Matthew 4:23,24 talks about the start of Jesus’ ministry, He taught in synagogues (churches), preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness…

We are called to be separate and apart but it does not say to separate yourself from society.

I too believe we are to get out of the building and into the world but we must also be careful to be lead by the Holy Spirit.

The most obvious place to start is with family, friends and associates you may have influence over.

Don’t start out trying to save the world. Jesus gives us the pattern in Acts 1:8 …and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.

After you have developed some spiritual muscles then take on some of the “world” around you but take a friend. That too is part of the pattern.

With that said, I became close to about 25 high school boys and girls, with about another 30 or so on the periphery. To get close to them, to earn their trust, I would hang out with them on their terms. As we know high school kids maintain lives that are often a far stretch from what their parents could imagine. I was party to conversation about sex, drinking, drugs, sometimes hate…the list could go on….

But when I was there, right in the thick of it, I think this debate culture and ministry clashed. Should I have pulled out the whip and lashed the ground and proclaimed the unrighteousness while sitting around a table at Denny’s? Or should I just try to steer the conversation toward more wholesome topics? What would Jesus do?

Would Jesus when hanging out with prostitutes pronounce their latest trick a terrible tragedy and a sin? Or would Jesus sit back, get close and earn their trust before pointing the finger?

What do you all think?

I can see that we’re roughly on the same page. And while I certainly would not want to emphasize cultural comprehension over and above gospel proclomation, it seems to me that to communicate the gospel clearly we need this cultural awareness. In the old model of evangelism you could simply proclaim the gospel because largely everyone was aware of Christian teaching (though this hardly warrents the lable of “A Christian Nation”). Now days, however, fewer and fewer people know and understand anything about Christianity. Building relationships is the first step to modern evangelism, and this requires cultural awareness.

Furthermore, while it is indeed true that we cannot escape culture. The fact remains that most churches exist in a culture that is purely nostalgic and non-existent in the present world they live in. They don’t know how to do ministry in their new context. It’s the reality of that Ed Stetzer quote above.

It means that we can no longer ignore culture (popular-
culture included) and believe that we will impact the lost.

There are two ways I could approach this and so in two ways I shall:

1) Cultural comprehension and facility, while perhaps helpful, do not seem to be any kind of necessity for impacting the unbeliever. While cultural acumen may be put to use in conveying the gospel, it is the gospel that impacts lives.

Further, Scripture makes it seem as if lives of righteousness and the works of the Spirit may also impact the lives of unbelievers. And in such passages as it recommends these things, it makes no mention of any specifically cultural involvement.

2) In a very real way, ignoring culture is impossible for all save perhaps the deeply autistic. Whether I watch television or not, I am thoroughly entrenched in the culture because I am a member of the culture. I am, in a sense, a very real participant in world culture because despite the auspices of difference (as related to niche-cultures), there is little that makes my culture honestly different from a tribal African culture or a Wall Street financier’s culture. We all share in the human experience and despite value differences and varying ideologies, our experiences are not all that dissimilar.

And for that, it is impossible for me to ignore the human culture when doing anything in life.