I'm Thinking About Culture

The two signs in these attached photos point us in the direction of beautiful and healthful walks. We all need to be guided by more signs like these while, at the same time, being led away from aspects of our lives, like mind numbing and endless entertainment, that diminish vitality.

My first mission trip to Romania, in 1982, was the most transformational experience of my life. I experienced God there, many times and in many ways. Baptists survived under communist oppression by trusting God. I longed to experience such faith and the rest of my life, up to the present moment, has been lived in pursuit of this goal.

I observed this faith and hope and trust the first night in Romania in the city of Arad. Before the dinner and service at one of their churches we stood around outside our hotel and observed hundreds of Romanians walking past us. It was a gruesome sight!!! They walked like Zombies. Rigid. Emotionless. Saying nothing. Apparently frightened. Turning neither to the left or the right. It was a gruesome sight--walking was an expression of their barren emotional lives and their dead souls. However, later that night as we broke bread with our Christian brothers and sisters, and later as we worshiped in a standing room only church--with dozens more crowded outside near the windows--I began to understand how Christianity can transform culture, how faith can overwhelm despair, how life inside the Body of Christ can resurrect the death outside.

I wish you could have been with me ten years later when I returned to Arad, Romania to lead Evangelistic services at the Golgatha Baptist Church. The peaceful revolution and the overthrow of Communism had also overthrown many facets of Romanian culture. People walking by the river laughed and played. Even outside the church newly free Romanians we drinking deep from the fountain of liberty.

I tell you that story, and posted the two photos of trail signs at the beginning of this blog, in order to make a point about culture. CULTURE CAN CHANGE. People can change. People can learn to walk with joy in their hearts and appreciation for the creation in their souls. We can learn to walk and talk again, even after years of sitting around seeking entertainment. In fact, the church, in its responsibility for discipling believers, is exactly the place people can be taught such transformations. Worship can teach how to live in the world without being dominated by the world.

All in all, it seems to me that there is plenty of time for all of us to learn how to be in the world without being of the world. Just reduce the time we dedicate to entertainment and assign that time to building community.

What aspect of your life is lived too much "of the world?" Are you interested in transformation? Maybe we should keep in mind those gruesome Romanian walkers from 1982. Maybe we should ask where in our lives we look like that.