More on Ken Myers & the Church and Culture

from Stand Firm by Sarah

Here’s Rod Dreher on Ken Myers—I heartily agree with him:

I can’t say it often enough: If you are an intellectually engaged Christian, you need to subscribe to the Mars Hill Audio Journal. It is American Christianity’s most important source of serious, deeply literate cultural analysis. The current issue, No. 112, is one of the best ones in ages. Though I’m tied up with a project today and Friday, I’ll be blogging on it over the next few days. Meanwhile, if you’ve never tried the Journal, you can get a free sample for your MP3 player by going here.

I’m also excerpting a couple of bits from an interview with Myers over at The Christian Post—the entire piece is interesting:

CP: What about the argument that church has to be “relevant” to the broader culture in order to draw seekers?
Myers: First, just to be clear about how we use the word, let’s substitute the phrase “way of life” for the word “culture.” How can the Church be relevant to the way of life of its neighbors? As Eugene Peterson has said, by showing a better way of life.

True seekers are looking for something different, radically different. If people are just looking for a religious band-aid or spiritual Prozac, they are not seeking the redemption promised in the Gospel, which calls them to die to self and live (really live) to Christ. If I were drowning, the most relevant reality I could long for would be someone who was a really good swimmer. If my house were on fire, I would want a man with a hose, not a lighter. If my life were plunged into darkness, light would be the most relevant thing imaginable.

Years ago I was asked about my opinion of seeker-sensitive worship services. I quipped that as long as they were part of martyr-friendly churches, they were fine. But churches that have pursued relevance by emulating fashionable cultural trends without examining the meaning of those trends – how they form the souls of those embedded in them – have not had great success in nurturing mature disciples. And remember, the Great Commission is all about making disciples, not converts. The Church should be more like a farm than a showroom.

And one more:

CP: What is greatest opportunity for the church today to truly impact the larger culture – or should we even be concerned about that?
Myers: Not long ago I interviewed a poet who suggested that he just couldn’t imagine early Church leaders sitting around trying to come up with clever ideas about how they might influence Roman culture.

Robert Wilken made a very similar comment in an interview given in 1998 in which he reflected on the early Church’s posture toward its cultural surroundings. Wilken pointed out that the principal way in which the early Church leaders sustained cultural influence was by discipling its members, by conveying to them that the call of the Gospel was a call to embrace a new way of life. The Church was less interested in transforming the disorders of the Roman Empire than in building “its own sense of community, and it let these communities be the leaven that would gradually transform culture.”

Christians can best serve the health of American culture by striving to be deliberate about and faithful to a way of life that Church historian Robert Wilken has called the “culture of the city of God.”

If congregations in America were deeply and creatively committed to nurturing the culture of the city of God in their life together, I think it would have an inexorable effect on the lives of our neighbors. But I fear that too many churches are shaping people to be what Kenda Creasy Dean calls being “Christianish” – or not deeply Christian at all. The more faithful we are in living out the ramifications of a Christian understanding of all things, the more out-of-synch we will be in American culture. But why should we wish for anything else? What can we offer the world if we are just like the world?