When thinking about how to best engage our culture – whether it be through social media, blog posts, one-on-one convos, street evangelism, mass marketing, mainstream events, hip-hop radio, etc… – I’m always (well, sometimes) reminded that the blueprints have already been laid out for us in the detailed life of Jesus. What Jesus did through his life, death, & resurrection is often hard to identify in today’s culture. I’m not saying that there is one definite answer but there’s a significant playbook to consider when it comes to how we plan on engaging the culture around us. The fact is that we cannot attempt to engage our culture on a sub-Christian gospel. People who don’t want Christianity don’t want almost-Christianity. Simply put, Jesus came to wreck our lives, so that he could join us to his.
I think the root of the problem many of us encounter may be the fact that Christian “values” have always been more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That’s why you could speak of “God and country” on the street with outstanding reception in almost any era of our nation’s history – but you’d probably create an uproar as soon as you mention the gospel message of “Christ and him crucified”. God seems to always be “welcome” in American culture. He is, after all, “the Deity whose job it is to bless America”. However, the God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Jesus, is a lot more difficult to set to a background of patriotic music or to “Amen” in a prayer at the local Mason’s Lodge meeting or Rotary Club brunch.
“[As Christians] Our legacy is a Christianity of persecution and proliferation, of catacombs and cathedrals. If we see ourselves as only a minority, we will be tempted to isolation. If we see ourselves only as a kingdom, we will be tempted toward triumphalism. We are, instead, a church. We are a minority with a message and a mission.” (35)
“Our life planning ought to be about the next trillion years, and beyond. If we assume that what’s waiting for us beyond the grave is a postlude rather than a mission and an adventure, we will cling tenaciously to the status quo, or at least the parts of it we like. . .
Let’s model what happens to a culture when the kingdom interrupts us on our way to where we would go, as if we were mapping this out on our own. Let’s not merely advocate for causes; let’s embody a kingdom. Let’s not aspire to be a moral majority but a gospel community, one that doesn’t exist for itself but for the larger mission of reaching the whole world with the whole gospel. That sort of kingdom-first cultural engagement drives us not inward, but onward.” (52, 91)
“We assume often without thinking that the church is white, American Protestants doing missionary work for the benefit of everyone else. But the church isn’t white or American; the church is headed by a Middle Eastern Jewish man who never spoke a word of English – Jesus of Nazareth.” (126)
“To rail against the culture is to say to God that we are entitled to a better mission field than the one he has given us. At the same time, if we simply dissolve into the culture around us, or refuse to leave untroubled the questions the culture deems “too sensitive” to ask, we are not on mission at all.” (181)
“It may be that America is not ‘post-Christian’ at all. It may be that America is instead pre-Christian, a land that may often be Christ-haunted, has never known the true power of the gospel yet.” (218)
All things considered, think about how much more effective our witness would be if we remembered to thunder God’s justice, while always following with God’s welcome, through the vision of a God who, in the crucified Christ, is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:26).
GREATER DEPTHS 