Blogging from the heart again…
Over the years since meeting Christ, we’ve heard Christian music getting better and better, loads of great songs and bands arising. Yet so often, the music sounds derivative of popular culture. Or it all starts to sound the same as each other Christian band, as the musicians emulate each other in style and form.
Christian film and television has followed popular world trends, trying to compete alongside it; but under-budgeted, unsupported, so often not as good as what the world offers. Christian video games and cartoons, similar: not competing with the creativity we’re seeing on the non-Christian channels and shelves.
Of the seven mountains of the world (a teaching by Lance Walnau: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQbGnJd9poc — education, government, media, etc.), whenever Christians have tried to compete to ‘take over’ the mountain to seat Christ at the top, we often fall short of the glory of God. We seem to make feeble attempts at emulating world culture, but with a Christian flavour or language.
We continue to make Christian products that the world doesn’t want or need, and we wind up having to sell them to ourselves. We all say, ‘Wow, that’s good!’ but I’m not sure we really mean it, and that we’re not instead just pulling the wool over our eyes, justifying Christianese and our church lifestyle to make ourselves feel better in light of the world rejecting us and our culture.
Culture is the culprit.
In science, a culture is a bit of bacteria or whatever that one grows in a closed environment.
Are we Christians making ourselves more and more insular, closing ourselves to the world that we claim we need to embrace? Are we trying to just add some Christianese to worldly things, making inferior stuff, and then wondering why no one is buying into Jesus as a result?
Are we pretending that we are not hurt by the constant rejections of the world that we are supposed to be reaching out to and affecting. So we seem to do and say and make things that help justify us staying in our closed environment, where our culture remains supposedly safe and unchallenged (from within).
Perhaps we are not meant to be following and emulating the world at all…
Perhaps we are meant to be going in and out of heaven and asking Papa for blueprints for things that are truly of Heaven’s culture, and then bringing those plans down and creating them here on Earth. Like Moses did when he received the plans for the tabernacle and all the items therein. Like David did when he built the first temple.
Shouldn’t we be the most creative and innovative culture on Earth? Because we are our Father’s children, bringing true heavenly Kingdom Culture to Earth. Shouldn’t we be setting the trends that all the world greedily desires?
I put it to you, that so long as we continue to intellectually attempt to win the world, that we are going to fail miserably, and remain a bacterial closed Christian culture.
But when we begin to embrace the things of heaven, the things of the spirit, then we will begin to be forerunners. We will begin to set the trends. We will begin to release the true culture of heaven, the true Kingdom Culture on earth.
And everything that we create will be salt, and create a thirst for more…
And the knowledge of the Glory of the Lord will fill the Earth…
And every tribe and every tongue will bow down and confess Jesus is Lord…
Please hear my heart on this. I don’t want to criticize Jesus’s Bride.
Please hear my heart to encourage the Church for change…
Be encouraged. Be empowered. Be delivered.
Glory Company
