This fundamental shift in thinking naturally affects the way people approach faith and their relationship to faith-based institutions. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, with its rigid structures and traditional approach to outreach, will certainly not be able to continue with business as usual in a post-modern world. I believe Jesus gives a glimpse of the Adventist dilemma in Matt 5:13-16. There He articulates two types of Christian community. One is based on the model of a city/fortress, the other is based on salt.

In the fortress model of evangelism, the saints are safely enclosed in protective walls with strong gates. They avoid undue influence from "the world" and safeguard the integrity of the community. From time to time, however, they will hold a "crusade" by opening the gates, sending out the army, and snatching up a few captives. The captives are brought back to the fortress, the gates are slammed shut and all is well in Fortressland. But we live in a world where the captives are becoming fewer and the casualties larger as a result of this approach.

In the salt model of evangelism, the salt mingles with a dish of food and melts in to the point where one can hardly tell what is salt and what is food anymore. But the result of this process is that the entire dish tastes better. The salt model is an incarnational model. The saints go out into the world and seek to make it a better place by their presence.

While the fortress model worked extremely well in the age of Christian modernism and continues to work well in territories where a large number of Christian modernists can be found, I believe the salt model points the way to a work for post-moderns that will engage the church and society in a productive interaction. I see nine changes in traditional Adventist outreach that will be necessary if we wish to participate in the mighty act of God that we call post-modernism.

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