In considering the church’s response to culture, I am reminded about how those not directly related to our youth ministry at our particular church respond to our students and our youth ministry. Since our particular church is relatively conservative in its theology and ecclesiology, there are those who find the way the students dress, talk, and even worship as strange, disrespectful, and even downright wrong in comparison to their views of what church should be. At the same time, there are those who try to understand the way the students dress, talk, and worship. Moreover, in trying to understand them, they are building a bridge for greater relationships and mutual respect and learning.
Considering this latter group of people in our church makes me wonder why they are trying to understand and dialogue with the students in our church. Similarly, it somehow reminds me that contextualization is one key and vital element to how the church can respond either in a healthy or unhealthy way to culture. One well-known pastor put it this way: “To over-contextualize to a new generation means you can make an idol out of their culture, but to under-contextualize to a new generation means you can make an idol out of the culture you come from.” Let’s unpack this a bit.
If we under-contextualize culture and don’t begin to make the church’s message relevant, then the church’s message will become just that…irrelevant. This is something youth ministry does well, and I am still a proponent of the foundations of relational ministry because relational ministry seeks to understand the context of our students, have empathy for them, and build relationships so that in God’s time, the gospel would impact their hearts.
Similarly, as I recently returned from a mission trip to Haiti last week, I realized another way that the message of the church can contextualize with a new culture of believers. In serving with young adults and students, we considered the idea of tithing, and while I still hold to this biblical teaching, I felt it was worth considering their questions of what place the tithing of time and talents has within this teaching. Similarly, this younger generation of believers asked whether spending a week in Haiti serving the Lord while sacrificing vacation time and a week’s salary is not a form of tithing. New generations of believers are going to ask and seek biblically centered questions and answers, and the church needs to consider and be able to contextualize them.
On the other hand, if the church contextualizes too much, the ministry and message of the church can get lost in that, and subsequently, we will not be confronting or calling people to the message of the church. And most importantly, that will make the church’s message irrelevant also.
I have certainly seen a shift in how youth ministries are functioning. The days of games, fun, and even just hanging out with students are now intentionally focused to be more than just a way to contextualize the students’ lives. Rather, youth ministries complement these activities with a more intentional focus that is ultimately headed toward a deeper spiritual and biblical center.
Hence, not lost upon us is that the church is ultimately the gathering of Christ’s people and not just a gathering. Moreover, if the church is not in the service and love of others to eventually call people into a loving relationship with our Christ, then exactly what is the function of the church? The church, in its attempts to contextualize, must never lose the core of its message.
Ultimately then, I am reminded of another quote from the pastor I quoted above. He notes that “the gospel makes you humble enough to listen and adapt to non-believers but confident and happy enough that you don’t need their approval.” Hence, if the church is to be healthy in responding to culture, we must contextualize but not lose the message of the church.
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This is a critical question. I could easily use all my words just to scratch the surface of the complexity involved with trying to define the meaning of culture. For example, in the book Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, by Kroeber and Kluckhohn, the authors flesh out more than 150 definitions of culture. On the other hand, poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote a book entitled Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, stated that culture could be described simply as “that which makes life worth living.”
The issue of what posture to take toward culture (even the posture toward defining culture) has been one of the most dominant and important conversations of the church for 2,000 years and will be for the next 2,000 years. How the church throughout history has defined and reacted to culture (in whatever particular context it finds herself in) has significantly determined the course of history in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Tragic periods of church history involving inquisitions, pogroms, and political abuse were linked to cultural ideals. Beautiful periods of church history involving the creation of art, architectural advancement, and care for the sick, poor, and marginalized were fueled by the church’s posture toward cultural engagement.
Often, the desire to “change the world” has fueled unhealthy behavior from Christians through attempts to gain political influence and efforts to “redeem” the culture. James Hunter, the Labrosse-Levinson distinguished professor of religion, culture, and social theory at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, has a new book called To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. In the book, Hunter critiques all the misguided attempts that Christians and churches engage in to change the world. According to Hunter, the various strategies to impact culture and ultimately change the world are driven by tragically ill-conceived concepts of culture and cultural influence. Hunter examines the political, sociological, and theological paradigms of the Christian right and left, along with the Anabaptist approach of Hauerwas and Yoder, showing them all to fall far short of anything resembling broad culture-changing realities.
Andy Crouch, senior editor of Christianity Today and author of the book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, recently reviewed Hunter’s book. Crouch writes, “Christianity in America, as Hunter sees it, is very much on the periphery, for all its numerical strength. Its institutions, such as they are, tend to be weak, they tend not to be in culturally central locations, and they tend to address the "lower and peripheral areas" of culture—secondary education rather than university research, popular culture rather than high art, ministries of mercy rather than public policy. At their worst they glory in their marginal status, feeding a subculture that churns out substandard cultural products for consumption by other Christians, simultaneously the most energetic and the least effective culture-makers you could imagine.”
