The Church's Role In Culture

Our byline is "taking the life as a Christian in the context." So, how do you do this in the context of your life? And then my shtick, of course, is understanding God's Word and applying it in the context of your life. So, in context of the text, in context in your life, so forth and so on. So, we have a lot of fun doing the podcasts.

But first, before we do that, let's talk a little bit more about In Context. How long have you been doing it?

"My" is about my songs, my worship style. I/me/my – my children, my marriage – those things are important, but I think we've made a significant shift, Darrell from a vertical relationship to, "I'm to serve Christ and, with His people, serve people," to "I/me/my."

And just from a pastoral hack side of things, what I've watched is far more self-orientation – not wholesale, but that's one of my big concerns is that the church has lost its footing a little bit, need-driven programs, need-driven ministries which can have a place. But if we're off target about honoring Christ, Christ and His Word, explain the Scripture, making disciples, helping people – truly, not joking – learn to think critically, then we're off scale.

I mean I tell – the way I like to illustrate this is I have two examples. One is the Telstar satellite, which is going way back. M-kay? I like you, by the way, when you illustrate, 'cause you go back to illustrations I get. Okay? They come back from my time.

And so, I wonder if some of the – even the crying for need, et cetera, isn't a product, at least in part, of the disorientation that life has introduced into people's lives.

I'm going, "Well, if we leave the truth behind" –

And where the relational capital's changed is the way we made disciples. You and I sat under a mentor who taught. Now we must sit at a table and have a dialogue, because that – the mindset today seems to worship dialogue not truth. So, the goal for you and me, as an educator, is to help them dialogue to the truth in an open way, not subterfuge. But to be able to say, "Guys, you can't just go on your experience; you can't just go on your feeling. Feelings are valid for as long as you feel that way."

What we've tended to do is we've analyzed, "Well, here's what the Scripture says, and here's where the culture is, and the two things often collide." The problem is is that life, in a fallen world, is actually pretty messy, so that sometimes what you get are biblical values that also come into tension with each other. "How do I balance these things, because I live in an imperfect world, and I don't walk into an ideal space?"

And so, I might know how to analyze what the ideas of Scripture are and how that weighs against the failures of the culture. But I still have the problem on the other end of, "How do I relate to someone who's in that space well, in the midst of trying to get them to either react or respond biblically?"

And so, we've – we've gone with our ideas as our lead card, which is important. Ideas are a key part of the deal, but you've also got to think through relationally how you engage the person so you don't just shove them away but they actually come to sense, "You're challenging me because you want my best interests at heart."

And my mind says, Darrell, "You gotta serve influence, and there's some people you have just the communication of life, your travel, your neighbors. Why can't you just be good human friends to those people and see how God will open those relationships to have and afford that conversation." And it's true in the church as well as it is in our communities.

Cindy and I just moved to a new community some time ago. And it's striking; nobody's trying to prove anything, 'cause we're all new. "I have been here for 30 years."

And I think that just simple, basic community of meeting people where they are – forget about engaging them and understanding their worldview. They got marriages that have broken their hearts, kids that have broken their hearts. They’ve got cancer, they've got a tough job situation, upside down financially, that's the human condition.

And I think loving them and being friendly to them and being kind to them, if they brustle back because they find out I'm a Christian or a pastor, I can't do a lot about that. I really can't. I mean I'm not an in-your-face kinda guy with the guy in the street. I might be – you and me, we'll be in our face 'cause we're on the same – we're on the same thing.

And the credibility of the church and how they care about people, and how they engage with people and all that is wrapped up in the way in which the church functions both as an internal community and the types of things that it's concerned with.

You know, I say, "Well, that's great, but we're doing 112 ministries."

For example, we had a church in D.C. that was enormous, 112 ministries. To add one more ministry to that table, you're talking infrastructure, the money, resources, offices, staffing – the right staffing." You've hired and fired people, getting the right people to serve the Lord.

So, I'm going back to what did Jesus say? "Make disciples of all ethnos, and I will build My Church."

Which means they are walking into these spheres and facing these kinds of questions and having to think through, "How do I best represent Christ in this particular challenge that my job is offering me," and that kind of thing?

And when you get to know these people, obviously one person, you can probably handle about 10 or 12 relationships outside of your really tight-knit group.

