A Small Faith

Something about the meeting last night brought to mind a Ken Myers talk I listened to recently. Yes, I’m linking Ken Myers and “emergent” but I think it’s because they have some of the same concerns. Namely, seeing God’s plan as more than just individualistic salvation and then working out the ramifications of how we live embodied in this creation. I’d love to see the Emergent guys move towards Myers’ more robust and historically connected views on these subjects.

This is from about the 36:30 mark in his talk :

Culture is the cultivation of the order of creation.

Now for many American Christians, culture is not the pursuit of ramifications of the order of creation in ways that honor our nature and the nature of the world. Cultural experiences are just pleasant diversions or opportunities for evangelism. Because we tend to separate creation from redemption and because we’ve tended to think of redemption as an escape from creation to a purely spiritual existence, culture tends to be trivialized.

I spoke with someone recently about some church leaders who had made, in my judgment, some rather bad choices in the culture of their church. The person I was speaking to [said] “…they mean well, they’re trying to get as many people to Heaven as possible”. I said that’s exactly the problem. They see the church’s ministry as an escape plan rather than a recovery project.

Some Christians believe that creation is a lost cause because of Adam’s sin and thus our salvation involves a deliverance from creation. Our spiritual lives don’t have much to do with our embodied life and so cultural choices can be made according to the very pragmatic standard of what enables evangelism. Evangelism understood very minimally is encouraging someone to respond to a few propositions about sin and grace. That view depicts an inadequate view of the relationship between the order of creation and the effects of God’s redemptive work in Christ and thus I think misunderstands the church’s cultural obligations.

I think in the Biblical picture, the church is not simply a fellowship of spiritually and internally and invisibly renewed people. We are a people who recognize the cosmic lordship of Christ [and] who strive to configure our lives as best we can in ways that conform to the kinds of creatures we were made to be. And in whom by God’s grace our full humanity will eventually be realized.