The Church Out of Time

The Church out of Time

The battle for Culture

Among Christian Churches, there has long been a cultural battle. This battle has been characterized both as trying to keep away from and stay behind culture; also as trying to stay ahead of culture or keep up with it. How is the church doing in today’s culture? We will look at a small slice of the answer to this question.

A Culture Defined

Culture is the collection of beliefs, behaviors, and the results and evidences of those beliefs and behaviors for a particular people-group. Some have defined culture as, “’the way of life for an entire society.’ As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behaviour and systems of belief.”[i] Some of the key components of culture are Values, Institutions, Norms, and Artifacts.[ii]

In this paper, we will look at Western culture in general, and United States culture in particular. This culture dominates the planet in every way. Western Culture is exported through television, through Hollywood, through global news services like CNN, and through financial venues originating on Wall Street. Western Culture is full of values that are antithetical to Christianity and Christianity is full of values that stabilize Western Culture like control rods in a nuclear reactor.

A Church Consumed

The Church must adapt to the culture in which it finds itself. For instance, if the current culture speaks English, the church must speak English rather than Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic; but we must remember and maintain an understanding of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. If the current culture uses automobiles and aircraft to transport people and goods, the Church must use automobiles and aircraft to transport people and goods, rather than mule drawn carts and by foot. The problem with this necessary adaptation is that the Church may over-adapt and become consumed by the culture. When the control rods of the church are removed, the culture reverts to its base state of turmoil, debauchery, strife, and self-destruction – a cultural China Syndrome.

The Church must be obsessed with the Word of God and the fact that it is from God and important NOW. It is evident that most of the Church has over-adapted to the culture and is now becoming consumed by it. The Church is losing the battle to remain an ekklesia, a group of people called out of the world by God. Instead, the Church is morphing into a philosophical system, rather than a Way of life.

There are clear scriptural directives for Christians in the Bible. Since, culture has consumed the Church, it no longer believes in Scripture. For instance, scripture says, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth.” Yet the United States has the 7th largest population of Atheists and Agnostics in the world.[iii] In the Essay “2020: Social, Economic and Technological Change, Educated Predictions of the Future Based on Current Events & Technology,” we read, “In the United States 10% of Americans are atheist. This figure has been growing slowly during the last century, but it has seen its sharpest increases during periods of heavy immigration. The influx of different religions into North America is feeding the rate at which children grow up and become atheists.”[iv] Clearly more and more people are losing their belief in God. At the same time, other religious beliefs such as Buddhism and Islam are taking their toll on Western Culture and the Church.

Moreover, the Bible says in Leviticus 18:22; 20:13, “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable [or, 'an abomination'].” Also in the New Testament, in Romans 1:24 and 6:19; 2 Corinthians 12:21; Galatians 5:19; 1 Thessalonians 4:3 and 4:7; Ephesians 4:19; 5:3,5; and Colossians 3:5, there is repeated condemnation of this kind of sexual immorality. However, major denominations accept homosexuality, and even support it by hiring homosexual clergy and not requiring repentance for this sin.[v]

The roots of this slip into the mainstream culture are growing into the churches acceptance of Evolution, even going so far as to purport that God created everything by means of evolution. The church has succumbed to a school of thought taught in our institutions of education. Our elementary schools, our junior high and high schools, and especially our universities are over-run by Marxist-Atheist oriented thought patterns. These thought patterns are taught to us from kindergarten through graduate school, they permeate our media and seep into the ship of the Church, drowning the passengers through aged and rotting respect for the Word of God.

Dialectic thought is drowning our children in a sea of relativism. We find that in, “today's public school students are taught dialectically rather than didactically. This means they are taught there are no absolute facts or morals and a thought process based on feeling and collective thinking has been substituted for individuality and logical, rational thought.”[vi] These kids, if they make it out of university still Christian (70% do not), fill our pulpits and church boards with a way of thinking that is antithetical to Christian Discipleship and Truth.

But all is not lost, because the Church still runs far out on front of culture in ways that matter, in ways that show that we are not yet in a cultural China Syndrome.

A Culture Brightened

Modern times demand death and church is trying to hold back time. The church is, by far, ahead of culture in the area of doing good in the world. The church does and inspires the doing of more good than this planet earth has ever seen save the time when Christ came Himself. The church has brought to us scientists who, believing in God and His order in the universe, have made fantastic discovers in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology, information science, and a lot more. Thousands of scientists have been, and are Christians.[vii]

The Bible has taught Christians to be givers and to take care of the poor. This runs against the natural human inclination to flee and even murder those less fortunate. There are thousands of Protestant charities and hospitals around the world: American Family Association, BGEA, Baptist World Alliance, Christian Relief Fund, Compassion International, CBN, and Presbyterian Hospitals, just to name a few.[viii] The Catholic Church runs 5,478 Hospitals with 4,500 million people treated, 14,806 Dispensaries, 793 Leprosariums, 27,281 Homes for the aged homeless and handicapped, 7,102 Orphanages, 9,293 Nurseries, 97,823 Special Centers for Social Services, 8,216 Matrimonial Advice Centers.[ix] Virtually every congregation on earth helps the poor. Books can be written on the good works done by Christianity in this culture. I put forth that we have taught the atheists, Muslims, and other non-Christian groups and governments the importance of giving; and how to go about doing it. Christianity has brightened existence on this planet.

The church has stifled the fires of culture of death as society desires ever more to murder its unborn, kill its elderly and infirm, and snuff out the lives of “inconvenient undesirables” like Terry Schiavo. As university professors and lawmakers work hard to being death to all people they deem unnecessary, Christians rally against them, hold protests, write in to congress, engage on the cable news, on local television, in chat rooms, in local and national newspapers – everywhere there is evil rising like a hot flame, the church rises to meet it. But mostly we stand against culture in prayer. The prayer of the righteous can make things happen. Jesus said to be a light and Christianity has done so in this day. We must continue to fight.

A Battle Lost and Won

I remember tomorrow.

Soon we will be out of time. It is written in the pages of Ezekiel, Hosea, and Revelation. Matthew 24 and II Thessalonians speaks of it. It is a tomorrow with the control rods of Christianity withdrawn. It is a nightmare; it is hell on earth, a global ideological “China Syndrome”. The Church will lose the battle for culture. The church will even become complicit in the coming catastrophe. The battle will be lost.

However, in home study groups, in small meeting places all over the world, will rise up a shining group of people who will know God and His Word so profoundly that they will even die for it. They will join together in heaven crying out in a loud voice, “Holy and true Sovereign, how long will it be before you judge and take revenge on those living on the earth who shed our blood?” They will lament for their brethren still caught in a culture out of control, run by Satan himself.

The war will only be completely won when Christ returns to set all things right and, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There won't be death anymore. There won't be any grief, crying, or pain, because the first things have disappeared. The one sitting on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new!” He said, “Write this: ‘These words are trustworthy and true.’”[x]

Even so come Lord Jesus

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[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

[iii] http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html

[iv] http://www.lilithgallery.com/articles/2006/social_and_economic_change.html

[v] http://www.endtime.com/magarchive.asp?ID=30

[vi] http://www.steelonsteel.com/articles/myth_socialization.html

[vii] http://www.tektonics.org/scim/sciencemony.htm

[viii] http://www.christianservicecharities.org/Charity1.htm

[ix] http://www.religion-cults.com/Christianity/Catholic/Branch-C-Catholic.htm

[x] Revelation 8:10 and 21:4-5 International Standard Version