What’s that, you say?

That Hollywood is depraved, hardly putting out anything wholesome anymore?

That our universities are becoming bastions of secularization, just another pile of much that a Christian has to crawl through and hope to come out clean?

That you have to cover your child’s eye even during the commercials on TV?

That popular music seems to be glorifying sex more than anything else?

You won’t find any argument from me. But I do have one question.

What are you going to do about it?

We as Christians love to bemoan and complain about the current state of our culture. And we’re certainly good at it. But instead of actually doing anything about it, we end up retreating in exasperation or fear, to build thicker walls to keep out these corrupting influences.

And then the culture around us becomes more depraved, which again is an excuse to build even thicker walls than the last. Rinse and repeat. It’s a vicious cycle. The church tries to remain in its ivory tower while the rest of the world crumbles. After all, it’s their own fault. Jesus is coming, so he just have to hole up in our fort until he comes to rescue us, right?

On the contrary, the depravity of the world is a conviction of the church itself. It points the finger directly at us.

What is the church?

• The church is the new Israel. And as Jesus says in Matthew 5, we are to be the light of the world, the city set on a hill, so that all may learn of God. By walling ourselves off, we are doing just what Jesus condemn the Jews for: hiding their light under a bushel.
• The church is a kingdom of priests. (1 Pet. 2:5, Rev. 1:6) The Levitical priesthood was meant to be the guides and teachers of Israel. But they had failed. Kings were corrupt, and even when they were good, the people were still astray. And so, as Hosea puts it in 4:9 - “And it shall be like people, like priest.” They were not spared judgment.
• The church is the body of Christ. (1 Cor. 12:27) So if Christ does not seem to be working in the world, and the culture becomes more depraved, we are solely to blame. We are supposed to be the body. What are we waiting for?
• The church is the new temple of God. (1 Cor. 6:19) Similar to the previous one, we are the new keepers of the Spirit, the dramatic intersection of heaven and earth where God dwells. If the spirit is not at work in the world, and is not out conquering this inheritance, the church is solely to blame.

So it’s time to act like the church of God and to quit giving lip-service to how bad things are on the outside. It’s time to act like the intersection of heaven and earth, and to show people what a fully redeemed creation really looks like. One way to do this to create Beauty.

There are many signposts to God in the created order of things. The details of each are whole other topics in themselves, so right now I’ll just list them: our passion and desire for justice, our thirst for spirituality, our need for human connection and relationships, and last but not least, our yearning for beauty.

It is this last one that I wish to focus on in my next post. People are looking for beauty in all the wrong places. It is up to the church to create true beauty to fulfill this yearning, but also to create it in such a way so that it points to the master creator of all things beautiful: God.

To be continued in Part 2 of the call to culture.

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