Culture

God’s Marketing Strategy: Christ-Like Churches

/ davidsschrock / 2 Comments

marketingFor a whole year [Paul and Barnabas] met with the church and taught a great many people.
And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians
— Acts 11:26 —

Marketing is a big business. From 2000–2006, Coca-Cola spent 15.5 billion dollars to advertise their products to the global market.[1] In 2009, Apple Computers spent half a billion dollars on their advertising, which is a third of what Microsoft paid out in 2009 (1.4 Billion).[2] These leading companies invest incredible capital into these self-promotion schemes for the purpose of cashing in on the customers they solicit.

Genuine Converts are God’s Marketing Strategy

But what about the church? Will advertising help achieve Great Commission success? What is God’s marketing strategy? Surely as the Lord of all creation (Ps 24:1), he has ample resources to fund such a project; as Maker of the Milky Way, he has the creative intuition to impress audiences. Yet, Jesus’ ministry is not marked by such promotion. In the Gospels and Acts, we find something more personal, if not even more hidden. Continue reading →

How Should Christians Engage Culture?

/ davidsschrock / 1 Comment

christandcultureIn 1951 Richard Niebuhr wrote a book called Christ and Culture. In it he listed five ways the authority of Christ relates to the ideas, influences, and authorities of the world—what might be called “culture.” These include Christ against culture (e.g., Amish and hyper-fundamentalists) on one side and the Christ of culture (e.g., “cultural Christianity,” be it conservative or progressive) on the other.

In between these poles, Niebuhr also observed places in Scripture and church history where Christians have put Christ above culture. He rightly remarks that this is where most Christians live, vacillating between various forms of synthesis and separation from culture.

Evaluating Christ and Culture

To this day, Niebuhr’s book remains the historic guide to thinking about Christ and culture. However, more recently and more biblically, D. A. Carson has updated the conversation by evaluating Niebuhr’s book and presenting his own “biblical theology” of culture (see his Christ and Culture Revisited). Carson shows that Niebuhr’s conclusions suffer from his own Protestant liberalism, that at times he forces Scripture into his mold, and sometimes Niebuhr includes in the wide-tent of Christianity things at are not (e.g., Gnosticism).

Nonetheless, Niebuhr’s five-fold taxonomy (or four-fold is “cultural Christianity” is excluded) helps us think about Christ and culture. As Christians, we must have a multi-pronged approach to the world: we must resist the world without retreating from it; we must love the world (John 3:16) without becoming friends with the world (James 4:4; 1 John 2:15); we must appreciate God’s common grace in the fallen world, even as we seek the conversion of the lost, such that these new creatures in Christ might go into the world as salt and light to better preserve, purify, and improve the world.

All in all, the Christian’s duty to be in the world but not of the world is perplexing. Like the Jews living in exile, we must seek the welfare of our secular city (Jeremiah 29), but in seeking the good of our neighbors, we must not seek the city of man more than we seek the city of God, the city whose architect and builder is God.

But how do we do that? Continue reading →

Holding Fast to the Truth

/ davidsschrock

truthLast week The Gospel Coalition posted a blog I wrote on the nature of truth. I argued that truth is inspired by God, incarnate in Christ, and progressively revealed by the Spirit as the Triune God effects redemption throughout the ages.

Here’s its summary:

Without coincidence, true truth is triune truth: it’s decreed by God (the Father), personified in God (the Son), and effected by God (the Spirit). Contrary to popular belief, truth isn’t based on personal feeling, self-understanding, or a contemporary situation. It’s based on God’s revelation, centered in the gospel, and revealed by the transforming work of the Spirit.

Unlike the mood of our age, truth isn’t something we can create, discover, or deny. Like the innocent man Pilate sentenced to death, truth has a way of coming back to life.

May we, like Jesus, make the good confession and hold fast to the truth.

You can read the whole thing here: Holding Fast to the Truth.

Soli Deo Gloria, dss

Nine Things You Should Know About Noah . . . and Two More

/ davidsschrock

noahI love it when the Bible meets theology meets culture. Today Joe Carter triangulates those three in his illuminating “Nine Things You Should Know about Noah.”

Highlighting the facts about, Joe Carter reminds us of who Noah really is and not just who Hollywood would make him out to be. Beginning with the literary construction of the Noah narrative in Genesis 6-9, he writes,

The story of Noah is told is chiastic parallelism (or chiasmus), a figure of speech in which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. If you assign the letters A and B to the first appearance of the key words or phrases and A’ and B’ to their subsequent appearance, they follow what is commonly referred to as an A-B-B-A pattern.

