Christians, even today, often attempt to present the gospel on the basis of 'you are a sinner' or 'God own you but you are disobedient to him' and similar lines, perhaps stimulated by a misreading of Galatians 3:24, where the law as the guardian in anticipation of Christ is misread/translated as the teacher/tutor/guardian to 'lead us to' Christ.
No. With Christ, the law as any route to salvation, even contra-positively, plays no role.
So talking to our contemporaries:
Lets not start with the word 'sin' and 'sinner' because these are either meaningless terms to our contemporaries, or conjures up an obdurate legalism that has nothing to do with the proclamation of the gospel.
Still, we do need to drive a point, but, in language that makes sense to our peers.
So, let's expand 'sin' in terms of the biblical words: the Bible Project has a helpful piece on this.
Missing the mark! Much more descriptive.
Christian community. A phrase more likely to open a conversation than close it down.
Your interlocutor might then ask: so who are we really? How could you/we know?
Whence 'failure' and how do you define or understand it?
A few conversational gambits might be up your sleeve.
In response to someone's horror at some horror: social, natural, criminal, etc
"Sadly part of the horror show of a dislocated humanity"
Far better than the conversation stopper of 'that's sin for you'
The follow on concept snippets that might be ready for use could be:
'Sin' is the word Christians use for our dislocation from who we really are and the resulting loss of value coherence.
Reprieve has to come from outside humanity, and even outside this world, because we can only keep doing what we keep doing! And it has in the self-existent creator joining us in Jesus of Nazareth/Yeshua the Nazarene.
If they dismiss this as being 'religious' you might point out that a religious belief is a belief about what is independently real. So everyone lives in terms of a 'religious' belief, articulated, examined, or not. (Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality)
What other 'disrupting' but positive comments might you make to open the way to a 'gospel' conversation (even if a mere snippet)?
In many cases this opening might be appropriate (or not inappropriate):
In a world conceived in (purely) materialist terms there is neither diagnosis nor treatment for the human (dilemma/condition) -- only must wide-eyed despair at humanities history of failure, terror and cruelty in spite of its inexplicable (nobility/dignity/potential); yet in that conception the only real onclusion is the futility of death.
Back to the 'failure to be who we really are'
"Which is?" the interlocutor might ask.
People in harmony with their creator.
This idea jars against a materialistic conception of both who we are and life having any real purpose.
That itself is a symptom of the disconnect that we live in: denial that personhood is the most basic structure of reality.
And we are made to be connected to that basic structure, which, of course, is personal and relational.
This can then go many ways...
Creator...personal, but not merely personal, 'love' expressed within the personal triple being...Genesis
creation description...we made for community with the creator (Gen 3:8a) then severed from creator by rejection of the way he is ...love ...repaired by him entering our humanity to rebuild the connection by renewal of us.
The idea of reality being basically delineated in terms of life in person strikes the materialist, particularly
the modern Western one, as strange if not alien.
Time for reorientation, and the implication is that our personalness is derivative of and compatible
with what absolutely is; it is not derivative of incompatible random material events by which no value is real.
A book: Beyond Identity by Dick Keyes of the L'Abri Fellowship.
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