Vision
Culture
Ed Stetzer explains three ways evangelicals can expect to be involved with culture in the years to come (“3 Ways Christians Will Address Cultural Issues in the Coming Years,” Christianity Today, March 6, 2015). Some will engage culture, trying to equip Christians for more winsome involvement with people via their cultural interests. Some will defend culture, speaking out loudly (and sometimes shrilly) on matters of morality and freedom. Others will create culture, as in film and music, to express Christian views and values without necessarily including the overt Christian message. Mr. Stetzer’s analysis is helpful, but inadequate as a guide to equipping the saints for a Kingdom approach to culture. His view suggests that culture matters are the calling of certain groups or people (like himself) who are involved with culture in formal and public ways. His approach to Christian cultural engagement, in other words, is for leaders and ministries, but not for the community of believers as a whole. We need a bigger and more all-inclusive vision than this. For the Christian community to begin maximizing culture for the glory of God and human and creational good, we need a much fuller view of culture than this. The members of the Christian community must learn how to consume culture as good stewards of God’s resources; to function as critics of culture, pointing out and avoiding what is troubling and celebrating and sharing what is good; to create culture of all kinds, especially everyday culture (language, manners, work); to conserve culture and pass it on to the next generation, especially our great heritage of Christian culture (concerning which most Christians remain woefully ignorant); and to converse about culture meaningfully and in an edifying manner. These are tasks for all Christians to master, not just the few who are interested in culture and culture matters, or who happen to work for organizations or ministries with a cultural focus.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2015/february/3-ways-christians-will-address-cultural-issues-in-coming-ye.html?paging=off

Disciplines
Higher Education
Todd Gitlin takes issue with those who want to protect undergraduates from course content that might be shocking or disturbing (“Please Be Disturbed: Triggering Can Be Good for You, Kids,” Tablet, March 13, 2015). Triggering occurs when students who have been traumatized by some form of abuse or other unpleasantness are reminded of their trauma by something in the curriculum, so that they experience some measure of relapse. Certain curriculum reformers want to eliminate or at least put warnings on course content that can be disturbing. Todd Gitlin says being disturbed is an important part of the learning process and one of the goals of the higher education experience. I agree, and I think Jesus would, too. The goal of Christian instruction is not to preserve and deepen good feelings on the part of those who are being instructed; rather, the goal is love, and that affection can be stimulated, nurtured, and stirred to action only after it is liberated from the grip of self-love and clothed in the Christ-garments of self-denial, sacrifice, and suffering. And sometimes, for this to occur, we must be shocked out of our comfort zones, either by the depth of our own self-centeredness, the enormity of our neighbors’ need, or the unfathomableness of the Lord’s grace for all sinners. Christian preaching, teaching, and writing that refuse to shock and disturb may attract many hearers and readers, but they will make no disciples.

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189543/trigger-warnings-on-campus

Sunday School: RIP
“Has the sun set on Sunday school?” So asks Melissa Pandika in a March 22, 2015 article in USAToday. Citing statistics that show the bottom falling out of Sunday school attendance, Ms. Pandika explains why she thinks this is happening. Kids are too busy on Sundays with sports and other concerns. Parents are wary of poorly-trained and improperly-vetted teachers. Sunday school is regarded as boring and irrelevant. All the usual suspects. Sunday school may once have had an important contribution to make to the Christian education of children and adults. But the evidence continues to mount showing that Christian influence in society and culture is everywhere in decline. Sunday school contributed nothing, it seems, to overturning that trend, so why should it bother believers if an ineffectual institution goes the way of all ineffectual institutions? Sunday school and programs like it are a poor substitute for the work of disciple-making entrusted to shepherds and parents. With Sunday school effectively set aside by those who are its intended audience, perhaps church leaders will give up beating this the dead horse and look for other, more Biblical means of powering the disciple-making mission of the Church.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/22/ozy-has-sun-set-on-sunday-school/25080073/

Writing
The glory of the Lord is everywhere on display. The Christian’s task, at least in part, is to make that glory known, to celebrate the beauty and magnificence of God in all the ordinary and extraordinary ways that glory is on display at all times. Writing would seem to be a logical and most useful discipline for such a calling, if only Christian writers could achieve the kind of observation, description, and skill required to bring the glory of God to light. We who so aspire can learn from any writers, Christian or otherwise, who might help us hone our skills and improve our craft. As Denny Heitman reports in the March 30, 2015 issue of The Weekly Standard, one such writer might be L. E. Sissman (“Darkness Visible: L. E. Sissman, poet in a gray flannel suit”). Sissman took his inspiration from everyday things at his office, in his home, and around town, avoiding “the bland generality in favor of the telling particular”. He insisted “on planting a cosmic moment within the quirky little textures of the temporal realm.” He was a master of language and an appreciator of humble, ordinary, but meaningful and beautiful things. His writings “brim with lyrical reflections on everything from farmer’s almanacs to family dogs to antique clocks.” He made a sacrament of the ordinary, much in the way Alexander Schmemann expresses the idea in For the Life of the World. This is the kind of writing that might teach believers and unbelievers alike to recognize beauty and transcendence in even the most everyday situations and things.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/darkness-visible_892530.html?nopager=1

Imagination
Jon Turney discusses the role of a discipline called “design fiction” in promoting technological development (“How to design the future,” Aeon, 19 March 2015). Design fiction employs imagination to envision alternative worlds that could only exist if certain technologies were available. This use of the imagination often spurs innovators to create new technologies and, thus, at least a portion of those imagined futures. The article shows how science fiction, technology, and fun spin together to generate creative thinking and problem-solving, often resulting in technological advance. Why can’t we think and work like this in the Church? We do not value imagination that extends beyond some only slightly bigger vision of the status quo. But without imagination, as Jesus showed, it will be difficult to stir people to aspire for challenges that take them beyond their comfort zones. 

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/how-design-fiction-imagines-future-technology/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=d8535af566-Daily_newsletter_March_19_20153_19_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-d8535af566-68631581

Envoi

My Powers of Observation

My powers of observation are not what
they ought to be. For revelations swarm
about me; glory weighs down on me, but
I take scant notice, sound no glad alarm.
There’s plenty here to mesmerize and charm
my soul, and fill my mind with heavenly thought.
Yet, though it bear down on me like a storm,
I scarcely see it; I will not be taught.
My senses, trained to vanity and what
is merely trite, do not by nature warm
to things sublime, transcendent, perfect. But
God keeps on jerking, jerking at my arm.
   Jerk, jostle, jar, cajole, and jolt me, Lord,
   and make me see Your all-around-me Word.

T. M. Moore