Culturally Engaged

An interesting little discussion has been happening over on Christine’s blog (here and here) about how to engage with the culture in a meaningful way in order to bring the gospel to people. Here are some of my thoughts.

More often than not it seems Christians swing between either compromising the gospel and becoming man pleaser's or on the other hand demanding that people; use the same music, dress the same (shirts and ties of course), and have the same attitude to alcohol.

It’s important to the get the balance right between engaging with our culture while not compromising the gospel. On the one hand the gospel is always culturally relevant (we don’t need to make it relevant to culture). Our presentation of the gospel however needs to take into account the culture we try to reach (just as Paul did in Athens).

While I affirm the gospel smells like the stench of death to some, we can’t use this as an excuse for sloppy evangelism and poorly thought through evangelistic technique. We must be careful in the way we seek to engage people in our culture with the gospel. Too often in my own experience I know I have spoken in a way that has been unhelpful and insensitive.

 

2 comments:

ckjolly said... 4/07/2007 11:37 pm  

this is what started it

Anonymous said... 4/08/2007 12:31 am  

I'm sorry, I can't focus, I don't understand how you can be in the same house as Kim and Kelly Deal and not blog about it :)

Benny

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