The Intersection of Faith and Culture
As a future church planter, the prospect of designing a worship space excites me. And I’ll be the first to confess that I’m a sucker for the hipster aesthetic of ‘authenticity,’ and that if I were planting in a vacuum, that’d be the aesthetic I’d shoot for. But that’s the problem: the minimalist, ‘authentic’ aesthetic is only authentic to a vacuum.
As Christians around the world are beginning to hear the story of modern-day-Bethlehem, I believe Bethlehem will become an important symbol of injustice, emboldening thousands of Christians to take action. The story of the Nativity and the current socio-political realities are merging together in a flourishing of art and story-telling.
The very first issue of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy had a topless picture of Marilynne Monroe in it and that was considered pornography. Today porn is in HD and 4K, available on a cell phone for free. It is violent and degrading on a scale we have never seen before and parents have no idea.
I began to see that the amount of melatonin in my skin might have more to do with my experience as an American than I’d realized.
When did we stop loving our neighbor and start hating anyone who wasn’t a cookie cutter image of ourselves? Jesus set forth an amazing example of love when he commanded us to love our neighbors—ALL our neighbors.
In our modern age of iPhones and data plans, when WiFi seems more vital than oxygen, a constant stream of media washes over us. Connecting to Jesus on Sunday becomes just one point of contact, lost among a million tweets, text messages, and YouTube videos.