One of the themes of
Buzz 07 is
decoding culture. I just finished a chapter for a book that will be published on the topic next year. It's a collection of "
essays." Just thought I'd share an excerpt.
Church Steeples
There was a time, just a few centuries ago, when
nautical maps of Europe had legends that included the location of churches on land and
church steeples doubled as navigational tools for ship captains. Churches were typically built on choice real estate
in the center of town or
atop the highest hill. And in some places,
there were ordinances against building anything taller than the church steeple so it would occupy the place closest to heaven. Nothing was more visible on the pre-modern skyline than church steeples. And in a sense,
church steeples symbolized the place of the church in culture. There was a day, in the not too distant past, when
church was the center of culture. Church was
the place to go. Church was
the thing to do. Nothing was more visible than the church steeple. Nothing was more audible than the church bells. And it might be a slight exaggeration, but all the pre-modern church had to do was raise a steeple and ring a bell.
Is it safe to say that things have changed?
The church no longer enjoys a cultural monopoly. We are
the minority in post-Christian America. And the significance of that is this:
we can't afford to do church the way it's always been done.
Our tactics must change.
Don't get me wrong:
the message is sacred.
But methods are not. And the moment we anoint our methods as sacred, we stop
creating the future and start
repeating the past. We stop doing
ministry out of imagination and start doing
ministry out of memory. And if we think that raising the steeple or ringing the bells will get the job done; the church in America will end up right where the Israelites found themselves in Judges 2:10:
After that generation died, another generation grew up who did not acknowledge the Lord or remember the mighty things he had done for Israel.
Permission to speak frankly?
Too many pastors are getting As in
Biblical exegesis and Ds in
cultural exegesis. We know Scripture, but we're out of touch with the times.
The end result is a gap between theology and reality called irrelevance. We're out of touch with the very people we're trying to reach--the unchurched and dechurched. We've got to exegete our culture so we can close the gap. That's what incarnation is all about.
The post-Christian church needs a revelation:
irrelevance is irreverence!
Church and CultureAs I see it, the church has four options when it comes to engaging culture: 1)
ignore it, 2)
imitate it, 3)
condemn it, or 4)
create it. And each option leads in polar opposite directions.
We can
ignore culture, but
the byproduct of ignorance is irrelevance. The more we ignore culture the more irrelevant we'll become. And
if the church ignores the culture, the culture will ignore the church.
We can
imitate culture, but
imitation is a form of suicide. Originality is sacrificed on the altar of cultural conformity.
If we don't shape the culture, the culture will shape us.
We can
condemn culture, but
condemnation is a cop out. Let me just call it what it is:
condemnation is spiritual laziness. We've got to stop pointing the finger and start offering better alternatives.
If the church condemns the culture, the culture will condemn the church.
Those three options will lead the church down
a dead-end road to irrelevance, but there is another option--the only option if we're serious about fulfilling the Great Commission and incarnating the gospel. We can
compete for culture by
creating culture.
In the immortal words of the Italian artist and poet, Michelangelo:
criticize by creating.
At the end of the day,
the culture will treat the church the way the church treats the culture. And we're not called to condemn. We're called to redeem.
Cultural CapitalLet me confront an issue spiritual leaders face: it is difficult to
demand attention if we don't
pay attention. If we talk without listening, what we have to say is viewed as a diatribe. And we'll keep
answering questions no one is asking!
A few years ago someone paid me a surprising compliment that caught me off guard. They thanked me for
quoting non-Biblical sources in my messages. No one had ever commented on that component of my communication, but that compliment has become part of my
philosophy of preaching. I love to read and I'm interested in just about everything, so it's not uncommon for me to quote anyone from Aristotle and Heraclites to Gladwell and Goleman. And what I realized is this.
Quoting Scripture gives me credibility with Christians.
Quoting non-Biblical sources gives me credibility with non-Christians. And while our non-biblical sources should never be unbiblical, we have to recognize that cross pollinating with non-theological disciplines gives us
cultural capital.
Every year we do two series titled
God @ the Billboard and
God @ the Box Office that explore
spiritual themes in popular songs and movies. The reason is simple: the sixty percent of Americans who don’t attend church
get their theology from movies and music. For better or for worse,
musicians and movie makers are the chief theologians in our culture.
In the prophetic words of the eighteenth century Scottish thinker, Andrew Fletcher: "Give me the making of the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws."
Our culture is shaped, even more than we realize, by the movies we watch and the music we listen to. And we have a choice. We can
ignore them. We can
condemn them. Or we can
dialogue about them.
God @ the Box Office and
God @ the Billboards are attempts to
exegete the movies and music that are shaping the cultural consciousness of nearly two hundred million unchurched Americans. We exegete the scripts and lyrics and juxtapose them with Scripture. And while a series on movies or music may sound like
watered-down or
dumbed-down versions of the gospel, they are actually
two of our hardest hitting sermon series because movies and music are brutally honest about the human condition.
We need to get serious about exegeting culture and finding
spiritual identification points. We need to redeem cultural metaphors to communicate the gospel. Isn't that what Jesus did as a parabolist? He framed truth in ways that fit within the
cognitive categories of his listeners. It was
intellectual incarnation.
If we choose to
ignore the culture around us, we aren't following in the footsteps of Jesus. We're only
digging our own grave and
burying ourselves alive.
