Faith & Culture

After my little rant about Christianity and the arts the other day, I remembered a quote that I was given by a friend in Stockholm. I'm pretty sure that the book was entitled "What is Culture that Thou Art Mindful of It?," but I can't even find it on Amazon or Powells. The author writes about how C.S. Lewis viewed the relationship between Christianity and culture.

"Lewis’s reply was that the ideal of suspending all cultural activity for the sake of evangelism or the pursuit of holiness was impossible. 'If you attempted,' he argued, 'to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better.' This is precisely what many religious people do, which is one of the reasons we have such bad music and ugly architecture in Christian settings. Lewis went on: 'You are not in fact going to read nothing, either in the Church or on the [front] line: if you don’t read good books you will read bad ones. If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions you will fall into sensual satisfactions.'"

The attempt to "suspend all cultural activity" by the church has been quite subtle, but I wonder if it has been an underlying cause behind much of the nasty mudslinging against those involved in th emerging church dialogue. I think part of what is driving that dialogue in the first place is the realization that it's impossible to separate culture from faith and the church. There is no such thing as a church that has managed to quarantine itself from culture, thus being purely informed by Scripture. The very language we speak, be it English or American English or high German or Austrian German, carries cultural nuances.

Those churches who do attempt to either separate themselves from culture (or more commonly, simply attempt to ignore or downplay any cultural influence) usually find themselves merely embodying a cultural aesthetic that is about 50 years old. Think about it. How many churches have you seen or been in that still use flannel banners with the words of Matthew 28.19-20 or John 3.16 (or other scripture passages) sewn on with other material? How 'bout those reader boards outside church buildings? Here in England, 3 out of the 4 churches that I've been invited to guest preach at have also asked me to do a little song-and-dance thing for the kiddies at the end of the service. These are usually the churches that still conduct worship singing out of hymnals or use acetates (yankees, read "overhead transparencies"), lead by the senior pastor and accompanied by an older female piano or organ player who can't quite keep a steady tempo, in part because the pastor just informed the piano player of the hymn numbers that morning.

I really don't mean to sound mean or cynical. My point is, as was Lewis's point from the mystery book, any attempt to separate the church from culture results in inadvertently replacing that culture with a foreign or unfamiliar subculture.

A few other ideas/questions about how culture has informed how we do church:
- Just think about how we dress at church. For a lot of years, church goers predominantly put on their "Sunday best," claiming to give God their all in how they dressed. This meant that men wore three piece suits and women wore dresses or skirts. Was this type of dress style informed by Scripture, or by the secular business standards of the day? Today, in most contemporary evangelical churches, people dress however they feel most comfortable, which means casual. Have you ever noticed the fashion news headlines stating that corporate dress standards have gotten more casual and informal? (Just ask my brother what the big wigs at the Microsoft campus in Seattle wear to work.)

- Where in the Bible does it say that the people must sit theatre-style in church, staring at the back of one anothers' heads while all the action happens on a stage? Sounds like what happens at the modern day cinema or the symphony.

- Where in the Bible does it say that local churches must be lead by a single senior pastor (or elder), with a few associate pastors below him (if any at all)? Sounds like the equivalent of the modern day CEO or president of a large corporation.

These are just a few petty examples of modern day cultural influences that I've wrestled with. I think the bottom line is that the church needs to loosen up about culture, while not letting it get in the way of the mission of the church by 1) ignoring it, or 2) getting so consumed by it that the point is lost.

I'll end with one last quote that I think informs the issue rather well:
“. . . the church is a part of the whole; she is both influenced by the world around her and called to influence the world in which she exists. Too often the church does not realize that she is a part of a greater societal and spiritual ecosystem and that her role is to be the very fiber that produces health within that ecological system. . . . The commission erupts out of the great commandment. . . . . When relationships become stagnant and the community of Christ closes itself to the outside world, the result is an institution rather than a movement.” (Erwin Raphael McManus, An Unstoppable Force)