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Comment: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis
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p.s. Seeing red and feeling blue

The elusiveness of trust on the ethnic frontier
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Beliefs, values and spirituality
David Livingstone

Citizenship
Brighde Vallely

Creating Community
Ben Walker

Interview with Jose & Marizete Lara: Laboratory for mission
Anna Rankin

Transforming Culture
Derek Keefe

That's not fair!
Drew Gibson

Review: A Heart to Listen
Lynne Livingstone

Review: How to Detox your Spiritual Life in 40 Days
Claire Martin

Review: Praying in Exile
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Laboratory for mission

MANY DISCUSSIONS of church and culture during the last fifty years have begun with the categories laid out in American historian H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1951 book Christ and Culture. In it Niebuhr proposes a typology of positions that Christians throughout history have taken with respect to the surrounding culture: Christ against culture; Christ of culture; Christ above culture; Christ and culture in paradox; and Christ transforming culture. Though much has been debated about the adequacy of this typology,¹ for my purpose here I am most interested in the fact that the last option or ‘conversionist’ position, understood in one form or another, seems by far to be the preference of choice among many Christians, especially ‘progressives’ and ‘activist evangelicals.’ While the appeal of this option is understandable – even at first glance it seems to be the most positive option – I think the church must be smart about how understand and appropriate a ‘conversionist’ paradigm.

In our haste to develop strategies by which we might transform culture, Christians often miss a more primary consideration – the incarnational reality that church and culture are in a mutually conditioning relationship, with cultural forces influencing the church in significant and sometimes undesirable ways. Lest we doubt the power of the particular cultural milieu churches inhabit, we need only take a cursory glance at history, our local scene, or across the Atlantic to see that churches all-too-often mirror some of the worst aspects of the surrounding culture, appearing at times as nothing more than its reflection.²

But how and why does this happen? How is it that those so intent on shaping the culture end up being shaped by the culture in undesirable ways? What is it that makes churches susceptible to cultural forces? As a way of probing these questions I will discuss, in turn, two realities the church must accept and reckon with, as well as the inadequate response of some churches to these realities, failures that increase our likelihood of being co-opted or generally ineffective in our mission to the world.

First, as I’ve alluded to already, I think cultural interaction is simply an incarnational reality. Local churches are just that – located in a particular place at a particular time in history and share a complex relationship with the attitudes, beliefs, and sensibilities of the surrounding culture. Before they are against, above, or for the culture they are simply in it. Churches cannot reasonably expect – nor need they desire – to be completely free from the influence of the culture.

Sadly, as I have already noted, some churches ignore this reality and fail as students of the particular cultural environments they inhabit.³ Either they ignore it altogether or are fixed on past cultural battles, often against extra-biblical social taboos. However, ignoring the broader culture does not make it go away; such naiveté only makes churches vulnerable to the pervasive cultural ethos. And anachronistic cultural crusaders may possess a robust sense of mission, but are woefully out of touch, delivering strong blows to straw men while the truly menacing gods of the age slip by unnoticed.⁴ Their flurry of activity is little more than a holy harrumph.

Second, I think cultural influence is also a missional reality of being the church. Ironically, the urgency and orientation of Christian mission – ‘I have become all things to all men, that by all means I might save some’ (1 Cor. 9:22b) – opens the church to cultural trends. All groups with a message to convey – whether religious or secular – rely on points of contact with their culture in order to gain a hearing. In practice, however, these points of contact, whether stylistic or substantive, sometimes overtake or distort the original message and become a defining feature of the communication. Here we see the law of unintended consequences at work. This is common in churches that put great emphasis on relevance, the sovereignty of the audience (give the people what they want) and success as measured in raw numbers – people and pounds.⁵ Hence we see, especially in America, churches that look more like attempts at niche marketing: church as entertainment complex, church as therapy center, church as coffeehouse, church as leisure center, etc. Often churches that claim to be ‘meeting people where they are’ decide to ‘stay’ when they see just how many people are ‘there’.

Therefore churches with a weak or undefined ecclesiology – churches that do not have a strong sense of identity or mission – are most prone to mirror or chase after culture. The first questions, then, in the discussion of church and culture are ‘what is the church,’ and ‘what is its mission in the world’? The task of cultural engagement makes little sense unless churches have the question of identity and mission answered. There is no question of church and culture if there is no church.

