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Understanding The Times And Knowing What To Do
Brian Mashburn
July 4, 2010
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Learning The Culture's Language
It was six years ago that I packed up my family and moved from Houston to Amarillo. It was quite a cultural leap for me.
That may sound strange, but while the people of Houston and Amarillo have a lot in common, there are some cultural gaps. Some of them I was aware of, but most of them I had to learn by just moving here and immersing myself in it.
Of course the cultural gap would have been more if I moved from Houston to Portland, and less if I moved from Houston to Dallas. But however slight or large the difference may be between cultures, if someone from one culture desires to interact with another, he must “learn the language” of that culture.
The church, by it’s very definition and by direct commission, desires to interact with the culture it lives in. Our Master Jesus modeled this in the most extreme of ways, leaving Heaven and its culture and entering Earth and its culture, for the purpose of loving, saving, and transforming the people of it.
Our church (like all American churches) finds itself living within a quickly changing, mind boggling, diverse culture. No need to move to a different city to find a culture gap.
The times, they are a-changin’. We need to understand the times and figure out what we as God’s people need to do to speak the language of our culture.
We need to be like the men of Issachar “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” (1 Chronicles 12:32).
For the rest of this summer, we are going to take a good hard look at the culture we live in, so that we, too, can understand and know what to do as a church family.
The gospel message we carry, the foundation for the Kingdom’s culture, does not change. But how we deliver that message to the culture we live in must change if we are going to be faithful to getting that message to the world that Christ died for.
How great would it be to speak to Amarillo in such a way that they WANT to hear the message of Christ?
May God bless us.