culture matters

tomorrow's the big meeting/run through for the new service my church is starting to reach the "emergent" generation. we're going to talk the interested people in our church through our vision and strategy for this ministry. it appears that i'm going to be saying something about why such a thing is even necessary.

so i've been thinking about this--actually since last Sunday when i was in church. i've been thinking about the peace child. since the apostle Paul, Christians have entered cultures and tried to communicate the message of the Gospel. Paul looked around & pointed to the unknown god, and said that's my God--let me tell you about him. the missionary in the peace child went and lived among a people group for a really long time, studying the language and the culture, and eventually he saw something that they did that was a picture of what God did. so he pointed to their ritual of the peace child, and said let me tell you about my God, who sent his own peace child to earth to restore all mankind's relationship to him through that child.

and i think--how powerful.

did the message of the gospel change between Paul and the peace child?
no.
did the truth of God's word change?
no.
did the truth of God and his character change?
no.

but the way that message is communicated changed--it had to change.

so often we trip over language and culture when we try to communicate who God is and what he has done in us. it takes a student of culture to learn the words and the pictures that are already present in a culture to accurately communicate those truths to that culture. if we don't, then we can speak the truth, but who will hear us? who will understand?

culture is. it exists. it's not good, it's not bad, it just is. we communicate within the context of culture. we have to understand culture in order to truly communicate cross-culturally. if we don't, we're just saying words that don't make sense to anyone.

so that's what's behind our new ministry. we need to learn how to communicate to the heart language of the post-modern/emergent/emerging culture. we are not experimenting with the truth. we are not leaving the faith. we seek only to effectively communicate the message of Christ to a new generation.