But many churches do not know who they are or how to be church and are looking to the world to tell them. They are currently taking on many manifestations in a desperate search for meaning and an appreciative public, looking to the same institutions and groups as others – party, state, business culture, Hollywood, academics, success gurus, therapists, pollsters – for answers.⁶ If you don’t think there is an identity crisis in many churches, you haven’t been paying attention.⁷

Christ transforming church
With this backdrop in mind, I would like to suggest that ‘conversionist’ churches back off the throttle and broach the logically prior ecclesiological question about identity and mission. I would also like to suggest a starting point that is anything but novel. At a Community Relations Council meeting last autumn a devoted member of the church suggested in group discussion that the church needed to be ‘converted to the community.’ Most at the table, including myself, received this assertion favorably and just nodded. However, when this well-intentioned comment was brought the attention of David Porter, who was leading the session, he unhesitatingly answered in the negative. No, he said, the church must first be ‘converted to Christ’ if it is to serve a redemptive purpose in the community. What may have seemed a quibble to some was for me an important reminder about first things. The identity of the Christ-ian church, if it is to bear the name in any meaningful sense at all, is centred in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are those called by God to be the church of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in our midst.

I will be the first to admit that this assertion of identity raises as many questions as it answers – most notably, what exactly does it mean to be the church of Jesus Christ?! But the point I wish to make is not that such a confession answers all our questions, but that beginning the question of church and culture from this starting point reorients our conversation and changes its tenor in crucial ways, freeing us from a host of misguided concerns. The church that confesses Jesus as Lord is a church freed for culture.

Church freed for culture
A church freed from fear
The converted church neither despises nor fears the culture. Yes, cultural forms and institutions are fallen. But like humanity they too were created good and are an object of redemption. It is part of God’s creative intent to communicate his salvific will in and through cultural forms. Culture is an arena of divine activity and transformation.

Yes, cultural spells and illusions can be powerfully misleading. But Jesus Christ has unmasked, triumphed over, and made a public spectacle of the enchanters in his death and resurrection (Col. 2:15). There is no cosmic dualism, no equally powerful anti-God, just rebellious creatures dealing in artifice, those who, as N.T. Wright has quipped, ‘can shriek, but without authority.’⁸ The sovereignty of ‘the powers of the air’ has been broken. We need not live under their spell. Jesus is Lord.⁹

A church freed from idols and ideologies
Not living under the culture’s spell means freedom from its misconstrued values. Relevance, success, privilege, respectability, power, and affluence; the converted church need not chase after any of these as ‘first things,’ and will reject or redefine some altogether in pursuit of life in the Spirit according to the pattern of Jesus – untiring obedience to the mission of God. C.S. Lewis’s observation about Jesus in The Four Loves has import for the church that bears his name: ‘You can’t really be very well “adjusted” to your world if it says you “have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.’ How does the church understand successful mission in light of the cross?

Similarly, a converted church is also freed to deny the prevailing isms and ideologies of the day the sort of ultimacy they presume, if not demand, whether they be social (consumerism, individualism), political (nationalism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism, democracy), or philosophical (i.e. scientism, materialism).¹⁰ Ideologies and isms are often built upon important, but limited or incomplete goods or insights, whether it is the value of the individual, personal freedom, social equality, or the scientific method as a means of discovery. These are worthy commitments, a good of significant value worth pursuing, but they are not the good, not the church’s reason for being. When churches exalt these values and ideologies to ultimate status, confusing their ‘salvation’ narratives for that of the gospel they become idols, and we their servants.

A church freed to ‘be church’ for the sake of the world
Finally, the converted church is free simply to be church – and not something else – for the sake of the world. This is simultaneously both less than what many ‘conversionists’ want and more than they imagine. It is less because there are those who want to launch a ‘culture war’ in an attempt to take the kingdom by force. They want to ‘win the culture,’ ‘take it back,’ or ‘restore it to former glory.’ Yet they forget that the kingdom of God is as much about means as ends. There is no such thing as a kingdom of God established in ways not in keeping with its king – Jesus.

With this in mind, theologian Miroslav Volf has argued not for inaction, but rhetoric and action that is ‘more modest so that it can they can be more effective.’¹¹ He looks to 1 Peter – words to Christian communities living in exile amidst hostility – which nudges us to drop the pen that scripts master narratives and instead give account of the living hope in God and God’s future (3:15; 1:5), to abandon the project of reshaping society from the ground up and instead do as much good as we can from where we are at the time we are there (2:11), to suffer injustice and bless the unjust rather than perpetrating violence by repaying ‘evil for evil or abuse for abuse’ (3:9), and to replace the anger of frustration with the joy of expectation (4:13). We are freed then, to communicate our hope to others with ‘gentleness and reverence’ (3:16), which is the ‘open life-stance of the strong, who feel no need to support their uncertainty by aggression toward others’. The church can operate with a ‘fearlessness borne of a people who are ‘secure in their God…who have no need either to subordinate or damn others…but seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even “without a word”’ (1 Peter 3:1).

