For my artifact, I attended to a January Series event. The lecture was called “The Next Christians: How a New Generation is Restoring the Faith.” The speaker was Gabe Lyons, who is famous for his book “The Next Christians.” Lyons lecture mainly focused on the Christian interaction with our current culture. He explained the two kinds of Christians in today’s society—the separatist, and the cultural Christian. Separatist only spend time with people who think like them, act like them, and share their beliefs. They only listen to certain kinds of music and watch certain kinds of movies. Overall, they seclude themselves from the world in order to remain holy. Cultural Christians, on the other hand, tend to blend in with the rest of the population. These Christians do no stand out--the word “Christian” is simply a label. Both separatists and cultural Christians fail to see the full creation-fall-redemption-restoration story--they only see half. Separatists look only at the fall and redemption part. For these separatists, redemption is solely about escaping the material world, rather than working at renewing it. In contrast, cultural Christians focus on creation and restoration. They fail to see the need to redeem what is fallen—rather than standing out in opposition to fallen culture, they fit right in.
As followers of Christ, we are to be neither separatists nor cultural Christians. Instead, we are called to be restorers, or a vision of how things ought to be. As restorers, we are to be provoked. This means that we are not to simply critique and condemn culture, but we are to get involved in it and take action. As Lyons explained, humans are called to help create the world as it should be and use their God-given gifts to help restore culture. However, in order to restore culture, we must first become engaged in it.
In conclusion, I believe that our interaction with culture is extremely important. We must not become separatists and seclude ourselves from everything materialistic and evil in the Empire. In order to bring the Kingdom of God into culture, we must be involved in culture. However, we should not let ourselves become so well adjusted to culture that we fit right in, becoming “cultural Christians.” We must work at becoming restorers, bringing the backwards Kingdom of God into our society.
Discussion Questions:
1. How can we avoid being separatists and cultural Christians, and seek to be restorers in today’s society?
2. How can we engage in culture and use our gifts to help reform it?
Great report on the lecture, Kendra--thank you. Another interesting question to explore might be how our Plantinga and Walsh/Keesmaat texts encourage the kind of holistic approach that Lyons is talking about--how they take creation, the fall and redemption into account in the visions of faithfulness they're promoting.
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