Category: Church Ideas

“We have to be wary of the influence of culture.”

That’s what I heard an older gentleman say the other day in a conversation about how the Church should conduct its business. Culture, as he saw it, was a mental contagion that was poised to infect the Church and kill her from the inside.

Let me be clear that I’m not writing this to criticize this person. In fact, I’ve waited nearly four weeks to start writing about this experience and won’t be posting this for several more weeks. No, this isn’t about that particular person. It’s about the narrow view of culture that he expressed so clearly that I’ve heard others express as well, though less explicitly. And so, let’s discuss his perspective without judgement of his character.

Implicit in his assessment of culture as a threat to the Church was his belief that culture was an entirely worldly creation and was not already an aspect of his own Christian experience.

Culture is a false enemy. People often use “culture” as a stand-in for the ideology of their political or religious rivals. Combined with a flawed view of what is secular and what is sacred, we arrive at a perspective of culture as an evil force desperately trying to influence, infiltrate, or in anyway incapacitate the Church.

There is no such thing as a “secular” or “sacred.” All things belong to God, and so nothing, in that sense, is secular. However, some things are sacred in that we use them for God or to worship God and other things are “common,” which is to say that we use them as part of our everyday lives.

“Profane,” however, is what we call the treating of sacred things as common. When we take the name of the LORD and use it as an expletive, a word uttered to express anger or pain, we profane the Name. However, that doesn’t mean the we cannot use words to express our suffering, but rather, we should reserve some words, like the Name, for when we call out for an end to suffering.

The problem in that scenario wasn’t the language, but it’s use. The enemy isn’t culture; it’s the way it’s used, expressed, warped toward the common away from the sacred. Human beings are sacred creatures, and the culture we create out to reflect that. To the extent it doesn’t, we and our culture are profane. But that doesn’t mean culture is the enemy, and it doesn’t mean that culture is a foe or force banging on the door of your church, trying to force its way in.

Culture is already inside the church because it is part of every single one of us.

The fact that this individual in this meeting was debating an issue in English is an example of his culture.

The fact that we were meeting to discuss and debate is an example of culture.

Culture is an indispensable part of who we are, and like everything else, reflects our fallen nature while simultaneously being slowly redeemed.

In Revelation 21:10, the Apostle John had a vision of a heavenly city, a “New Jerusalem,” descending to the earth. This would be the capital of God’s eternal kingdom, Heaven on Earth.

But why wasn’t it a garden? In Genesis, when all of this began, God planted a garden and placed humanity in it as the crown jewel of all that He had made. The first cities were made by men, men descended from Cain. In fact, for most of the Old Testament, cities were places that represented the heights (or rather depths?) of humanity depravity.

And yet, at the close of this world and the opening of the next, God was founding a city, not planting a garden. Why?

Because Jesus died to redeem humanity along with the rest of creation, including what we have created. God has redeemed us, and one day, He will redeem our culture.

I have shocked some of my fellow Christians by not supporting legislation that would require prayer in schools or Bible classes in schools. I have shocked others by not voting solely based upon the potential for certain judges to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

To be clear, this is not because I don’t care about prayer, or the Bible, or biblical morality. I oppose these because I think that such laws and strategies are flawed, short sided, and even a bit dangerous. I’ll give your three quick reasons.

1) Laws restrict behavior; they don’t resurrect the dead.

Nothing saves a soul except Jesus. Yes, we can forbid certain soul-killing activities, but we cannot bring a soul back to life through legislation. Banning gay marriage, abortion, and every other sin that the conservative Christian media sphere obsesses over—don’t hear much about gluttony, do we?—won’t do anything to abate the habits, desires, and mental frameworks that produce these things.

I understand why conservative Christians are obsessed with trying to end abortion: it’s the state-sanctioned murder of unborn babies. I get that, and I agree. And yet, I sometimes wonder if we work so hard to win the courts, the laws, the political positions because it is easier than trying to “win souls,” as the old revivalists used to say it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the pro-life brigade are actively lobbying the government while also actively loving their neighbors with the love of Christ, proclaiming the gospel with their words and actions.

That’s our real mission. Ending abortion would be a miracle, but it’s a temporal miracle. Aborted babies are physically murdered, but their souls live on. Ending the physical murder of these babies would be a good and godly thing, and yet, those babies, as they grew, would still need to be introduced to Jesus. Saving their lives is not the same—nor as eternally valuable—as saving their souls. The real, eternal miracle is that of someone coming to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior. That should be our mission, that should be our goal.

2) Laws safeguard the vulnerable: my faith isn’t vulnerable.

Generally speaking, laws are created to safeguard and protect the vulnerable. We have a law against murder to offer some protection for those who are mortal, and therefore, vulnerable for murder. Granted, that’s all of us, but the point is that laws are designed with the vulnerable in mind. There are laws against shoplifting that don’t directly protect me because I don’t own or run a shop. I’m not vulnerable to that crime, so I don’t need that law. But if I opened a bookstore, as is one of my dream careers that will likely never happen, I would need that law against shoplifting to help me.

