The church is afraid . . . very afraid. It’s why church folks get involved in politics and home school their children to influence and protect from culture/society. But what is culture really? I have been studying this subject for years and it is a really difficult thing to get a handle on.
In a nutshell, culture is the absorption and reconstituting of experiences. de Certou describes it the “act of reusing and recombining . . . materials. Meaning is tied to the significance that comes from this new use.” The external influences of life are reworked in the heart, soul and mind, and then meaning comes from the new expressions of that recombining. These new expressions appear in the worlds we live in and they often are shocking and can be scary. We react and withdraw because we have not ingested and then reconstructed in the same manner. We do not understand why that boy has a purple mohawk, or why that girl has two metal bobs in her lip and four more in her eyebrows. We are confused by the anger in modern music, and the randomness of violence. And on and on it goes. It is a re-mix of meaning and values.
What a great opportunity for the church! An opportunity to express a Christian re-mix! What parts of the cultural reconstruction currently underway can be means and methods of being Christ to the world, and expressing Christ to the world? This is where we are called to LEAD! Unfortunately as one DS recently told me, he is trying to get his District out of the 1950’s and into the 1980’s. In his world that would be a success.
I, on the other hand, want to make a strategic jump to 2010 at the very least, and even further if I can. But I am finding that there are few I can even talk with about this endeavor because it’s just too scary, risky, threatening, hard, costly, etc, etc just to name a couple of the adjectives I hear. In a word we are afraid. Afraid of losing something, afraid of the present and the future, afraid that what we believe will be irrelevant in this new re-mix. (Maybe what we really are afraid of is that we will upset our giver base?)
On the contrary, what we believe is the only hope of stability and eternity that the exponentially rapidly changing present and future has . . . the ancient text holds up quite nicely in the modern world. We need to be on the lunatic fringe to be the fresh wind that the Gospel represents for our world. Who wants to visit the edge with me (and maybe set up camp for a while)?
In a nutshell, culture is the absorption and reconstituting of experiences. de Certou describes it the “act of reusing and recombining . . . materials. Meaning is tied to the significance that comes from this new use.” The external influences of life are reworked in the heart, soul and mind, and then meaning comes from the new expressions of that recombining. These new expressions appear in the worlds we live in and they often are shocking and can be scary. We react and withdraw because we have not ingested and then reconstructed in the same manner. We do not understand why that boy has a purple mohawk, or why that girl has two metal bobs in her lip and four more in her eyebrows. We are confused by the anger in modern music, and the randomness of violence. And on and on it goes. It is a re-mix of meaning and values.
What a great opportunity for the church! An opportunity to express a Christian re-mix! What parts of the cultural reconstruction currently underway can be means and methods of being Christ to the world, and expressing Christ to the world? This is where we are called to LEAD! Unfortunately as one DS recently told me, he is trying to get his District out of the 1950’s and into the 1980’s. In his world that would be a success.
I, on the other hand, want to make a strategic jump to 2010 at the very least, and even further if I can. But I am finding that there are few I can even talk with about this endeavor because it’s just too scary, risky, threatening, hard, costly, etc, etc just to name a couple of the adjectives I hear. In a word we are afraid. Afraid of losing something, afraid of the present and the future, afraid that what we believe will be irrelevant in this new re-mix. (Maybe what we really are afraid of is that we will upset our giver base?)
On the contrary, what we believe is the only hope of stability and eternity that the exponentially rapidly changing present and future has . . . the ancient text holds up quite nicely in the modern world. We need to be on the lunatic fringe to be the fresh wind that the Gospel represents for our world. Who wants to visit the edge with me (and maybe set up camp for a while)?
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