Athens. He knew how people were thinking. Today, our culture is shaped not by the soap-box orators. For us, our cultural shaping is the product of the omnipresent media, written, verbal and visual. The Hiscox advertisement obviously thinks it is sufficiently in touch with the current cultural mood to invest a great deal of money in a tangential approach to increasing its client base, by tapping into not just a nostalgia for how things used to be, but a growing desire for honesty and fairness. That is a great way in for the gospel.
