Christ Culture:

In recent days, the American Church has awoken to a serious problem within its current manifestation of ministry: The Church is not reaching outside of its own culture groups in America. In other words, the affluent, mostly white church in the suburbs largely keeps its ministry in the suburbs, and rarely ventures into the downtown areas of town. At the same time, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other churches stay largely within their own cultural and ethnic people groups. And while America as a nation has made tremendous strides for equality and civil justice socially, the Church, for whatever reason or for a variety of reasons, is slow in making that a reality.

The Church has responded to this problem in different ways, all the while trying to right the ship, so to speak. The Church has held numerous community outreach services days, which have proved good, but not effective in breaching the long-term cultural divide because these efforts usually only last a day or so, and as a result they do not promote long-term relational connection. The Church has held rallies and conferences to address the lack of ethnically mixed churches in America, which do a lot to raise awareness, but again, very little in terms of actually breaching the cultural walls in our cities. And of course, the tried and true encouragement to “reach-out-to-someone-who-looks-different-than-you”-Christianese-forced-friendship activity is about as effective at making cross-cultural inroads as trying to buy a cola that doesn’t taste like carbonated dirt water from your local health food store.

Socially and politically, the answer to the cultural divides that persist in America is the idea of multi-culturalism. Multi-culturalism is defined as, “the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgement of their differences within a dominant political culture” (1). To a growing degree in the Church, the idea of multi-culturalism is being adopted and tried as yet another solution to the culture chasms between communities and the churches that serve them.

This book is proposing a different strategy that finds the majority of its basis in contrasting God’s intention for humanity with what popular culture has suggested is right. And so comes the concept of Christ Culture. Christ Culture is the biblica example and mandate of many cultures coming together, worshiping God, and loving each other as one totally new culture: Christ Culture. This is distinct from merely pursuing multi-culturalism because, while Christ Culture honors our individual and ethnic cultures, it invites every culture to come under one, larger cultural umbrella, that of Christ Jesus.

We (the authors) firmly believe that God knew what He was doing when He created humanity, and that He knows best how we are to live together in a world that is infected with sin. Furthermore, we also believe that God knows just how the Church is supposed to combat the evils of ethnic preference and racism, and that God demonstrated that strategy in and through the establishing of the Church in Acts, and the articulation of its (the Church’s) distinctives throughout the New Testament. We do not believe that God’s design for humanity is to bring us all together only to keep us separated in our cultural corners. Rather, we believe that it is God’s intention to bring us all together and adopt us into a brand-new culture, that is, Christ Culture.

We invite you to journey with us as we endeavor to present a renewing of our minds with respect to how address and approach racial and cultural relations in America as the Church. To be sure, this book is not intended to be a “how to” book, nor do we pretend to have the specific answer that will work in your particular community. But, there are some basic principles and truths that God revealed in His Word that are applicable throughout the entirety of God’s Church.

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/multiculturalism. Accessed on 4/25/2018.