And I go, "Man, let's talk about that." I don't have the answer, but I have the relational capital as a friend and a co-follower of Christ to hopefully disciple him or her.

I had to go around the circuitous route, 13 counties, and see how your tax dollars were helping those counties as a college grad. Ah.

So, again, I think I can – well, me – I think the Christian can go in and help another businessman or woman in their world. Say, "Do the best job in your sandbox you can for God's honor and see how He'll use that."

But one day, it dawned on me there was this bulletin board, and on the bulletin board, I decided to put what I called "the verse of the day." So, I wrote up a verse of the day, but this is how I did it. The first one was, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." And then it was one question, "Does anyone know where this comes from?"

So, what does it do? It engenders all kinds of guesses. "Well, it's gotta be about this," or all kind of – and I'm just enjoying the conversation. Okay? So, I did this for a while, and mostly Proverbs and Psalms is what I would put up there.

I said, "I was just seeing if it made any difference."

You know, the idea is, "Well, the reason God inspired this is 'cause He wants to tell us something that works." You know? And so, thinking through it that – so, I'm wrestling with all these relational features that you're talking about, but thinking about, "How do I do this for people who have – whose perception of what Christianity is has been absorbed by the culture?" And I like to tell people, "Well, if that's where their impression of Christianity is, we're probably talking past each other."

So, part of my friendship with him over the years has been encouraging him to live out his Christianity. And over the years, he's offered help for kids to go to private schools. He's set up funds in his company for, like, if a baby was born with some medical problems or whatever.

And little by little, he's got his camel's nose in the tent to say, "I can be a Christian, after all, I own this company. I employ all these people; I pay them all their salaries." I don't know that he put a verse on his office door, but they know that he's a believer.

The part of it that's helping him mature – I asked him one time, I said, "Why don't you have a Bible study for all your top-tier people?" And he was very nervous about that idea.

And he said, "Well, I don't know if I could teach it."

I said, "Well, that's fair enough. What if we got somebody to help you?"

And the more he thought about it, he said, "Well, if I do that, and then people come for the wrong reasons" – so, now we're into the ethics of how you run a business as a believer.

So, to your point, then, I think there are lots of ways – and I don't put the church as this amoeba that has to do all this. I put this back on guys like you and me and other men and women who know the Bible to be able to say, "This is exciting to see how God would use you in your sphere of influence. You don't have to be afraid; you don't have to cower; you don't have to worry about being politically correct. You can say, 'I'm sorry.' And if you're kind and loving and smile at the future, you're probably gonna have a pretty good opportunity to encourage those people toward Christ."

You run with attorneys, you talk to attorneys, you have interest in politics, interest in sports; those spheres of influence are so easy. And if you're – the term used "cultural engagement" – to me, I'm engaging a culture of people that have an interest in medicine, in sports, in computers and technology. And I'm like you; I want to go see where they work, because when I come back to the books, I can see that guy in his office, at his university, or his medical center, and I know, "That's where he's 40-50 hours a week."

And then it's having enough background or, if you don't have the background, knowing where to go to help get it, to be able to help speak into that. And even at points, as you're right, sometimes you'll end up and say, "Man, that's a good question. I don't know what the answer to that is." But it probably wouldn't hurt us to stop and think through and wrestle with, "What are our options here? You know? And what will best represent what Christ is, et cetera?"

To me, that's part of what engagement is about. And when you communicate – when you communicate to people that you care, and even if they're in the midst of making a bad decision, if you communicate in the midst of them you care, and they get that, they will care more about your challenge to them about the way to live.

So, I'm sitting there with a couple of staff, and wholesome conversations, and these young women asking me questions, looking for that father to love 'em and encourage 'em. This is how weird it got.

So, some of them came to work for us at the church. One woman was 30-something years old; she was a schoolteacher. She taught a couple of years, hated it. [Laughs] Hated teaching.

And they would say, "Of course not, Dr. E." And they would want to hug me. Now, we're in the wholesome nature of Christianity; to a young man, to a young woman we encourage them. But what happened? I listened to their story.

I wasn't afraid to talk to 'em, and it was always the same thing. It was heartbreaks. It was stupid boyfriends. It was, you know, whatever. Their friends were getting married, on and on and on. Some of them had been hurt when they were young, and you're just trying to love 'em as Christ loves 'em. I just think the sphere of influence that people have, we underestimate how easy it is just to be open and kind and say, "Man, I'm sorry."

