Engaging culture or living counter-culturally?
Travis and I started talking about counter-cultural living today and ended up at this deeply troubling (at least to me) question - "As followers of Jesus are we called to be counter-cultural or to engage the culture?" The two ways of life seem contradictory at first, but can they be? I think the answer to the question is "yes" - Yes, we are to live counterculturally as citizens of a kingdom that is counter-cultural to our present world AND yes, we are to flesh out this faith within the culture we find ourselves in.
There is much to say here, but I want to let it brew a bit. In the meantime….I would love to hear your thoughts.
Tagged as community, compassion, creativity, environment, faith, family, general+ Categorized as general
Zack, Mike Frost talks about this question in part 5 of a 6-part talk. Zip ahead and listen from around the 30:00 mark.
I think that in some ways we are counter-cultural and in some ways we can validate and participate in cultural expressions. I think Jesus exemplified this. He stood against many things in his culture: touching lepers, hanging out with prostitutes and tax people, breaking the sabbath, and many other things. Yet at the same time he participated as a Jew in the feasts, in worship at the temple and synagogue, as a rabbi who makes disciples, etc. Something I’ve come to on this thought is that if followers of Jesus only behave counter-culturally then they become their own sub-culture and therefore lose relevance and are extracted from their culture. I see Jesus validating and enjoying aspects of culture. And at the same time, who he was, contradicted aspects of the culture he lived. So as his followers, we engage and live and enjoy much of the culture we find ourselves in, but at the same time we cant deny that much of who we are is counter-cultural, and that is a tension that we live in.
I don’t think anybody is validating counter-cultural living as an excuse to lose touch with the world around us. But it seems as though the seeker sensitive movement has the church dangerously ambiguous in current American culture. In other words….in an attempt to engage the culture we have possibly gone too far and have become no different than the culture.
I wonder if we are to look at it this way. Before we were followers of Jesus, we were human. We are humans who find themselves living in collectively human ways called “city and culture”. As we have come to embrace Jesus, we have entered into another collective effort - the church. But even as we identify with the church we remain human at our core - always have and always will. In our humanity, we must embrace the fact that their is set of cultural distinctives around us (language, customs, interests, traditions, etc.). But in our Christianity, we discover new distinctions.
Perhaps the tension of this question lies in the fact that there is tension (even contradiction) in all followers of Jesus. It is as Jesus says, we are not of this world (John 17:16). But we also are very much of this world in that we share flesh and bones and location and city with those without faith. So I am with you Trav, we need to embrace our culture as citizens of our cities and of our countries, AND embrace our culture as citizens of the kingdom of God. The problem I think comes when we stop wrestling with the tension between these two worlds and just become one or the other (evangelical subculture vs. liberal carnality).
This is a great discussion by the way.
Jon,
Thanks for that link to Mike Frost’s talks. I checked out the link you gave, but the file linked didn’t go to 30:00. So I am not sure what specific section you intended to expose. I will just listen to the whole thing and see if I can pick the relevant parts out myself.