How to live out the good news in our cultural conversations - part 2
From a video by the Evangelical Alliance
The EA recently held a Perspective Conversation where Jo Frost from the EA, co-author of 'Being Human: A new lens for our cultural conversations' and Aaron Nayagam from Fusion shared their perspectives, testimonies and tips for meaningful conversations in the present challenging culture. Some abridged comments from Jo Frost:
We are exploring our challenging cultural conversations and I would imagine that all of you have in the back of your head questions or topics of conversation that you really want to avoid having, whether it's with your family, your friends, people that you share life with or your neighbours.
We all have really gut-crunching moments when we want to talk about Jesus but we're not quite sure how to deal with it.
Today we're probably not going to deal with the specifics. Instead what we want to do is lift up the bonnet and have a look at our culture and see where these questions are resonating and coming from. And then see whether or not the fullness of the good news, the fullness of the God story that Jesus encapsulates and invites us into, is capable of dealing with these challenging questions.
Do we need to be nervous and afraid of the conversations that people around us are having? I would posit no we don't.
The Talking Jesus research, (see part 1 of this blog), showed that the questions that are being asked but the church is often incredibly good at answering questions that people aren't asking. We're skilled at knowing some of the big apologetic questions of "Who is Jesus", "The Resurrection", etc., yet our culture isn't overly wired into that space. So I suggest that we need to have a look at what our culture is talking about and what we have to offer.
It's not all bad news. One in three people want to have a conversation about Jesus. Fusion research says that 74% of students would go to church if a Christian invited them. I am hearing more and more stories of people coming to faith in Jesus because of the dreams that they're having because they've encountered somebody talking on TikTok. We are hearing of all of these places where God is on the move - the cultural story and the cultural conversations that people are having are leading people to church and to the gospel.
We don't need to be afraid of the challenging questions. In fact we just need to have confidence that the story that we inhabit is a story that is capable of addressing and dealing with these conversations that people are having because when they hear, they want to give their lives to Jesus.
Culture is a set of shared habits, the things that we do, the stories that we tell, the stuff that we make that help us make sense of who we are and the world in which we live. Our cultural stories aren't doing a very good of helping us live good and full lives. Think of politics, war, celebrity behaviour, etc. Our culture is one that not just Christians are struggling to deal with.
Underneath it all, we are seeing a fundamental question, "What does it mean to be human?".
The Being Human project has introduced a lens for seeing who we are and the world in which we live. There are four core aspects that can actually bridge our cultural conversations and the Church. We see cultural stories that are asking questions around:
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our significance
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our connection
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our presence and
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our participation.
We can be actually confident that the story that we share not only can answer and give space to some of these conversations but offer a bigger and better story in which to base our lives.
Our Significance - the idea that you matter.
The West is a story of secularism. We often assume that secularism means that we are anti-God but it merely means every belief gets to be questioned, pulled apart and challenged. So the Christian is treated with questioning and doubt. But in that, fundamentally in our being, we know that we matter - that our human life is significant.
The God story tells us that our significance is rooted in the one whose image we bear. What that means is that we get to reflect and project his character and his nature out into the world. So in our cultural conversations around dignity, human rights, identity, who am I, we get to engage with those conversations and remind people that human significance of your life comes from a God who knows you and invites you to know him too and to make him known to others.
Our Connection - we live in relationship with others.
We live in relationship with God and we live in relationship with the world around us. With Covid we quickly discovered that a high percentage of the population had to go out and work because otherwise we couldn't eat, keep electricity going, etc. We are related to each other - our connections matter.
However, the secular story put doubt in and removed God out of the centre of the equation. There was nothing left to replace him except the self. We start to build our identity not in the one whose image we bear but in our own image and we start to see individualism - the only person I can rely on is me. This is where we see some of the cultural conversations around authenticity - I've got to be true to myself. Nobody else gets to define me.
What that does to our relationships is that, when it's founded on self-expression, it becomes a a place of self- protection because of what happens if somebody questions my Identity or what happens if somebody else's identity impinges on my own. Fear starts to enter the centre of our relationships and we start to put up barriers. But the God story tells us that not only does God know us but he loves us. We don't need to be afraid of how other people view us or how other people treat us. We don't need to be self-protecting. In fact we can be selfless because we can go out into the world and love bravely and kindly because that is what God is doing to us.
Our presence - not only are we connected but we are rooted in a time and a place.
It is impossible for me not to be here right now, to go back in time, break out of the limiting finite world in which I find myself in.
Our cultural stories want to tell us the gift of technology, travel, everything else means that we can be virtual. We can be global, connected to hundreds, thousands of people all at the same time and there are good things there. But when we disorientate ourselves, our cultural stories don't have an answer for the loneliness that people feel, the isolation that comes from being being disconnected and disorientated from others.
Yet our God story is rooted in a God that is not distant, is a 'come near' God. Jesus showed us that to the human is to acknowledge the world in which we live and to be placed there. We have a story that can have an answer to the questions that people are asking about their physicality, about gender and sex, about beginning and end of life, about AI, about technology. We have a God that invites to come near, promises to go with you wherever you go. The peace of God is carried by you as his Holy Spirit lives within you. When people are question what is it to live present in and of this world, we have an amazing story and we can invite people into it.
Our participation - we actually affect the world that we live in.
This is the place where our purpose lives. There are big cultural conversations on freedom, power, abuse, choice, etc. Thanks to secularism telling us that everything can be questioned, thanks to individualism telling us it's all on you, when it comes to participation, this is the place of deconstruction. This is the place where we can tear it all down.
Secularism and Individualism have built a Jenga tower of unstable reality. When you're getting towards the end of the game and everything has been destabilized and everything has being taken out of their foundations, you know one move is going pull it all down. That is the state of the world that we're living in right now - war, pandemic, cost of living, climate change, political crises, etc.
Participation reminds us that Jesus was never in crisis. Jesus's life was always submitted to the one who knew him. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. People change when they are on a quest or in a crisis. Our culture is beset with crises. We don't need to be subsumed by the crises of of our culture. The challenging conversations that we are facing today are an invitation for us not to be afraid but to have confidence in the story that we embody. In having those conversations, we find the challenge when we lose sight of the goodness and the truth and the beauty of the good news that we partake in.
Ultimately everybody is asking questions around their significance, their connection, their presence and their participation. We have answers and stories to help them navigate.
Watch the 90 minute video of the session here:
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From a video by the Evangelical Alliance, 23/01/2024