I remember it like it was yesterday; I walked into my dorm room at Briercrest and was shocked to see my roommate sitting on the floor and systematically destroying all of his "non-Christian" CD's. For weeks he'd been getting slack from fellow guys (including me) about some of his pagan musical choices. Unbeknownst to me, he was getting more and more convicted/guilty about some of these choices and in a spectacular display of radical faith/guilty conscience, he was destroying all of his CD's that weren't on a Christian label.
At the time I was impressed and yet there was a nagging worry. Did he really have to destroy all of them? Was it devotion, guilt, desire to impress others, or something else that was behind this action - what were his motives? At that time, there was a great battle between the secular culture and the Christian one. The Christian sub-culture was like a big bubble; it it had Christian alternatives for everything; music, movies (yes, they were bad), books, clothing, candy, art, greeting cards, etc. Look in any large Christian bookstore and you'll see it all for it still exists in some ways. Where I think it doesn't really exist any more is with students.
Growing up in high school as a Christian it was all black and white; Christian or non. Choose! Today though as I was putting away dishes I thought about how much had changed when it comes to students. As a youth pastor, I was in a small rural Mennonite community and I literally saw the transformation with my students. They moved from a closed Christian culture to a quasi Christian culture and then finally into a "vaguely Christan" sub-culture. "The world" was first rejected, then explored with caution, and finally embraced as the norm. By the time I left most of my students were listening to/watching/purchasing most of the same things that their unchurched friend did.
It seems that things are always on pendulum and I worry that maybe the pendulum has swung too far. As my first story illustrates, the Christian sub-culture was way too judgmental. Today though I wonder if we have swung too far the opposite direction. Do we still have discernment? Have we forgotten that we are aliens in this world? Are we different enough? Will spiritual hunger reengage with the next generation of Christian students and will the pendulum swing back to a defensive Christian culture again? Or will we seem something truly different from this next generation - a fresh new approach to being in the world but not of it?
May Light increase!
Church service at Holy Church near Rescue 1
4 weeks ago
6 comments:
have u seen a change like that in me?
I'm not interested in living in a different "world" while on earth, than everybody else. The Christian "sub-culture" turns me off, I'd like to live amongst the people. I'm not talking morally, but presence wise.
John 1.14
The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
Jacquie
Jacquie: I agree that we should not cut ourselves off from the people around us, we should embrace them. I think of the Christian sub-culture as an attempt to protect Christians from the negative aspects of the world. God calls us to reach out and he calls us to be separate and different. It seems to me that Christians have been wrestling with how to balance these ever since the dawn of the faith. If one goes to either extreme, one falls into error. I think of it as continuum - on one side is radical syncretism with world where one can hardly tell the difference between the Christians and the non-Christians. On the far side from that are the radical abstainers who cut themselves off from a lost world and indeed offer nothing to it. I wonder how we can somehow be in a healthy spot in the middle. . .
Pierre: I'm not sure I know you well enough to comment! I think you need to look at yourself and decide where you are at . . . and where you want to go.
thanks mark....that was the kind of answer i was expecting from you. you're a good friend.
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