…People are.

Recently, the Lord has been teaching me that the culture that we live in is not — in and of itself — sinful. Clarification is needed: The culture is not a living, breathing being with a soul and personality. It is the name we give to the network of the exchange of goods, services, information, and relationship. Culture is the way that we interact with one another. It includes language, art, medicine, architecture, clothing, music, the way we form friendships, the way we end friendships, the way we talk. It is everything that governs our day-to-day interaction with ourselves and eneryone else in our society.

Like most things, culture can be used for good or for evil:
For instance, medicine is not evil. Those who murder children (yes, I am talking about abortion) are.
Food is not evil. Those who are gluttonous are.
Alcohol is not evil. Those who indulge in drunkenness are.
Rap music is not evil. Those who use it to express anger, sadistic desires, or perverse sexual fantasies are.
Smoking is not evil. Those who are mastered by it are.
Clothing is not evil. Those who use it — or a lack of it — to attract attention to their bodies are.
The list goes on. Culture never sent anyone to hell; but people who use aspects of culture in sinful ways condemn themselves. We can live in our society in such a way that uses the culture for either redemption or condemnation.  There is one way to use the culture for redemption: When we see it as a tool to reach the lost for the sake of the Kingdom, we are free to engage the culture. This is what it means to be in the world but not of it, and the end of this mindset is a life lived within society to the glory of Christ. On the other hand, there are two ways to use the culture for condemnation: First, we can dismiss sinful practices as “merely cultural” and use that as an excuse for license to do evil. Second, we can see the culture itself as evil and so fail to meet the people who live within it on terms that they understand and can relate to. Both of these mindsets fail to maintain the integrity of the Gospel while evangelizing the lost.

The basic principle that we must understand is that our mission in life is not to isolate ourselves from the culture, but to see sinners come to repentance and faith in the One True God. It is the  people in our society that need saving, not the music industry, the clothing industry, the Internet, or the English language. The Gospel is unchanging, but the way in which we communicate that timeless message and the way we validate it by our actions changes from era to era, from nation to nation, from generation to generation, from region to region. We must keep in mind that God is not impressed if we don’t frequent the coffeeshops where gay couples hang out, if we don’t play cards, or if we only listen to classical music and hymns written before 1880. The brutal fact of the matter is that everyone is entirely ugly and evil before a holy God, and the only thing that makes us at all worthy is His love for us!

The church, in an effort to keep itself unstained from the world, has failed to engage the culture, and it has instead created its own subculture — or, more accurately, subcultures. From within these subcultures, it has become ingrown and isolated. The seeker-sensitive church may be very relevant to the suburban upper middle-class married boomers, but it has absolutely no point of connection to a younger, more community-oriented generation. Furthermore, in an effort to “market” the Gospel to a certain demographic, some of these churches have lost the content of the Gospel. The Gospel is always relevant, but churches are not. The church must realize that there is a way to maintain the content of the Gospel within the context of the culture — and this is just what Jesus and the Apostles did in the First Century. They understood that sinners had to come to salvation, and that salvation was by grace alone through faith alone, and it was found in Christ alone. They took that core message and preached it boldly within the context of their cultures. Jesus spoke in a very Hebrew way to the Jewish people; Paul, likeways, spoke in a very Greek way to the philosophers on Mars Hill. However, both of them preached the exact same Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The mission of every Christian individually and of the church collectively is to draw sinners to faith and repentance. We must engage the culture to reach sinners who condemn themselves by using the culture sinfully. We must be in the world but not of it to save those who are of the world and not in the church’s culture. May we live our lives to the glory of God alone!