Archived entries for Culture

Sources For Post-Christian Exploration?

Depending on who you believe the world of Christendom is either dying, transforming, or being reborn outside the West. What everyone agrees on is this: God is moving.

My questions today are: Who is reporting on the move of God at the edges of society? Who is incubating experiments in a post-Christian lab? What are your favorite publications, magazines or websites for exploring the frontiers of the missio dei in post-Christian culture?

What are your sources? Continue reading…

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Toward a Missional Economy, Part 2

Yesterday I said that economics permeates every realm of life as the “rules of the household” for handling our resources. I also proposed that Exodus 16 is the defining economic narrative of the bible, that it’s rules create an economy of sharing so that everyone’s needs are equally met, and that the implications of this cut deeply into what it means to live together as a community.

Manna in the Postmodern Desert
With these rules of the household in view we can readily recognize similar economic undercurrents being explored outside the Church today. This is where our exploration becomes “missional,” by asking the question, “What is God the economist doing in the world around us?” Continue reading…

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Make Something Day, 2009

It’s the time of year when we start thinking about gifts. No, I’m not talking about Christmas. Friends Jason and Brooke Evans started Make Something Day a couple years ago as a way of practicing an alternative economy of simplicity and gift-giving on the most conspicuous consumption day of the year: Black Friday. Naturally, this idea appealed to me right away as it goes hand-in-hand with the gift economy approach of the Twoshirts.org Community.

Here’s a snippet from the MSD website: Continue reading…

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I'm Calling B.S. On That

Sam O’Neil of the Out of Ur blog recently posted an little snippet of an interview from Leadership Journal with Daniel Hill, founder of River City Community Church. In it, they touch on some very important issues, including the expectations of modern U.S. church-goers and the challenge of small groups in different U.S. sub-cultures. This topic is highly valid and important, but I was frustrated to see it degenerate into simplistic stereotyping. Here’s an excerpt:

What assumptions do white people carry into the church?
Arloa Sutter (pastor of community life): When I came I said, “Let’s just start small groups! Everyone wants to be in a group, right?” The fact is small groups aren’t as important to other ethnicities as they are to white people. Continue reading…

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The Usonian Church

I often say that ecclesiology is what keeps me up at night.

I’ve spent the majority of my life in churches that assumed we can and should shape the church to suit our tastes and conveniences: We create the kind of youth ministry that keeps our teens docile, we build facilities that cater to every self-serving multi-purpose imaginable, and we change the time and place of gatherings to accommodate our devotion to other cultural phenomena (like football and Friends). If the congregation is largely white and middle-class then the church ends up looking like a discreet warehouse in the suburbs because that reflects the ideals of middle-class American industrial success. Similarly, the worship looks like a Fleetwood Mac or Coldplay concert (depending on the church’s age) because that reflects white, middle-class ideals for a tastefully edgy kind of musical experience.

To a certain extent this is good because the church must be contextualized into a given culture. That is, after all, the task of the missionary (1 Cor 9:20). But at some point this becomes a problem. If your church looks like a Wal Mart, walks like a Wal Mart, and quacks like a Wal Mart…isn’t it really just a Wal Mart? Is it still a church? Is it a place where God is re-making you into His image, or have you merely re-made Him in your own image of cozy American consumer success (can I supersize that for you)? This is how we shape the church to suit our needs and tastes.

But what if church shaped us? Continue reading…

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Honk if You're Going to Hell

As I was driving with my daughter this morning I noticed the following bumper sticker on the car in front of me:

“Eternal hell awaits those who question God’s unconditional love.”

Naturally, the letters were stylized in a fiery font meant to convey the literal flames of Hell and the excruciating (no pun intended) torment that would surely accompany such a punishment. When I first read it a flood of questions invaded my mind: “What makes the driver think that bumper sticker is a valid expression of the gospel?” and “Does the driver really believe this is an effective means of conveying the gospel or is it just that their personal sense of spiritual validity is derived from presenting an acutely polarizing brand of religion?” and “Is it even possible in a post-Christian culture to present God’s justice (including His judgment) in a way that won’t be understood against the historical backdrop of horribly twisted theology and practice?“  But all these questions were quickly crowded out by a sudden realization: Continue reading…

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Announcing the Micah Film Festival

micahlogo

As I mentioned last week, my resurrected posts about the Sundance Film Festival have been in anticipation of an exciting announcement. Because I believe art in general, and film in particular, are an unheeded prophetic voice in our culture I wanted to find some way to missionally engage with that vital expression.

Hence, for the past several weeks our little community of faith has been working diligently on a project we’re very excited about: The Micah Film Festival.

Continue reading…

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The Re-emergence of Suffering as a Virtue, Part 3

This is the last in a series of older posts from an older blog that came out of my trip last January to the Sundance Film Festival. This series is in anticipation of a new gathering our community is hosting later this summer around the medium of film (details coming soon).

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I’ve had a blast at Sundance with the Fuller folks, but I’m glad to be heading home to all my girls. I’ve been blogging about “suffering” as a theme in many of the films here, and this will be my last post on the subject.

So if some of the Sundance Films are suggesting that suffering can be good, and others are calling for a certain kind of suffering, exactly what kind is it?

When it came to depicting the complex nature of suffering through dramatic film this year, none was better than Cary Fukunaga, the writer and director of Sin Nombre. The journey of determined immigrants from Guatemala to the United States, becomes the vehicle for Fukunaga to explore the depths of human determination as he chronicles the explosive collision between a family seeking solace in the U.S. and a Mexican gang in violent transition.

Continue reading…

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The Re-emergence of Suffering as a Virtue, Part 2

The following is an older post from an older blog that came out of my trip last January to the Sundance Film Festival. I’m posting this series in anticipation of a new gathering our community is hosting later this summer around the medium of film (details coming soon).

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Yesterday I suggested that one theme at the Sundance Film Festival this year has been the depiction of suffering as a virtue. Perhaps some emerging films are expressing the mood of our times, or perhaps they’re like a cultural weathervane, pointing us toward the coming clouds.

But how can suffering be good?

In Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Writer/Director John Krasinski (yes, from The Office) suggests that men are the new powerless minority, not because of traditionally conceived weakness, but because of their brute force. The screenplay is an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection of the same name.

Continue reading…

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The Re-emergence of Suffering as a Virtue, Part 1

The following is an older post from an older blog that came out of my trip last January to the Sundance Film Festival. I’m posting this series in anticipation of a new gathering our community is hosting later this summer around the medium of film (details coming soon).

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If filmmakers are the prophetic poets of our culture, then our culture is tired of the shallow pursuit of happiness and hungry for steadier sustenance. The last time our country faced serious economic hardship we found our prophet in a three foot tall muppet named Yoda, who rasped in Buddhist fashion that the source of all evil was “suffering.” The nation – still reeling from Vietnam and the shattered idealism of the 60’s, followed by the Iranian hostage crisis and record unemployment – dove headlong into the waters of unchecked economic growth, personal prosperity, and individualized fulfillment through consumer gluttony.

What followed was a quarter-century of debauchery, in which everyone could be a .com millionaire, a real estate tycoon, or a reality show celebrity. Combined with a simultaneous explosion in pharmaceuticals, we embraced a new American dream: the elimination of suffering. It turns out we weren’t cured, merely inebriated.

Frankly, the hangover sucks.

Continue reading…

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