Christianity is not vulnerable. Jesus is not vulnerable. We don’t need laws to protect them. We don’t need Bible classes to promulgate our faith. We don’t need compulsory prayer in school. We can survive in a country that features a variety of religious traditions. How? Because we have the truth. Is that a bold and seemingly arrogant statement? Yeah, but also, it’s intellectually consistent. If I didn’t believe the claims that Christianity made about life, the universe, and everything, then, why would I be here? Why I would I hold to a faith that I only partially believe in?

I’m not claiming the absolute truth of Jesus’ claim to divinity as a way to put other faiths down, anymore than I believe that the Earth is round as way to insult Flat-Earthers. If I insult Flat-Earthers—and I have—it’s because of what they believe, not what I believe. I believe in Jesus because I have been convinced of the truth of His claims. I am convinced that He is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, God of all the Universe, and therefore, not in need of protection by the federal government.

3) Democracy is a two-edged sword: who will wield it next?

Our nation is changing. It’s quickly becoming a majority non-white nation, which I have zero problem with. (If you do have a problem with that, you might want to ask yourself about the ethnic make-up of all those biblical figures that you want school kids to learn about.) But not only are we becoming a non-white nation, but we’re also quickly becoming a nation of no religious majority, as more and more adherents to Eastern religions are immigrating to the US while, at the same time, many US citizens have begun to claim “no religious affiliation” on census and survey forms, reducing the number of people who claim Christianity as their faith.

We are a members of a shrinking demographic category, so we should be careful of how we use our majority power while we still have it. Anything we do to support our faith or to oppress another can always be undone or even reversed when members of other religions or no religion eventually gain majority power.

I’ve often heard Christians sing the praises of our First Amendment right to the freedom of religion and speech and rightfully so. We have some tremendous freedoms in this nation, and those freedoms should applies to every citizen! Every attempt to weaken or limit these rights for those who don’t agree with us will backfire and result in the limiting and/or weakening of our rights.

Do to others as you would have them do to you—the Golden Rule is the heart of good citizenship.

Conclusion

Friends, I am a committed Christian with conservative social views, and yet, even I can see how we cannot impose our faith upon others. Do I want to see our society become more Christ-like? Sure. Do I think the best what to achieve that is through political means? Absolutely not.

Jesus called upon us to bring His message, His love, His power to the lost. We must take up that mission. Let’s live our lives as a public proclamation of the power of Jesus to save lives. Maybe if we took up that mission with the same passion that we campaign for presidential candidates, we wouldn’t have to worry about legislating morality because we’d see a significant influx of our fellow US citizens becoming citizens of Jesus’ kingdom.

I failed last night.

This wasn’t the first time I’d failed, in general, but it was the first time I’d failed at speaking at church in a long time. Or at the least, the first time I’d fully failed. There have been plenty of times when I put the microphone down and think to myself, “That wasn’t very good.” Last night was not one of those times.

Last night, I put the microphone down and said, “That was terrible.”

I walked back to my office and pouted and stewed. I started to make up excuses, to search for others to blame, but thankfully, I quickly put all that aside and blamed myself.

I had failed, and it was my fault.

After a few minutes, I rejoined our prayer service in the sanctuary, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t focus, couldn’t pray.

My wife gave me a stern talking to after service, and basically said to me, “This isn’t about you. You’re not performing; you’re speaking God’s truth.” Her point was that, so long as I’d delivered a bit of God’s truth, I had done what I could do.

The counterpoint, of course, is that there were a lot of other things I could have done to be better prepared, but in the end, she was still right: it wasn’t about me.

This morning, in my devotional readings, I found this same theme. I was reading about humility, and I realized that my failure last night might have been due to some practical issues, like not being as prepared as I should have been, but my reaction to my failure was all about pride.

I was upset not because of the failed attempt at speaking but because it was I who had failed. I failed, and that was no okay.

My reaction was the problem, not my lackluster presentation of Scripture. How little faith did I have in God—how much misplaced confidence did I have in myself—that an off-night could derail what He wants to accomplish in the church, in the lives of those in attendance, or in the life of fool on stage? It’s the height of arrogance.

At times like this, when I’m faced, once again, with my own sinful nature, I remind myself of my favorite piece from Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God:

That when an occasion of practicing some virtue offered, he addressed himself to God, saying, “Lord, I cannot do this unless Thou enablest me;” and that then he received strength more than sufficient.

That when he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God, “I shall never do otherwise if You leave me to myself; it is You who must hinder my falling and mend what is amiss.” That after this he gave himself no further uneasiness about it.

May we always pray such prayers.

God, unless You are with me, I will ever be failing. Only You can fill in my gaps; only You can supply what I lack. Only You can save me from failing, and in failing, from my arrogance.