We’ve taken the last several weeks to explore the idea of engaging your culture, with particular emphasis on your local culture: your town, your village, your community and your neighborhood.
Today we will wrap up this series. We’ve explored several questions that should guide our engagement with culture. 1) What is right? 2) What is missing? 3) What is confused? 4) What is wrong? Each of these questions give us a perspective to understand what’s really going on in the places where God has sent us to live, work and play. We want to engage our communities and local cultures in ways that are helpful and redemptive, and it requires the hard work of asking good questions and listening well in order to discern how God wants us to engage with the people to whom we are sent.
Today I want to point you to a couple of resources and a recent article to encourage you to do the critically important work of engaging your local culture.
Q Ideas (https://qideas.org) Over the years I’ve appreciated the work of Gabe Lyons and his team at Q Ideas. Our larger culture in North America is rapidly changing and the challenges seem to become more complex with each passing year. I’ve found the work done by Q Ideas both timely and committedly Christian in their approach to culture. As a matter of fact, the source of the four questions we’ve explored in this series was inspired by the folks at Q Ideas and their good work.
Barna Research (https://www.barna.com) I know that many of you are familiar with Barna Research, but I’d encourage you to stop by their website to check out the various resources available there. They continue to produce helpful research on the trends and forces shaping the perception of Christian faith and the church in our culture. In addition to some great research, they are producing resources to respond to some of the challenges their research uncovers.
Barna recently released some research that deals with the very issue we’ve been exploring these past few weeks.
Are Local Pastors in Touch with Their Community’s Needs? Americans Weigh In
https://www.barna.com/research/local-pastors-community-needs/
I encourage you to follow the link and read the article for yourself, but I’ll note a couple of the more interesting pieces of data.
- 55% of adults who claim no faith agreed with the following statement: Christian pastors are out of touch with the needs of my community. The perception by those who don’t share our Christian faith is that Christian leaders are out of touch with the needs in the local community.
- 62% of adults who claim no faith agreed with the following statement: Christian pastors are only focused on growing their own churches and not on community transformation.
Now, I know that we’re often tempted to dismiss research like this with responses such as “they don’t really know us.” While there’s some validity to that claim, we also need to wrestle with realization that the very people to whom we are sent don’t sense that we really care all that much beyond the needs of our own congregations.
How well do you know your local community in order to be able to contextualize the Gospel? Do you know what is right? Do you know what is missing? Do you know what is confused? Do you know what is wrong? Who are the persons of peace that God has placed in your life who can help you understand the place where He has sent you to live, love and serve?
Have you taken a step in the recent weeks to learn something about the place where God has sent you? What could you do this week to take another step? What do you need to learn? Who do you need to call this week?
Christ’s Peace,
Lance
CGGC eNews—Vol. 15, No. 43
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