The Cultural Captivity of the Church — Prelude

(This is the first in an unspecified number of posts that I will periodically produce addressing what I believe is the #1 silent killer of Christian faith in America:  the average believer’s failure to recognize the dangerous, cultural smog polluting our spiritual lungs every single day.  The posts will consist of various thoughts as they emerge from the mists of my own mental confusion.  I have been thinking about the issues involved for a long time, but have held off on posting my thoughts for reasons that I no longer feel are binding.  So here goes.  Please, let me know what you think.)

Here is my thesis:

A primary responsibility of every Christian leader in every Christian congregation is to help God’s people learn to see through the lies, distortions and misrepresentations of reality that are created for us by our culture.  (I begin by assuming that knowing reality fully requires knowing Jesus Christ.)

The most dangerous distortions are those that warp our perception of the things that matter most – questions of human existence, meaning, purpose, responsibility, and, of course, a right relationship with our Creator.

So here is every Christian’s challenge:  We spend the majority of our lives

swimming through an unfiltered stream of cultural pollution.  No, I am not condemning all things secular.  Neither am I suggesting that we should try to jump into a different, a more Christian, stream.  I am afraid that’s not possible, despite the testimonies of its many proponents.

I am afraid that we are what we are where we are.   Period.

Our culture permeates everything, usually in ways that we don’t understand or even begin to recognize.  Which is one important reason why the oft-repeated arguments in favor of solving our cultural problems by creating an alternative, Christian culture with Christian schools, Christian unions, Christian political parties, etc. is always doomed to fail.

These attempts at “engagement by means of alternatives” will always fail to address the problem because, first, we cannot extricate ourselves from ourselves.  We will always be the people creating the alternatives.  We are bound to who we are, where we are, and where we come from, alternatives be damned.

Secondly, even if we withdrew into the hinterlands of the furthest wilderness, we will always bring the pollution along with us.  The source of that pollution is a part of us, buried deep within, because we are all fallen sinners.

Thankfully, this life is not painted solely in tones of black and white.  The question is not about who is good and who is bad.  Everyone and everything in this world are always a mixture of both.

Even a polluted stream can contain elements of its original, God-ordained balance, the biological diversity including fish, insect life and vegetation that makes it all worth preserving.

Sadly, however, those polluted fish now have no choice but to breathe the dirty water, inhaling the pollutants along with the oxygen.  Human beings have so successfully polluted this planet that scientists can find mercury polluting the flesh of those flightless, tuxedoed birds coddling their eggs on the ice flows of Antarctica.

We are like those penguins and those fish.

The church’s cultural corruption is every bit as universal, which is why working to learn how to recognize the problem, working to learn how to address the problem, working to learn how to remedy the problem together within the Body of Christ is an essential part of spiritual maturity.

It is also a non-negotiable requirement of responsible church leadership.

Every Christian leader ought to be making this challenge a central ingredient in his/her job description. How do I recognize cultural corruption within the church?  How do I learn to see it within myself?  How can I help others to do the same?  Then, having learned to recognize it, what can we do about it?

How can we survive swimming in this culture without being suffocated by its corruption?  And, in what, precisely, does its corruption consist?

These are the kinds of questions we have to ask ourselves.

I’ll give you a hint of where I’m going with this argument.

The usual suspects of sex, divorce, alcohol, and tithing are the not church’s greatest threats.  They are significant problems, but they are not the “heavy metals” of our cultural corruption.  They are only the bacteria that eat away at a weakened body already diseased.