Friday 22 April 2016

CHRISTIANITY & CULTURE

'When the church honors and cares for the vulnerable among us, we are not showing charity. We are simply recognizing the way the world really works, at least in the long run. The child with Downs syndrome on the fifth row from the back in your church, he's not a "ministry project." He's a future king of the universe. The immigrant woman who scrubs toilets every day on hands and knees, and can barely speak enough English to sing along with your praise choruses, she's not a problem to be solved. She's a future queen of the cosmos, a joint-heir with Christ.
The most important cultural witness the church has it not to raiser up Christian filmmakers and novelists and artists and business leaders and politicians, although we ought to work to disciple those in all sorts of callings, and encourage them. The most important cultural task we have is to crucify our incipient Darwinism, in which the leaders on the inside of the kingdom colony are the same as they would be on the outside, even if there were no God in the universe. The first step to cultural influence is not to contextualize the present, but to contextualize to the future, and the future is awfully strange, even to us.' 
Russell Moore, Onward, p.82.