Culture.Theology.Gospel: learn & live in culture

Many churches can be seen as a vendor, dispensing spiritual goods and services. Offering A better life, a better future, a better career path, and some really cool WWJD bracelets. For those of you who don't know our dorky jargon, WWJD means "What Would Jesus Do!"

A clearer picture of the church should be seen as a people not just a place where we dispense goods and services. This produces consumers not strong Christians. We are the sent people of God, people living on mission in our city within our culture, not above it or against it, but in it. With this paradigm, culture becomes critically important if Christians will have a lasting influence in our society.

This may surprise some of you, especially if you come from a fundamentalist church background. Culture is not evil. In fact, culture is made by God. By definition, Culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

Through out the scriptures we see Jesus himself authenticating his deity with his words and works within the culture he lived in. Remember Jesus himself left heaven and came down to earth. He embraced the culture without comprising his character. In the incarnation, He was born of the virgin Mary, 100% God and 100% man. He lived in our world and walked among us! He preached in public places. He went to weddings, parties and peoples homes. He was to say the least culturally connected.

For Christians to gain influence we must pursue cultural relevance w/o compromising character nor to the gospel message. We need to be a people who learn and live in our culture. Expressing the gospel in and through it, so that the gospel is better understood by our hearers.

Here is an exercise to test your abilities in understanding culture. More importantly this may serve as exercise that you can repeat on other songs, movies etc.

Brett Dennen, singer song writer recorded the hit song "Ain't no reason: on his album,"So Much More" which has been ranked the number-one folk download on iTunes.

Watch the video and take notes. Answer the following questions. According to the song...

1. What is the condition of man?
2. What is the state of our world?
3. Who or what sets us free?