cultural addition

One of my favorite subjects to discuss is how to engage culture with the truth of the gospel. We talk at FEFC about learning what we need to receive from our culture, reject from our culture and also in what ways we can look to redeem our culture. Marvin Olasky has an interesting article with a great quote on this subject. I am not into politics at all and strangely enough this article is about politics. So putting the politics aside, I appreciated this quote that seems to get at how we can engage culture.


"Instead of working fruitlessly to subtract evil from the land, add the good. American conservatism can have a bright future, with God’s grace, if we are strong and courageous in developing positive alternatives to the cultural negativities around us. But if we merely praise our own Christian circles and curse the darkness outside them, we will soon be surrounded by it. This type of guerrilla cultural warfare can be more difficult than an invasion of Canaan—but God calls Christians to help transform the societies surrounding them."

Also, tonight I just read another great post on this subject by my friend Jonathan Dodson. Check it out.

Crowder

This week I spoke at the FEFC youth retreat and the Dutton Band led worship. The Dutton Band used to fill in for David Crowder at UBC when he was touring. So they played a ton of crowder songs this weekend, which I really enjoyed. But I was out blogging and read this article on the character of David Crowder and was even more impressed. It is great to see that he is not just talented and creative, but truly is trying to live what he sings.

Consuming me some church

This week Shaun Groves wrote a post about if he should even keep going to church. I realize that it is tongue and cheek, but I think his premise in the post is the wrong approach. His entire post is talking about things that he should be able to get from church and then how he can get those things better in his cul de sac.

We have a long way to go to change our view of church away from the consumer (meet my needs) to the gathering of missionaries living in community, the body of servants (utilizing spiritual gifts), etc. And also we have some difficult ground to break to teach ourselves that church is not a building, but rather a people who are part of a movement for Jesus. Now to be fair, he does come around with somewhat of a counterpost explaining that he is not going to stop going to church.

Don't stop going to church because we need you, your gifts, your encouragement, your mercy, your teaching, your exhortation, etc. That is why you go to church.