I have spent years (literally—years), I mean in real time—years, talking about church and culture and gospel, and yet I still find the question this week perplexing and challenging. Even though some declare that I have a good intuitive understanding of how to engage culture, I will acknowledge that this question is so important that I must adamantly admit that I don’t have an answer. But I’m committed, as all youth workers should be, to immersing myself in deep theological, sociological, economic, and political reflection and dialogue about what it means to engage meaningfully with and in culture. This conversation is so important for discovering what T.S. Eliot describes as “that which makes life worth living.”
Promoting To Change the World on James Hunter’s website is this paragraph: “What is really needed is a different paradigm of Christian engagement with the world, one that Hunter calls ‘faithful presence’—an ideal of Christian practice that is not only individual but institutional; a model that plays out not only in all relationships but in our work and all spheres of social life. He offers real-life examples, large and small, of what can be accomplished through the practice of ‘faithful presence.’”
Crouch declares that this important work by James Hunter will “be provoking better Christian conversations about culture for years to come.” I hope this is true because—God help us—we need more healthy conversations and behavior vis-à-vis the relationship between church and culture.
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This has dogged youth ministry and youth-ministry-type people for a while. Those of us who work with people who seem obsessed with their own and/or popular cultures (if there is a difference) have often struggled to figure out how we should engage culture. After all, it seems that young people and culture are inseparable. And I think in many ways this is true. I think young people are obsessively bound in culture—but no more than their parents; no more than anyone.
To be human is to be a cultural animal. There is little to no escaping it. Of course, this anthropological reality heightens the stakes when it comes to ministry because, though we can’t escape some kind of culture, we do possess (as human beings) the ability, while stuck in culture, to reflect on it. Therefore, we can aesthetically and morally judge it. We are bound to culture, but even in our boundness, we can resist and disdain much of it.
So as Americans, we are stuck in a culture of reality TV, low-cut jeans, a fetish for youthfulness, and a dogmatic passion that anyone can make anything of himself. You may not understand much of this, or you may find it banal or evil, but those are the cultural waters in which we all swim, even in resistance. Even in resisting consumption culture, we have to buy a whole lot of crap to get off the grid and live green.
So how should we respond to culture? We can begin by recognizing that we can never escape it! Many young and hip evangelical Christians have helpfully realized this, stopping the conservative Protestant game of beating culture like a piñata, only to realize that it’s made of steel. So instead, these young and hip evangelicals have turned from culture bashing to culture constructing. I guess this is a good move…I’m just not sure how it happens and how it escapes just Veggie-Taling everything, giving popular culture some kind of Christian morality or aesthetic. I know, I know, that’s not the cultural construction they’re pushing for, and I know that Christianity has been a force for culture creation. Believe me, I’ve heard of Abraham Kuyper and how this theologian changed culture by engaging it theologically.
But I guess this is the problem. Such a perspective of culture building often has an innate theology that contends that God’s action in the world happens through the unfolding of cultural realities; that the will of God is found in culture. So now you have these young thinkers looking for all sorts of Christian themes in movies, video games, and music. So because God acts through the unfolding of culture, we are stuck trying to find God’s action in episodes of The Hills or Coen brother movies. It starts to feel weird to me.
But more than weird, it has a theological problem. I, in contrast, to Kuyper (and the neo-unaware-Kuyperians), don’t think that revelation happens as a cultural construction. I don’t think God is somehow inertly pushed into our context through the waves of culture or societal structure. I think the God of Israel breaks into our world, thrusting our cultural conceptions of God into question, showing us how culture always makes idols. I, in a more Barthian flavor, don’t think culture can ever hold the act of God; I don’t think we can look at cultural creations to reveal the otherness of the action of God.
Okay, but I guess then, game over, no reason to care about culture (this perception is often people’s disdain for Barth), and if that’s true, doesn’t it make all the crap I just said about the anthropological necessity of culture inconsistent? I don’t think so. We are cultural beings, no escaping it, and we use culture to make meaning and form identity, but simply Christianizing it isn’t going to do any good. A Christian culture (like those pre-WWI and WWII in Europe) doesn’t guarantee that we will participate in the action of God, just that we’ll make God into an idol to justify our culture (hence, the whole problem with Christendom).
So maybe the way we engage culture is not to try necessarily to create it or enfold within it a Christian story/message but to listen deeply to it, to crawl next to it so fully that we can hear its deep cries for meaning, its deep longings and despairing questions. I actually think we should engage culture—not necessarily to find God but to find our neighbor—to see, hear, and act for her (and yes, there is a little Tillichian flavor to my Barthian read). In doing this we close the circle. When we engage culture to encounter the humanity of our neighbors, we are drawn into places where God’s revelation does meet us—in encounters with humanity of the other.
So this gives us both a constructive and critical way to engage culture. Where cultural constructions open us up to otherness, we shouldn’t label these as revelations but as helpful ways of seeking God by seeing the humanity of our neighbors (where the revelation of God is found). But where cultural constructions stereotype, abuse, and objectify (like the way porn is becoming pop culture), we should resist it. This takes deep cultural engagement that respects the creator of the cultural text—it forces us to try to understand what the songwriter, director, etc., is trying to communicate, not just baptize it with some trite Christian meaning.
So the revelation of God is not bound in culture but next to my neighbor, and at times the cultural construction or text (songs, movies, video games) can help me see my neighbor. When it does, it has become a gift.
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