Rev! interview with Gabe Lyons, co-founder of Catalyst and founder of the Fermi Project.

Gabe, in the essay "Influencing Culture" on your Web site qideas.org, you say, "Nobody addressed what to me seemed an obvious problem: Christianity has gained more conversions in America over the last two hundred years than any other faith. Simultaneously, Christianity has steadily lost cultural influence despite its rapid conversion growth." I gather that's what led to the Fermi Project.

Yes, we created Fermi Project to be a way for a lot of different leaders to offer their thoughts and ideas and content about what it looks like to help the church recover its understanding of its responsibility to renew culture. It's really a space for that to happen through several different means. One is our annual Q gathering in Austin, Texas, this spring. We'll have more than 25 presentations, each 18 minutes in length, about the culture, the future of the church, and the gospel. We bring in world-class presenters to help educate church leaders, community leaders—people in the culture who are Christian—to talk about what the church's role is in creating the future, shaping it, being involved in it.

Our goal and intent is for the Fermi Project to be an incubator of ideas and projects that we can either initiate or promote to help people embody the gospel in their context. The qideas.org site has a lot of content, including videos that people can watch for free. Every month we highlight different projects that are good examples.

Why do you think Christianity has lost influence on the culture?

In the early days of the church, there wasn't any sense that "senior pastors" and "youth pastors" and "missionaries" or whatever titles they used at that time—there was no sense that they were first-class Christians and everyone else was second-class. You were valued as a Christian influence whatever your role was. Your vocation was valued. It's more natural for Christianity to flourish when people are in the society being salt and light wherever they are. We don't see that when we spend all our time in our Christian communities. As the church gets back to seeing the vocation of every person in every congregation as valuable, that over time has a much bigger effect on the flourishing of Christian ideas and of the faith itself—connecting with regular people.

How did we get away from that?

There have probably been a lot of factors. One is that we have focused on numeric growth and attendance. That has been valued so highly and rewarded that it became what people thought was most important.

Another factor is the separatist movement to create our own culture. We've gotten out of the main movement of culture and created our own—from Christian music to Christian films to Christian clothing. When you do this the people who are elevated the most are the people who speak into that environment, like the pastors, Christian musicians, and so on. If conversion growth and attendance growth are what's valued, then to be a super-Christian you have to give yourself to that vocationally—because everything else operates at a lower value. So it took a lot of focus off the fact that the Holy Spirit works really well through the local business owner and the neighbor and the farmer and the teacher. Those people in our society are touching as many or more people than a pastor or missionary would ever touch.

I think there's an imbalance in the idea of what we're supposed to do with our time on this earth. The Great Commission is a critical part of what we're called to do, but we can't avoid what Chuck Colson calls our Cultural Commission to engage the culture and create great art and beauty, being faithful in our business lives and personal lives. We're valuing cultural renewal and valuing the creation—these are things that God values and the Holy Spirit works through.

So you're encouraging church leaders to be conscious of not making those in a full-time role like the pastorate or missionaries seem like super-Christians and to deliberately hold up examples of people being solid Christians in roles that are contributing to society.

And you still get the growth you were worried about. Evangelism actually takes place more credibly and more effectively when we're understanding the holistic missions of Christians in society rather than isolating it to just a few positions.

Gabe Lyons, co-founder of Catalyst and founder of the Fermi Project.