Church & Culture

1. 006 The Problem In the Church Church & Culture 006 The Problem in the Church

2. The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. – Charles Malik 006 The Problem in the Church

3. How Do I Integrate God Into My Life? • Where is God in my life? • What appears to be depression may be a longing for spiritual meaning in your work • Tensions between spiritual hunger and demands of a “purely” secular job • Illustration: lawyer 006 The Problem in the Church

4. Law addresses issues connected to the whole person • People come to lawyers because they are in crisis • Great opportunity to help people do what is right • “The law is not merely a set of procedures or an argumentative technique. It is God’s means of confronting wrong, establishing justice, defending the weak, and promoting the public good.” • In every profession, the prevailing views stem from some underlying philosophy-basic assumptions about what is ultimately true and right • Christians need not feel out of place bringing their own assumptions onto the field • Just like a lawyer can claim the freedom to bring biblical understandings of justice, rights, and reconciliation into the legal arena 006 The Problem in the Church

5. Christian Happiness? • No Christian can be happy when torn in two different directions • How can we experience the full faith of the Christian life? • How can we lead whole and integrated lives when we are required to leave our “beliefs” behind and function with a “secular” mindset? • The dichotomies of secular/sacred and public/private have a significant impact on all of us • Our lives can become splintered and fragmented • Our work has no spiritual significance • Spiritual truths are limited to our “down time” 006 The Problem in the Church

6. Breaking Free? • How do we break free from these dichotomies? • We can accomplish this by finding a worldview that unifies both secular and sacred, public and private within a single model • Realize that all honest work and creative enterprise can be a calling from God • Realize that biblical principles apply to every field of work • Insights will fill us with new joy, new purpose as we begin to relate to God in and through every dimension of our lives 006 The Problem in the Church

7. Christian Guilt • The God of the Bible is not only the God of the human spirit but also the God of nature and history • We are to serve Him not only in worship but also in obedience to the Cultural Mandate • Because many Christians do not have a biblical worldview they see their jobs as secular and not having the same worth as “sacred” or a religious occupation • They feel guilty • If they were really committed to God they would be doing something more worthwhile • “Most Christians don’t have a biblical sense of calling in their jobs-and thus they fail to treat is as frontline work for the Kingdom” • Col 3.23 006 The Problem in the Church

8. Church’s Frontline Troops • Example: Doctor stops practicing medicine to join a Christian organization • Leaves medical practice to work in ministry • Never realizing that his medical practice was his ministry • Everyday Christians working everyday jobs are on the frontlines of the church’s engagement with the culture/world • Does the church see laypeople as frontline troops in the spiritual battle? • How would churches be transformed if they did? • Does the church take seriously its duty to provide the frontline troops support in this war • What is the church doing “to strengthen their Christian witness, to help them in facing the very difficult ethical problems which they have to meet every day, to give them assurance that the whole fellowship is behind them in their daily spiritual warfare • The church should be a spiritual boot camp, training its soldiers, its laypeople, to send them out “to speak the gospel to the world.” 006 The Problem in the Church

9. “Bilingual Christians” • Christians need to be able to “translate” the worldview of the gospel into a language that can be understood by our culture • Like many immigrants Christians speak two languages • We speak a language that ignores God while claiming to make sense of the world in our “outside” of the house time • We speak with a biblical language when we are within the safety of “home” • Christians are called to be missionaries • We are to be more than immigrants, “simply preserving a few customs and phrases from the old country.” • We are entrusted with the responsibility to “actively translate the language of faith into the language of the culture around us.” • The issue for us and the church is that we are not very good a being “linguists” • Most Christians are unable to articulate their beliefs in culture,9 in a way that can be understood or be accepted as relevant • Like immigrants we are uncomfortable in talking in our new language, we are more comfortable speaking in our “mother” tongue 006 The Problem in the Church

10. Battle in the Work Place • The Church has lost the work place • A variety of polls have showed that a large percentage of Americans still claim a belief in God or are “born again” • At the same time there is a decreasing impact of Christian principles and thought in the market place, in public life • The results are telling us that while the private sphere may be growing more religious, the public sphere is becoming more secular 006 The Problem in the Church

11. A Key Poll: Secular vs Sacred • 1994 65% of Americans say religion is losing its influence in the secular arena • While 62% of Americans say religion has increased in their personal lives • Private world increases by blocking it off from the “real” world where the important activities take place • “The private realm. . .an “innocuous play area where religion is acceptable for people who need … (a) crutch-but where it won’t upset any important applecarts in the larger world of politics and economics” • A key role of religion is to provide a sense of life’s meaning • Today, much of the church no longer sees the role of the church as providing a “common universe of meaning” • Religion appeals almost exclusively to the needs of the private/sacred sphere • Religion, once “connected to group identity and a sense of belonging, it is now. . . a search for an authentic inner life • Christianity no longer a lens to interpret reality -no longer the total truth • Unique to western culture is the view that you can separate the private from the secular 006 The Problem in the Church

12. The Critical Disconnect • Christians do not understand : work is a service to God, a fulfillment of the Cultural Mandate • What Christian can explain a biblical perspective on the state and politics? • How do Christians work to advance justice and the public good? • Christians think individual voluntary activities are the solutions to the problems of society • “worthy as these projects may be, none of them attempt to transform social or cultural systems, but merely to alleviate some of the harm caused by the existing system.” • Before we can begin to develop a biblical worldview we need identify and understand the barriers that keep us from being able to apply our faith across the elements of civilization • How did we get to the point where we no longer have a voice in the public square • The basic answer: Christians are trapped by dualisms and dichotomies • To break free we must gain a clear understanding of the problem they have caused and how it came to be this way 006 The Problem in the Church