Fighting Culture

Dear Christian,

My heart hurts for you tonight.  And not in the way you probably want it to.  But my heart hurts at the way you’ve been responding to culture, to the world.  I’m not writing this to you for a guilt trip or to be another voice among the many calling for a response to our world lately.  But I needed an outlet and wanted to shed what I hope and pray is truth.

Because you see I’m fed up.  It’s been one of those days and I’m sick of it.  I’m ready to go to the mats.  Others (or Office Space) may see it as a bad case of the Mondays, but I think it’s been coming long before Monday hit.

I’ve been watching Christians and non-Christians, alike, for a while now and have the strongest desire to fight both cultures.  And I strongly feel that Jesus wants to fight both as well.  And I want what Jesus wants; I want to do what Jesus did.  If we look at His life, really look at it, we’ll see that He came into conflict with both worlds – the Jew and the sinner.  For the non-Christian the problem is simple: the need Jesus.  They don’t know that they don’t know; they aren’t alive in Christ. Tonight it’s the Christian trends that are keeping my mind reeling.

The trends I see are two-fold.  First, I see Christians becoming more and more closed-minded and ignorant of the world around them.  And then to combat that, if Christians aren’t trying to stay as clean as possible and removed from the culture and world around them, they are in it so deep that one may not even be able to see Jesus in them.  I want to fight for a happy medium.  I want us to be followers of Jesus who can have a conversation with a non-Christian, while upholding a holy life.  I want to live as Jesus lived, and if you look at His life you’ll see that He was perfect yet still shared meals with the worst of the worst; He touched the sickest of the sick, called out the self-righteousness of those deemed most righteous, and set the example of a life lived inside of God’s statutes.  If He did that, and still died for our sins, how can we be so self-righteous that we see ourselves as too mighty to get messy.  Life is messy.  And the more we separate ourselves from the call God has for us, the messier it will get.  

I wish it wasn’t that I had to fight the mess Christians have found themselves in, and that I could just fight for those who don’t know Christ to come to know Him.  However, we’ve messed ourselves as Christians up so much that it’s hard to tell what we’re living for anymore.

I ask, dear Christian, that you step out of the close-minded, ignorant, self-righteous mindset and culture that you’ve set up around yourself.  I ask that you become open to the opinion of other’s, that you are aware of what is going on around you, and that you step off the pedestal that you’ve placed yourself on and see that it is only because of God’s grace that you are anything.  You’re no better than anyone else; you’re just saved by Grace.  

In saying that, however, I also ask that you live holy lives. That you live “in the world, but not of it.”  Which means abstaining from sex before marriage, not smoking pot with the kids next door, watching language, or speaking truth instead of lies.  However, it means that you are connected to those around you so that you may relate to them, show them how you live, and share Jesus with them.  But if we’re separating ourselves so much from the world, we risk never encountering anything.  We risk being able to connect or have a normal social conversation, which in turn is a lost opportunity to have a conversation about knowing God.

This culture we’ve set up for ourselves as Christians is toxic.  Reactions to movies such as Noah don’t help our cause. (See my thoughts here).  Don’t you see, dear Christian?  These reactions are the very reason the unchurched won’t dare to step inside of a church.  We are portrayed as uneducated, close-minded, and not open to any opinion or view other than our own.  Have you ever stopped to think that maybe our perceptions at times might be off? That Noah really was a dark man or that a Christian organization should allow people of all kinds – saved or unsaved, gay or straight – to work for them in hopes of being light to them?

Reactions such as these make me cringe.  And maybe I’m writing to myself tonight more than anyone else.  Or maybe it’s that I don’t want to conform too much to one way and I’m in the wrong.  But I truly believe that if we are to reach a lost world for Christ we need to be quick to listen and slow to speak.  We need to have an educated basis for which our opinions are based.  If not the world will eat us up!  

So here’s what I ask, and maybe my heart will stop hurting for you: I ask that you stand for what Scripture calls us to stand for.  I ask that you open your minds to new ideas.  You don’t have to agree with every one of them, but at least be open.  I ask that you allow other people to make up their own minds.  Stop throwing your opinion around so that it prevents others from finding out and learning for themselves.  Just because you hated Noah doesn’t mean that you should tell others not to see it.  I ask that you change your culture, Christian.  Change your culture to fight self-righteousness, to get in the world, and to live as Christ lived – how He really lived.

I ask that you fight the culture that we’ve created over centuries of “church” so that we may focus instead on fighting the culture of the lost world.

Sincerely, a concerned fellow Christian.