And sometimes that means – well, one of my favorite passages is being – you may not know it from the podcast – "being slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to listen." You know?

And they responded back with a, "Well, you need to do better." Like a paragraph. You know? They were still mad.

And I said, "You know, I don't know her. She's hurt. Her story is unknown to us. To say the right answer is not going to change" – I learned this years ago, you can't fact away someone's feeling. And hopefully, as I've gotten older, I've gotten a little more gentle toward people that are mad at me, or angry at something, or angry at the church.

I say, "Wait a minute, they're probably hurt. Somebody bit 'em; they were abused; some church took advantage of them; they were in a harsh, legalistic background – who knows? – fill in the blank. But just to see them as a wounded co-struggler as opposed to a person who's wrong – in this case they were; they were wrong and unkind in the post. But I can't get into a – well, you can; you can get into a jousting match on social media; it doesn't work.

And the point that I made is is that the point that Jesus is making in the section where He says, "Love your enemies," is is what will mark out the church as being distinctive will be a different kind of love. And if we don't show that, we're no different than anybody else. And if the church – I think this is the lesson of liberalism – if the church is no different than the psychologist down the street, then why do I go to church?

And so, there's this core relational thing that the Spirit of God is trying to implant within us – that's why we get it; that's why the fruit of the Spirit is so relational – that is important to the DNA of any church community it seems to me.

I like to say that the challenge of any engagement is always a tension with regard to anything having to do with the gospel and God's truth is the tension between the challenge of what the gospel says about all our lives. 'Cause God is constantly challenging all of us to be more and to be better. I mean, you know, even the Thessalonians are doing well. I want you to love even better.

And the hope that's built into the gospel – 'cause at the end, you know, when Peter, in that great passage in 1 Peter 3, where it says, "Be prepared to give a defense for the hope that is in…" He has all kinds of words he could choose to summarize what the faith is about, and he chooses the word "hope." I'm defending a hope. There is something very – there's something very good newsy about the gospel. There's something good about the gospel. So, how do I do that in such a way so that a person doesn't just hear the critique, but they see that what's being extended to them is an invitation? The 2 Corinthians 5 language says, "We beg you, be reconciled to God and Christ."

And the tone of that is interesting. See, God's pay grade is to deal with the heart and fix the person in terms of response; that's not my deal. So, the pressure's off me. All I need to do is be faithful in delivering that. And so, figuring out how to do that, even when someone is pushing as hard in rebellion as they can is I think a tough assignment – I'm not saying it's easy; it's a tough assignment – but it's the call of the church.

And so, I know what those conversations are, too. But the one thing that has to come with that – absolutely has to come with that is the communication of, "This is being done out of love. This is not being – this is not retribution. You know? This is being done out of – this is because I care about you."

And sometimes I think, in our pursuit to be right, we sometimes –

Go home because the church is His bride, the church is His responsibility. We're ambassadors – right? – and we can muck it up.

And I do think that one of the effects of our culture today that is a little bit misleading is you get the impression that every problem is what I call a 30-minute and 2-commercial problem. You know, I can fix it with the right – in 30 minutes. No, most – there are many things in life that aren't that easily resolvable.

I tell people the story whenever I go somewhere, whether it's in a small group or a businessman or a lunch, and I'll say a couple of things, "Can I share something that I've read this morning?" No one's ever said no. And another thing they've never said no to me, whether it's a hospital or a lunch appointment or leaving their office, "Hey, can I pray for you before I leave?"

I have a Jewish surgeon that I know, and he's done work on me, and he lost his wife. Forty-two years of age, she died. And I went to see him for a follow-up, and I said, "Dr. So-and-so, is this indelicate? And if this is improper patient/doctor thing, you stop me. I'm just really sad for you."

And his shoulders slumped, and he sat there, and I asked him a few questions, and I said, "I'm a Goyim Christian, and I know you're Jewish. Can I pray for you?"

He said, "I would like that."

I just think we make it too hard. I think we construct these monsters in our mind that may or may not be real, and the compassion, the connection, the caring about those people – so, all that to say, you know, I think we're afraid to walk around with big Bibles anymore for a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day, if this isn't His Word, it doesn't matter.