Christians Effectively Engaging Culture
by Chad Hall

It has been fifty years since H. Richard Niebuhr wrote “Christ and Culture” – a classic text that has recently been re-issued by Harper. In the book, Niebuhr basically addresses the question “How shall we, as Christians, live?” Niebuhr describes five different relationships between Christ and Culture (Christ against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ the Transformer of Culture). The question of how Christians shall live in relation to culture is as relevant today as when the book was originally published. In fact, the question may be even more important for those of us living out our faith in this new millennium.

When Niebuhr wrote, he did so out of a context that was markedly a part of Christendom – that stage of history when Christian thought, attitudes, and convictions largely prevailed in the Western world. In this context, Niebuhr could positively anticipate Christ transforming culture because of the major voice Christianity had in the culture of that day. However, the world of Christendom has now faded. The “culture” that Niebuhr described was sympathetic to (and sometimes allied with) Christianity. Today’s culture seems to waffle amidst three attitudes: quaint recognition of Christianity’s role in our history; outright opposition to Christianity and the claims of Christ; apathy about Christianity. In a culture that moves less and less according to Christian undercurrents, how shall Christians engage culture?

In my ministry as a church planter and pastor, I have made it my aim to effectively engage culture. For me, “effective engagement” means that the cause of Christ must be moved forward as a result of the engagement. The goal of engagement is not simply to be on the cutting edge, to raise eyebrows, or to be novel. If the engagement does not serve God’s ultimate purpose of redeeming His creations, then it is of no use.

How do Christians in general and church leaders in particular effectively engage the culture? Here are a few examples:

• Hijack cultural momentum. One approach to engagement is to discern what is in the stream of the culture’s collective consciousness and to tap into the momentum for use in the church’s ministry. For instance, each summer when the blockbuster movies are released, a number of churches do sermon series that utilize the themes of these movies as a way of sharing Christ. Similarly, when the cultural consciousness turned to reality television a few years ago, some churches capitalized by offering message series that utilized that theme.
  
  
• Use cultural language. Churches and churched people have a definite dialect that is not the same as the other cultural inhabitants. In order to effectively engage culture, church leaders must learn and use the culture’s language when appropriate. For instance, most pre-Christians are not all that interested in having a lord or savior. They don’t know what those words mean. When sharing Christ with people, I try to use their language by saying that Christ is the person who can help them become fully alive; He is the only person who can help them become all that God created them to be. Those phrases pique their interest enough that I can then more fully describe what it means for Christ to be Lord and Savior. When using the language of the culture, it’s always important that the story you tell with that language is the story of God’s redemptive plan in the world, and not just one more story from culture.
  
  
• Culture’s hopes and hurts. Effective ministers will want to study the culture in order to know more accurately what the particular hopes and hurts of everyday people. As Christ-followers, we know that all hopes and hurts are rooted in Christ and our need for Christ, but the particular expressions of those hopes and hurts can change. Today’s culture is struggling with issues that were not crucial even twenty years ago. High rates of substance abuse, pornography addiction, coping with issues of gender identity, and a growing pandemic of consumerism all make this a unique context for doing ministry. Church leaders must engage the culture in order to understand such issues and how Christ’s ministry can be uniquely expressed in such a context.
  
  Some churches will choose not to engage the culture. It’s true that secular culture is a dangerous expedition, fraught with temptations to compromise, acquiesce, and condone. Christian communities such as the Amish and those tied to specific language traditions have chosen to isolate themselves from culture in order to insulate themselves from its influence. Other groups choose to live in the not-so-distant past by either pretending they still live in the 1950’s or condemning all developments since then as ungodly. But for those Christians who choose to engage today’s culture, there are a few rules that are helpful to follow.
  
  
• Prayerful Preparation. Christians who waltz into culture not expecting an attack from the enemy are fools. Any engagement with culture must be bathed in prayer. I typically pray for that any spirit or force opposed to God would be expelled from the cultural venue I am about to enter – be it a movie theatre, a concert, a sporting event, or a school function.
  
  I also pray that I would be able to view the experience through the eyes of Christ. While on a recent trip to New York City, I prayed that God would use my daily subway rides as a time of spiritual renewal. During those rides, I found myself surrounded by the core of today’s culture – foul language, lonely commuters, rowdy teens, and so much more. But looking at those experiences through the eyes of Christ helped bring me closer to Him and made me more aware that my surroundings are exactly why God became man for the purpose of redemption.
  
  
• Community. Christians are not loners and those who best engage culture do so as groups of believers. Ecclesiastes reminds us “A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.” For purposes of protection and accountability, I find it best to engage certain aspects of culture only as part of a Christian community. The small group I am a part of often attends movies, festivals, and other non-Christian experiences as a group so that we can debrief the experience in light of who we are in Christ.
  
  
• Maintain Purpose. Finally, it is always important that you not lose sight of your purpose for engaging culture. There are certain aspects of culture that Christians can find fun, entertaining, and even uplifting. However, enjoyment of culture is not the ultimate purpose for engaging. As Christ-followers, we are wrapped up in a story much larger and more important than the small stories supplied to us by culture. If we begin to find our identity according to culture rather than according to Christ, we will have failed in our aim to become fully alive in Christ. Some ways to maintain purpose include: observe Christian seasons such as Lent in order to be caught up in the rhythms of the Christ story and not just those of the culture; compose a mission or purpose statement that can act as a “north star” that gives ultimate direction to your journey; keep a close set of Christian friends who can lovingly speak truth into your life should they observe that you are straying.

 

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