Volf’s words point us toward the more than involved in ‘being church’ that some conversionists miss. We cannot forget that this Jesus – yes, this crucified one! – is also Lord, the King of kings. As the church, we have the great privilege of testifying to our ‘living hope’ by taking the radically strong position of walking in the ways of crucified Jesus, whose resurrection by God was the vindication of his life and ways and verification that He is the one. Volf is quick to dismiss claims that the way of suffering and gentleness is only an accommodation to the ‘rulers of the age’:

‘[This is] a call to struggle against the politics of violence in the name of the politics of a crucified Messiah. How blinded must one be by the prejudices of one’s own liberal culture to see in this demanding way of suffering only accommodation to the dominant norms of the Hellenistic world!’¹²

The converted church is free, then, to walk in the demanding way of her king, to live on his terms.

But what exactly does being church for the sake of the world look like? Even if we’ve settled the ecclesiological question – we will be the church of Jesus Christ – the incarnational reality remains. We are back to the first question. We must be church in our particular places. This means we must listen as well as proclaim. We must participate in conversation with the culture. I think Volf is right to ask ‘whether our urge for consistency does not skew our perception of social reality.’ The desire for a predictable, uniform, stable social world is understandable, for it would certainly make discipleship easier. But no such worlds exist. Cultures are not monolithic, but themselves a ‘complex pattern of symbols, beliefs, values, practices and organizations that are partly congruent with one another and partly contradictory.’ Because of the diversity within each culture and differences between cultures, we simply cannot decide the question of church and culture ‘up front’ on theoretical grounds. A church’s relationship to a given culture must be as diverse and complex as the culture itself and will therefore involve accepting, rejecting, subverting and transforming certain aspects of culture – all at the same time.

Being church in the world cannot be reduced to a list of rules or a simple formula. It is an incarnational practice, a new way of life, what we might call the art of learning to live redemptively in the pattern of Jesus. It is the converted church feeling its way around in a world made strange. It is word made flesh. Our Lord is the one whose name we bear, who knew the world’s strangeness (John 1:10). Our discipleship in all things – including cultural engagement – begins here: ‘follow me.’

NOTES
1 Several commentators have argued that Niebuhr’s reading of the particular sympathies of groups and persons throughout church history is flawed, that his notions of ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’ are vague and problematic, and/or that his categories themselves are insufficient, confused, or too wooden to describe the complex relationship between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture.’

2 Of the many readily available examples, I’ll note just one – the mid 19th century split of both the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the United States over the issue of slavery, with the Southern bodies offering biblical justifications for the institution.

3 This seems to be borne out by the Church in the Public Square research project conducted by the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in 2004.

4 Both of these positions are particularly lamentable given the fact that there are many insightful cultural exegetes at our disposal, several of whom identify as Christians. See, for example the work of Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Marva Dawn, Albert Borgmann, Christine Rosen, Neil Postman, and Stephen Toulmin, and Ken Myers just to name a few.

5 This understanding of success is itself borrowed from the surrounding (market capitalist) culture. The notion of the sovereignty of the audience is taken from Nathan Hatch’s book, The Democratization of American Christianity.

6 Hence, we could add to the previously mentioned mish-mash of ecclesiological models church as political action committee or lobby, church as corporation or brand, and countless others.

7 The enthusiastic evangelical response to Rick Warren’s 1995 book Purpose-Driven Church, first in America, and now elsewhere across the globe (available in 17 languages), is indicative of this ecclesiological uncertainty. What is ironic, however, is that the most pointed and consistent criticism leveled against the book is that its understanding of church and mission is detrimentally influenced by the predominant values of its cultural location, i.e. California (!), U.S.A. In other words, Warren’s book may be more symptom than tonic.

8 From an interview with Dick Staub. Audio and transcript available at http://www.dickstaub.com/culturewatch.php?record_id=693

9 This is not to imply the life in the world is easy for the church or that the ‘powers of the air’ are weak and feigning. But it is to say, echoing Paul’s discourse on the ‘armour of God’ in Ephesians 6, that provision has been made for us to withstand the powers by ‘being strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.’

10 Per George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship we could add Marxism, subjectivism, objectivism, romanticism, feminism, ethnocentrism, relativism, intellectualism, anti-intellectualism, populism, and elitism.

11 From “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter,” Ex Auditu: Journal of the North Park Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture. Available on-line at http://campus.northpark.edu/sem/exauditu/papers/volf.html Much of what follows is informed by Volf’s exposition in this paper. All quotes from the same.

12 Volf, 9. Volf is certainly not the only, or first one to see something substantive and potent in the presence of such alternative communities (i.e. churches) within a given culture. Over the last forty years a rich body of biblical and theological reflection has grown from seed planted by Hendrikus Berkhof, and subsequently tended and nurtured by other gardeners such as John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas and, more recently, Marva Dawn.

DEREK KEEFE is Research Assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland.

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