Gospel and Culture

• Mike Gunn
• Dec 11, 2009
• Series: Missional
• Categories: Church Planting Articles

Gospel & Culture

Mike Gunn

The Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Sponge wrote the book, “Why Christianity Must Change Or Die.” What Bishop Sponge meant, is that the church needs to adopt a “Modern” understanding of the world, morality and God, so that they will be seen as “Relevant” to modern secular culture. In other words, our best bet is to accommodate the gospel to the culture in which it is placed, so that it will be palatable to the people it addresses. This philosophy is not new. The church has always had problems with syncretizing with the culture it is trying to reach, and it is found in many different ministry philosophies, liberal and evangelical.

Where I do not agree with Bishop Sponge’s conclusions, I do agree with his premise. The western church has been in rapid decline for the past 50 years. Though mega churches report huge successes, studies are revealing that the “Revival” sweeping North America is nothing more than disgruntled church goers congregating to larger venues where they can consume the religious goods and services of these large, multi-functional church malls. In the meanwhile many smaller churches are closing shop, and the Christian message has been tweaked into a consumer driven gospel of the self, weakening the message, and destroying the unique status of Jesus Christ as savior from a wrecked world of sin.

On top of all this we are in the process of moving from a framework created by the industrial revolution into the information revolution. This not only has created chaos in many of the structures that order our world, but it has given us information in a way and speed that is impossible for our current framework to process. Millions of bits of information and ideologies strike us on a daily basis from T.V, radio, movies, music, advertising, internet, etc., and we have struggled to properly order this information, and critique it from a biblical perspective.

I hope to provide a framework that helps us understand how we got to this place, as well as, a workable system that will help us more clearly communicate our faith in a postmodern, post-Christian culture. We have to develop a plan that allows the church to be in the world, but not of it, a constant tension that the church must hold on to. Jesus’ prayer in John 17, highlights this point vividly when He says, “I do not ask you to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world…As though did send me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.”    John 17:15,16,18

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