The church is made up of people. People live in cities, neighborhoods, and interact with other people. Each person is influenced in both passive and assertive ways via means of tv and social media. So, how do we engage our culture? Should the church engage culture? How can the church leverage culture for the sake of making Jesus famous?

It’s hard for me to even begin this conversation without considering Acts 17:26-29. We learn that the city, the neighborhood, and even the street that we live in, was ordained and put into place by God. If we have been placed in a specific location by God, it would be good for us to also know the cultural and social climate of that place. In short, we have to be students of our culture. I love traveling and seeing what God is doing in various cities and communities. I love hearing pastors and church planters tell me how they are reaching their communities. There is a real danger for all of us to look elsewhere to see what is successful and attempt to replicate that system, process, or plan. The real work of ministry, in fact, is contextualization. It is looking at our culture and identifying where the Gospel informs the broken and hurting aspects of our communities and neighborhoods.

The church is in desperate need of active, intentional, and balanced contextualization – @Muddamalle
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3 Ways We Can Accomplish This

Be aware of your cultural blinders

We all are predisposed or bent towards a certain way. Tim Keller calls this our cultural blinders. This issue of cultural blinders affects every area of our life, not just the church. It is easy for us to assume a cultural perspective based on one that we lived in. All of a sudden we begin to create, build, and strategize around cultural assumptions that are derived from past experience. Possibly the first thing we must do is recognize that we do have cultural blinders and then intentionally deconstruct them so that we can accurately engage the context that God has placed us in.

Pay attention to your immediate context

We can learn a lot from the very streets that we live in. Each of our neighborhoods are made of people that have a culture, past, and story. It is very common for people of the same culture or group to live near each other. Our ability to learn and understand the motivation of these people groups will be vital in our ability to speak to them in a way that is affective and relatable. It’s easy for us to begin talking and sharing and speaking from our own perspective. However, in doing this we loose the opportunity to speak in a way that is winsome and directed towards the persons actual life and context.

Make a serious effort to acknowledge and understand their objections

Its easy for us to jump right into the conversation and begin to give a defense for the Gospel. But, have we actually seriously considered, thought about, and engaged with the objection that people have to the Gospel? We live in a world that is filled with tragedy, turmoil, and seemingly constant destruction. It’s not that difficult for anyone to become negative or pessimistic about the possibility of a good God in the midst of this fallen depraved world. However, its these very objections that serve as platforms to meaningfully engage those within our community in a way that speaks to deepest hurts that they have experienced. In fact, it is in these areas that we must boldly proclaim the good news of the Gospel.

Tim Keller captures all three comments perfectly.

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