A chiasm in the story of Noah and the flood (Genesis 6.10-9.19):

A   Noah (10a)
B      Shem, Ham, and Japheth (10b)
C         Ark to be built (14-16)
D            Flood announced (17)
E               Covenant with Noah (18-20)
F                  Food in the Ark (21)
G                   Command to enter the Ark (7.1-3)
H                      7 days waiting for flood (4-5)
I                         7 days waiting for flood (7-10)
J                            Entry to ark (11-15)
K                             Yahweh shuts Noah in (16)
L                                40 days flood (17a)
M                                 Waters increase (17b-18)
N                                     Mountains covered (18-20)
O                                        150 days waters prevail (21-24)
P                                       GOD REMEMBERS NOAH (8.1)
O’                                       150 days waters abate (3)
N’                                    Mountain tops become visible (4-5)
M’                                Waters abate (6)
L’                             40 days (end of) (6a)
K’                            Noah opens window of ark (6b)
J’                           Raven and dove leave ark (7-9)
I’                        7 days waiting for waters to subside (10-11)
H’                    7 days waiting for waters to subside (12-13)
G’                 Command to leave the ark (15-17)
F’                Food outside the ark (9.1-4)
E’             Covenant with all flesh (8-10)
D’          No flood in future (11-17)
C’        Ark (18a)
B’      Shem, Ham, Japheth (18b)
A’   Noah (19)

After this literary point, Carter lists eight other facts about Noah, the Ark, the animals, and the Bible. To his nine, let me add two more theological considerations. Continue reading →

Divine Weightlessness: The Fundamental Problem in Evangelicalism

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WellsThis year, I am reading through David Wells six works on the role of theology in American Evangelicalism (disambiguation: David Wells the South African-born theologian, not the former MLB pitcher). In years past, I’ve read selected chapters from his books, but this year I am taking the plunge and diving into his whole corpus.

For those who are not familiar with Wells, you should be. His six works include

Right now, I’m in the beginning of God in the Wasteland, the sequel to No Place for Truth. In this volume, Wells is trying to answer some of the problems and objections raised in his first volume. In both books, he argues that modernity (a hyper-rational way of thinking about the world) and modernization (e.g., urbanization, technology, consumerism, globalization, etc.) have effectively displaced truth from the church and left it with pragmatism and therapeutic psychology.

Synthesizing those issues, he makes this statement regarding the fundamental problem in evangelicalism:

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing stanch the flow of blood spilling from its true wound. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is to ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel too easy, and his Christ too common. (God in the Wasteland, 30).

Wells assessment was true in 1994 and it remains true today. In most American churches, God is weightless. Churches offer Christianity lite and evangelicals speak of God in worn-out, glib cliches. God’s glory (originally defined in the Hebrew as his kavod, his heaviness) is lacking in churches. As a result, Christians have little ballast to hold them in place, and little grace and truth to see how much culture has shaped their lives and how little Christ has.

What the church needs more than anything today is a vision of a holy and loving God, sovereign over all life and infinitely gracious to send his Son to die for wicked sinners. Going into a century that increasingly marginalizes and ostracizes Christ and his church, we need to recapture the of glory of God, or better we need to be captured by God’s glory.

Soli Deo Gloria, dss

Hustle, Charlie Hustle!

/ davidsschrock

charlie hustleBrett McKay, from the “Art of Manliness,” challenges men to hustle. In the spirit of Mark Chanski’s Manly Dominion or Owen Strachan’s Risky Gospel, McKay (with a few more expletives) challenges men to stop making excuses and hustle. He makes his point by observing how leaders in history hustle. He writes,

Looking at the men that I admire from history, they all have one thing in common: they were hustlers. Theodore Roosevelt accomplished an insane amount of work because he lived the strenuous life, i.e. hustled. Thomas Edison patented thousands of inventions and perfected the light bulb because he spent all day hustling. Frederick Douglass was an orator, diplomat, newspaper editor and author because he hustled. And pretty much every self-made man has the same story.

With a few personal anecdotes McKay makes a strong case that true men do not passively wait for good things to happen. They make things happen. Over all his article is worth reading, with a few caveats.

  1. Hustle will accomplish much on earth, but unless a man abides in Christ, he will accomplish nothing of eternal value. As John 15:5 says, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Likewise, Jesus said in Mark 8:36, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” In short, hustle can make great earthly gains, but it is insufficient for heavenly treasure (cf. Matt 6:19-21).
  2. Similarly, this “world may belong to those who hustle,” as McKay says, but the age to come still belongs to the meek. Against the worldly wisdom that the world belongs to those who work for it, Jesus says the earth will ultimately be given “as an inheritance” (i.e., a gift) to the meek (Matt 5:5).
  3. Meekness and hustle are not mutually exclusive in the life of a Christian. God created a world where hard work is rewarded, and rightfully so. Proverbs speaks often about the dangers of idleness and the blessings of diligence. But no amount of hustle, work, or wisdom can earn a place in God’s eternal kingdom for men born “in Adam” (Rom 5:18-19). Christ alone gained the kingdom through hard work. Why? Because he alone worked without sin. For him, he gained the whole world by way of his perfect righteousness. For the rest of us, sin invites God’s wrath and misdirects our work.
  4. That said, hustle, hard work, and endurance are societal norms for the kingdom of God. While hustle will not earn the kingdom, it is a value esteemed in the kingdom. Paul says in Ephesians 2:10 that we are created in Christ Jesus for good works. Likewise, Paul commended the example of hustle when he compared himself to others saying, “I worked harder than anyone of them” (1 Cor 15:10), but Paul quickly added, “though it was not I, but the grace of God that is within me.”

Therefore, with these caveats in place, we can say that man’s calling is to organize the chaos, build organizations, solve problems, fix equipment, save lives, and serve others with passion, wisdom, and hustle. Passivity and purposelessness are not manly values, and neither are they godly qualities. Real men hustle, and saved by grace and empowered by the Spirit, men of God will hustle in their earthly labors.

Soli Deo Gloria, ds

(HT: Eric Bancroft)