Preaching: Over the next 10 to 20 years, what do you think are going to be some of the greatest challenges that preachers are going to face.

Robinson: We are in a much more secular culture. In fact it's not just the post-Christian culture, it's almost a pre-Christian culture. When Paul went into a community, he had the advantage of going into a synagogue and teaching and preaching to reach some people, and then he went into the marketplace. I think that we are going to find ourselves -- if we're serious about our business -- just in the marketplace. That is good, and it is also difficult. I think we are going to find it much more difficult to proclaim the central doctrines of the Christian faith. To preach the uniqueness of Jesus Christ in a multi-faceted culture in which you insist Jesus Christ is the only way to God -- the response of people sitting in front of you is that you are a bigot. It's an emotional response. So people are willing to say yes to Jesus certainly, even to say He is the Savior. But the number of people in our churches who would say that He is the only Savior, the only way to God, is less and less.

I think it is going to be much more difficult for people who have been raised in a religious tradition to speak effectively to the secular culture. I think many of the things that church people -- and I mean this in a positive sense of church people like myself do -- we often use the jargon of the faith without realizing we are using it. If you've grown up in certain tradition where you think that preaching is yelling -- you try to face a secular audience today and yell at them, and you've lost them. The things that you sort of took by osmosis growing up will be less and less effective. I think the great challenge that we are going to face is not just how to preach to these people, but how do we reach them in order to preach to them. How do you get them inside the church; how do you get them to sit and to listen? I think we are going to see a declining church enrollment. We are seeing it now but I think it is going to get worse.

I think we are also going to find that when we take a stand on moral issues we will do it at a cost. If you're pro-life, you are going to find more and more people in this culture who look at that position as deviant. The series of ads that are being run by the National Organization of Women put a great emphasis on the right to choose as a fundamental right, the freedom to choose. They are warm, and they are glowing. But they don't ask the next question: freedom to choose what? Since it is an abortion, it's freedom to choose to kill a fetus that a woman carries. They don't spell that out, but they are winning.

At the confirmation hearings for members of Mr. Bush's cabinet, you heard the harshness of the rhetoric, the sense that you cannot possibly have somebody who is sincerely pro-life in that position. Conversely, that a person commits adultery -- it seems to people today, well so what? What you do in the privacy of your bedroom, who's business is it? So you start to preach the Ten Commandments and you discover people have already made up their minds that probably three of the ten don't apply anymore. So I think that we are going to find in the years to come we are going to have a whole strategy in the best sense how we get to that secular culture. I don't have the answer to it at all, but I worry about it a lot.