connecting with culture
19 Oct 2004
Article by Brian Draper at LICC, on ‘connecting with culture’. Marc Greene who heads up LICC will be involved in our december gathering, and I’m writing an essay for a chapter in a book they are putting together on making disciples in a emerging context.
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[Excerpt]
Good news! The church is beginning to catch up with the big changes that have been shaping society. Philosophical, technological, political and social upheavals of the last few years have re-moulded the way we live and breathe and have our being – and much of the church has come to realise that it must engage or slowly die.
So, recently you might have used some images in worship, for example – through power-point slides or video. You might have taken part in some ‘interactive worship’ by lighting candles, making a prayer tree or walking a labyrinth. You might even have gone to a conference on ‘emerging church’.
In the rush to become more culturally savvy, however, we must beware simply dressing the same old church up in new clothes. As Brian McLaren points out in his excellent book The Church on the Other Side:…(rest is here)
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Comment by Conrad
7.10 am on 20 Oct 2004
It is certainly the job of Christians to be able to relate to the culture in which they live. But is it really their job to “catch up to” and conform to the style of that culture when they meet together in worship? Are hyper-right-wingers in sections of my home country right to meet together and shape their church life to “catch up to” and reinforce their society’s anti-intellectualism or racism or whatever, because that means they can more easily connect with the non-Christians they meet every day? In a culture like my father’s where everyone should help themselves and be too proud for charity is it right to play down God’s gift in Christ and play up adherence to laws? In a culture like I grew up in where everything is about brains and understanding is it right to make church about assenting to the creeds? Or is it only our culture now, which we currently can’t see anything wrong with, that the church should embrace?
I need someone to tell me about how 1 Corinthians 11-14 works. The story clearly presented in 1 Corinthians is that Paul has passed on the traditions of a Semitic church to a people living in a Greek context. They found it challenging and uncongenial, so they tweaked it to fit their culture, made the service more about self-expression (speaking in tongues, everyone brings song etc), made the leader/speaker more important (the parties; the emphasis on rhetorical “wisdom”) and made the eucharist more about sharing a meal in the way their culture was used to (those who can bring and share with their peers; get there when you can). To this Paul says “Your worship does more harm than good” and calls them back to what he passed on to them, what all churches everywhere do — away from all these cultural adaptations and back to the semitic and traditional forms (and, unless you’re stuck on Gordon Fee’s commentary, quite probably liturgical, in the longest quotation from the Jesus tradition in all his letters).
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