Live.Awake

Godward Art Series Wrap-up

// May 19th, 2007 // Church Life

I’ve spent the week trying to explore this idea that Christianity needs to be contextualized in our current culture. God didn’t create us to live in a vacuum. The Great Commission commands us to “go” into the community and the world armed with the gospel of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom.

The fear is that we will become syncretistic, allowing the world’s flawed, hedonistic and banal pop culture to invade our own. That we will begin to capitulate to culture in ways that compromise our foundations, eroding the effectiveness of the message itself. I think the stabilizing factor is the Bible. If we are careful to follow it and trust it as the inspired and infallible word of God (and let it interpret itself) we will avoid the pitfalls of syncretism and universalism.

Some of you this week may have been wondering, “Why does this matter?” It matters because there is a tremendous push in the United States at this moment in history to revive the church to its mission to our communities; to use our culture to construct new bridges from the community to Jesus. Many are calling it the “Emerging” church. The problem is that within this movement there are those (certainly not all) that are calling into question the authority of scripture and therefore making no stand against areas of sin and heresy (homosexuality, false religion, fornication, etc.). The gospel message in the process becomes diluted and amorphous — without clear definition or authority.

Will we forsake the gospel?

The reason this stuff matters (or should) to you is that it’s easy to be mislead when the deception comes couched in terms like “progressive”, “relational”, “conversation”, and “authentic”.

I’ll let Mark Driscoll wrap things up for me. He summarizes my feelings on the subject well as he talks about how they have applied these principles at Mars Hill Church.

I hope this week hasn’t been an exercise in chasing a headless chicken for you. At least you got to hear some good music.

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