He shared his unchurched background and his ministry as an Anglican priest, missionary to South America, professor at Fuller Seminary and assistant at All Saints', Beverly Hills. He said he discovered that he was training people for ministry in the 1980's, while society had shifted to a post-modern culture.
Mission is the total task of the church.
Evangelization is at the heart of the task, but it is not all the task. He said that modernity is the apex of the enlightenment, characterized by a great confidence in people's ability to fix things. The evangelical and liberal traditions were both subverted by modernity's rationalism. The shift to post-modernity, which came first through the English departments of secular universities, results in the view that there is great unpredictability in the universe and we cannot fix things. There is no great story.