Christian sub-culture

I'll be honest. This is one of my favorite things to rant about, but I'm going to try and reel it in a little bit because my ranting is probably not going to be very productive. I don't really know how we, as the church, got to this place. I think it might be so close to where we are right now that not too many people have looked back to see exactly how we ended up here. Where is here? The place where somehow it became okay for Christians to separate themselves from the world. Now, let me explain what I mean by this before I send anyone wrong signals. I believe that we as a people are to be "in" the world but not "of" the world. I think in recent decades this has been misinterpreted though. Somehow it has come to mean that we should let the culture of the world decay into even more depravity while we create our own sub-culture (a mere shadow of the regular culture)and disappear into it. The reason that this is a misinterpretation is that it is trying to make this saying a physical reality instead of a state of mind, or a description of us as a people. Somehow it has come to mean that we have christian coffee shops as opposed to secular coffee shops, christian music as opposed to secular music, christian mints (yes there are such things), ect. The list could go on. What it boils down to is "christian" being used as an adjective instead of a noun. In some cases this might not be bad, but in the context of this blog I think it is. If in order for someONE to be a Christian they must profess Christ as their Savior and follow Him accordingly (nutshell), how can someTHING be Christian? Things are not capable of making these decisions. The fact is it is about MARKETING! If you label something as Christian it is guaranteed that someone will buy it because of this sub-culture that we have set up. It is destructive to creativity as well as destructive to our witness to the world. The fact is that perhaps twenty years ago, we needed Christian book publishers or other things like that in order to get things published that other publishers were not willing to publish, but in all honesty such things are not needed in today's society with the internet around. Christian bookstores for example are rotting from the inside out. It really has become about marketing, not content. Most of these things have little to no christian content outside of the name, and the tendency is to sell what makes people happy because it means more money, or trinkets and things that don't really serve any purpose or anybody.

Anyway, I think I started rambling a little bit. Here is the point: We need to stop thinking that our own culture will ever trump the culture around us. There is a saying that Christian culture is always 20 years behind, and this is one of the cases where it is true. The church can never trump the culture around us because we are a part of that culture. Trying to separate ourselves from it is ridiculous. We just end up looking silly because we start trying to Christianize something while the world has moved on. The fact is culture and all of its trimmings don't matter. Spreading the word of Christ and living lives obedient submission to Him is what changes people, and the more people that the Holy Spirit grabs, the more culture changes. This is a fact. Culture can't be changed by giving alternatives to it, culture changes when people come to have a saving faith in Jesus Christ. Take Rome for example, I don't think the Christians of that time were interested in having a culture war. I think they cared about people and were trying to share the gospel with them and so many people got saved that subsequently the culture started to shift (for better or worse). So I think we need to stop the sillyness. Stop dressing things up as Christian that are not. There is no such thing as a "Christian" bookstore, there is only a bookstore, a business, that sells books that express ideas influenced by Christian faith. There is no such thing as a "Christian" band there are only musicians who have come to saving faith in Jesus Christ and express the change in song. And finally, there is no "Christian" sub-culture. There are only Christians who have replaced fear of God with the fear of man. Yep, it's true. I think christian sub-culture comes from a fear of man and a lack of trust in the God of the universe. We get scared of how much culture influences us, but we should be scared of how much God does not influence us sometimes.


*Note: I'm speaking in general terms here. There are places where a sub-culture needs to form. Christian theology for example needs to stay rooted in the bible and things that make us different will form a unique culture. The point is that these things are naturally occurring and are not forced, they come from following in obedience.