Thinking Of You

No one can stand outside of culture and evaluates it, we are all immersed in current culture and therefore we are evaluating it from a position of being a part of it.  All evaluations are a complex understanding of a complex society.  To see this, just think about homosexuality, caring for the earth and entertainment and how dramatically the understandings of these issues are in comparison to 50 years ago.  Everything today is quite a bit different than 50 years ago, and I dare say, more different than any other 50-year timespan.  Technology has added a rapidity to change that wasn’t a part of past cultures.  This is why it is so critical for us to be constantly renewing our faith so as to be able to live well in our current culture.  Many of us see these changes occurring “out there” in culture but not in any meaningful way a part of our own culture.  However, if we are alive we are living in current culture and it is having a dramatic effect on us.   This means that the urgency of our need for significant spiritual development must match, or, better yet, outmatch the pace of culture development.  Getting behind in the current climate means a much more rapid decline as culture races forward on changes built not on newspapers, books, and magazines but on smartphones, smart televisions and personal computers.  Believers tend to be more and more opting for being spiritual and personally “off the grid” while their culture is being more and more built upon it.  This leads us to be ill-equipped at being effective change agents in our current culture and less apt to see our need for a deeper, more personal relationship with Christ, our source of being effective.  What is needed is for a renewed rededication of our lives to Christ, which will lead to us being better change agents in the circles we occupy in current culture.  Nowhere is this more needed than in the arts, which has long been where culture change not only sees its birth but its most rapid growth.  It is a call to first be more committed to our personal relationship with Christ and then be courageous enough to live and make art in the center of popular culture, the only culture we have and the only one we live in.  

Thoughts developed while studying my Sunday School lesson, Walking Differently Ephesians 4:17-32 and William Dyrness, Poetic Theology