Everyone's a Genius by Alan Briggs

Author:Alan Briggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2017-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

Five Responses to Culture

How we choose to respond to culture is a big deal. Perhaps people sometime in the past grew up in a black-and-white world where the differences between right and wrong were easy to spot in the eyes of the culture. Today, we live in a gray world where we, as followers of Jesus, must wrestle with our response to our host culture hourly, sifting for discernment. In his must-read book Culture Making, Andy Crouch gives five ways we can interact with our culture: condemn, critique, copy, consume, or create.9

Condemn Culture

Fear is the biggest reason Christians condemn culture. Clearly we need discernment as there are things lurking in our broken world that can take us down. Much of the underbelly of the holiness movement and fundamentalist tradition involved avoidance of possible sinful environments. It became defined by what it wasn’t instead of what it was.10 Condemning culture creates a fearful, negative environment. Instead of a positive message of pursuing holiness in Christ, this became a negative message: the world is bad, stay away.

Critique Culture

In an effort to engage culture, often the church is simply critiquing it. It is easy to speak against what we don’t understand. Instead, we can acknowledge art and creation as a heart cry. There is truth buried there, and we find longings of a world that is not whole. We can’t afford to miss these opportunities to engage the hearts of artists, activists, or entrepreneurs. Within our world, a carefully tuned ear will hear cries for the “good life.”11

Copy Culture

We have to go beyond imitation. The goal is not to find a Christian version of everything in culture, from branding to music to conferences. Walk through a Christian bookstore, and you’ll find myriad products redressing the cultural mannequin from Minecraft Bibles to Christian T-shirts (don’t get me started on these). I call these things “Jesus junk.” They don’t show the image of the Creator; they show a cheap, cheesy counterfeit of culture. Artists are not drawn to this; they are repulsed by it.

Consume Culture

Today, most Christians don’t avoid movies—as they were once told to do—or critique them carefully for dangers.12 We have been inoculated to them. We are in danger of simply consuming them, immersing in their thrills without seeing their vices. Simple consumption is perhaps the most subtly dangerous of all the ways of relating to culture.

In the months following the Oscars my wife and I watch all the Oscar nominated films and discuss the messages below the storylines. We can’t simply take our biblical lenses off and ingest culture without asking deeper questions about it. We need to teach others the process of asking discerning questions about mass media.

Create or Cultivate Culture

We are built to cultivate things, people, relationships, and spaces. God did not create us solely to create within the family of God, the church. What we cultivate and who we cultivate can create a storyline others want to follow. Followers of Jesus can become a redemptive alternative to the patterns of this world.

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