A Beautiful Mess...

I think (For the most part) that the church is ignorant when it comes to their understanding of culture! I think many of us who have attended church at some point in our lives have been told to stay out of culture because it's evil or its not sacred.

Here's what I believe to be true about culture: it is not this rigid, massive entity that Christ followers can either ignore or choose to acclimate to. The word Culture comes to our English language via Latin "Culturus," from which we also get cultivate(Thanks Tony Jones for that bit of information;)). Technically, culture is the wide variety of symbols (dialect, accents, language, apparel, ideas, secret handshakes, obscene gestures, hair styles, stem ware, icons and pretty much everything else) by which humans cultivate our experiences of life. Picture life as building supplies for a house that are strewn all over the place. Culture is the tools and builders that make this mess somewhat presentable into a house we can live in, so that we can make sense of all those parts.

"A culture is just a fleeting human creation, a spontaneous uncontrolled collaboration, and we shouldn't expect it ever to be perfect or even to be very good."-Frederica Mathewes-Green

Culture isn't anti-God!!! When we look at how we live our lives, and how we cultivate our experiences in life, we realize that culture is everywhere and everything. Counter culture is still culture-HAHA.

I'm very tired of pastors speaking from pulpits on Sunday mornings proclaiming to be countercultural when they, themselves are married to culture. These pastors are using language and microphones, Outlines they've typed on their computers(Hopefully a Mac-shameless plug). They have their hair done in a certain, perfect way, and they're either wearing suits and ties, reading from a particular version of the Bible. Likewise, every church attender in every pew is completely dripping with culture. There is no way to escape it!!!

When we realize that we ARE culture, we realize that there is no line between sacred and secular at all. We view this whole created world and culture as one big, beautiful mess in which God is moving. There's the glorious and godly, -Rocky Mountains after fresh snow, birth of a child, great conversations with dear friends- and there is also the horrific and evil-Tornados that level communities, murder and shattered relationships-and they are all inelegantly intermixed. And between those two ends of the spectrum lives a wide variety of objects, events, people and ideas that reflect some of God, some of us and even a bit of evil.

The way we approach culture is awesome if we approach it in the right way(Just an opinion):

There's no one-size-fits all method for seperating the good from the bad. In all actuality, it's an art of looking for the intersections between theology and other disciplines, looking for truth wherever one can find it.

This may sound like blasphemy, but I read it in the Gospels and see God working in His culture this way. Christian theology does not have the sole claim to truth(Don't stone me-haha). What christian theology should do is find truth and then translate that truth into the idioms given to us through the truth of the Biblical narrative.

Truth is whereever God chooses to expose it; Its most perfectly instantiated in the person of Jesus, and from Him it flows out into ALL creation. Not just the parts that we deem "Clean!" I believe that Christianity has a lot of truth-Jesus being the Son of God-the inspired breathing word of God we read in the Bible. But I also think that somehow, we as human being have perverted what that looks like at times. One of the greatest truths I ever heard was from Ghandhi, who most definitely was not a Christ follower

"I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians."

Translation: BE Christlike, and I see a Jesus in the Bible that was no hold barred, and nothing was off limits. He was immersed in the culture and creating culture and transcending it as well. He made water into wine(Thanks Chrisi); He broke all the "religious rules" of His time; He loved voraciously; He hung out with supposedly secular people; And most importantly He painted a picture of a perfect God moving in a beautiful mess!!!

I hope I can dive into this beautiful mess, and be more aware of who God is by doing so, because this place is dripping with truth, I just need to be aware of where God is placing it!


-NOTE-I want to thank Tony Jones for a lot of his thoughts on this subject-great stuff-