For years we have heard Christian leaders talked about a Christian sub-culture. Evangelicals for the past few decades have really invented a new culture to live in. We have our own soccer teams, concerts, coffee shops, bookstores, leaders, and some would say even politicians. We have our own lingo like "pray up" or "plugged in" or "traveling mercies" or "J.C." to name a few. We have our own clothes, and when we cannot be original enough we copy the culture around us with novelty shirts, musical taste, and cultural topics. When the culture gets Apple crazy, we change "iPod" to "iPray". We copy commercials and tv shows to make our own announcements. We have our own culture that is really a sub-culture of the bigger one. We are reactionary, and we are culture makers because of it.
Jesus, throughout his ministry, talked of the Kingdom. It was the subject of numerous parables such as the pearl of great price. Matthew 13 is a great manifesto of metaphors for the Kingdom. Jesus' first words in Mark are "The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel." We are told that the Kingdom of God lives in our hearts. The Kingdom has been established, and is alive.
This juxtaposition of these two, culture and the Kingdom, hit me yesterday. We are so caught up in creating a culture that we have forgotten that we are already in one. Christ has founded His Kingdom and that is the "culture" that we are in. What has happened is the Kingdom has lost its relevance to the world because people have stopped seeing the gospel and salvation as a call to be a part of a culture already established by Christ. We already exist within a culture that tells us how to act, live, and think about things. Whenever we give into culture creating we neglect and diminish the Kingdom that we are already a part of. I think the first church that grabs hold of this idea will be the smallest yet most influential church we have seen in a long time. Once we stop caring about our sub-culture and culture we live in, the more we will find the Kingdom of God to be more than sufficient to give us meaning.
So what are your thoughts? It is needed to address the culture we live in, but do we do so by diminished the kingdom and creating our own reactionary culture?
1 comments:
Funny, but I've been bothered by this for years now. I started off wanting to copy the culture and transfer that to the Christian side of things - a thing that churches are definitely guilty of these days. I ran into this problem in my documentary film class where many observations made about Bellevue by the professor and students there is that Bellevue (and other megachurches like it) create their own world where they can seclude themselves from the secular culture. They took offense to the fact that Christians don't want to be a part of the world they live in, and I think that's one reason people don't respect Christianity today. Why would they want to be a part of a group of people, or subculture, that feels they should exclude themselves from the masses? There are some things that churches will naturally do to just keep up with the times, but I agree that churches and Christians should be more proactive in the already established culture instead of be reactive to it and then excluding themselves from it.
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