Christians and Culture (4) Hostile

Christians are now living in a Hostile Culture. A Christian response will have the following sequence.

1. Safe Environment
A culture is more like an environment than a worldview. The only way to counteract the impact of a hostile culture is to create an alternative environment to sustain the life of Jesus.

Attendance at a Sunday worship service and listening to a sermon will not be sufficient to counteract the influence of the prevailing culture. When worshippers are sent out into the world, they will be swamped by the culture in which they live. Their lives will be shaped by the culture that is propagated by the institutions of the world.

Our beliefs attitudes and behaviours are formed by the cultural environment in which we live. A person who has chosen to follow Jesus needs a Christian cultural environment to grow to maturity. The leaders of a Kingdom Community will attempt to create an alternative cultural environment in which strong Christian lives are natural and normal.

The citizens of the kingdom will not ignore the surrounding culture. They will listen to the music and watch the popular movies, but because these will not be the only voice they listen to, they will have less influence on their lives. Through their involvement in the community, they will be involved in many conversations that underlay what they have seen and heard with a Christian context. Discussions about the culture of the world will push them deeper into their Christian culture

2. Prophetic challenge
Prophetic Christians will have a role in challenging and exposing the lies that underlay modern culture. Not everyone will do this, but those who do it must do it well. They must understand the culture and be able to challenge its flaws incisively.

3. Create alternative culture
Some kingdom communities will start developing an alternative Christian culture making institutions. Modern technology reduced the cost and democratises the distribution.

The biggest cultural influence is the school. Christians schools operating within the Kingdom Community, will propagate a different culture.
Christians will write books that promote Christian world view on social media and publish them.

They will write music and songs to give to give away on social media.

4. Send apostles
Some Jesus Teams will send their best people to work (as apostles) in the more powerful culture shaping institutions. They will provide them with strong spiritual and emotional support, in the same way as other teams support more regular apostles. As more and more of the people in these organisations becomes Christian, they will shift their stance, and begin pushing society back toward God.

As the gospel spreads like yeast through the dough, the culture makers will be slowly transformed along with the rest of society.

5. Secular culture collapses
When people understand what it has done to them, they will turn against the culture makers and hate modern culture (in the same way that the church is currently hated because it was seen as controlling the culture). The modern culture shapers will collapse along with government power (Rev 18:21-24).