Exegeting Culture is Critical

Back in 2002 I went on an interview at a church in Torrance where one of the pastors asked me to define "culture." Since that moment, my mind has always had that splinter in it "What is culture?"

Thankfully, David Wells has helped to remove that splinter when we takes his cue from Stuart Ewen and writes that culture is "the accumulated understanding by which a given people live and maintain themselves in a given society" and defines it for himself as "all of those ways of looking at life, the habits of mind, that become typical and normative in a given context" (18-19).

He goes on to say that culture "impinges on us, makes demands of us, sometimes alarms us, sustains us, and occupies us. it is the world that envelops us in a myriad of images in terms of which we think of existence, by which we respond to it, through which we communicate with others. And so many of these images by which we understand ourselves are commercial in nature" (19).

What I want to point out is what's behind that last sentence. The reason pastors and church leaders should take long, deep and prolonged looks at the culture around them is because all of us tend to "live and maintain" ourselves, we tend to look at and orient our lives by our culture. "Normal" is defined by what's typical in our context (as an aside, what becomes normal is usually determined by the marketing of the context).

While this is what culture does, this is not what it ought to do. Defining what's normal, what we're to think and live by, is God's role not culture's.

As a result, culture is not neutral. It's the conglomeration of a myriad of influences that have all been fused together to create it. When the major influences in a culture undermine Christianity, the people and churches will automatically reflect that undermining.

So, to really impact people enveloped by their culture, pastors and church leaders must be able to exegete the Bible, their own hearts and the culture. The Bible and the surrounding culture have the same effect on people, both want to be the dominant way of interpreting life.

Therefore, a relevant ministry must able to inflict the biblical worldview and it's norms on the hearts of those it reaches, rather than letting culture dictate the habits of our hearts. This is done by getting a good read on the culture, getting a good read on the Bible and then contrasting its superiority in every way to the culture.

When this happens, Christianity becomes a comprehensive world and life view, not merely a box we check off every Sunday in our organizers.