The Cultural Mandate – Other Voices

You didn’t think I dreamed up this Cultural Mandate stuff by myself did you? Well I wish I could take credit for it but …. uh … no. The Cultural Mandate idea has been around for a long, long time.

And today I am going to take a short break from The Grand Narrative and introduce you to a few other voices who appear to be writing and speaking like-minded thoughts. I have been poking around a bit on the web these last few days, looking for some similarly-minded thinkers, and have come up with three that I think are worth sharing with you.

First, please bear in mind that I do not know any of these writers personally. I have only looked at their blogs and perused their thoughts and ideas. Second, please bear in mind that these blogs are focused primarily on culture from a Christian, Biblical, and theological perspective, which is what I am in the middle of, right now. They do not address American history or patriotism. With that made clear, read on …

VOICE NO 1. Benj Petroelje is a first year Masters of Divinity student at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. Ben’s blog is titled Dissonance. From Benj’s “About” Page:

“Post-resurrection, we live in the midst of a world in which God’s “New Creation Project” has been launched in the midst of the Old.  In Christ, heaven and earth have been wed in such a way that God’s glorious new future has come rushing into the present.  This blog seeks to explore the dissonance that this creates.  For Jesus-followers, as our lives and work reflect more and more a marriage of heaven and earth, New Creation is bound to grate like nails on the chalkboard of the Old Creation.”

VOICE NO. 2. Darrow Miller is co-founder of the Disciple Nations Alliance (DNA), founded in 1997 to ” equip local churches worldwide to fulfill their strategic role in the transformation of communities and nations.” Darrow’s blog, Darrow Miller & Friends, is one of the organization’s mechanisms for communicating their ideas. About the DNA mission, Darrow writes,

“… today, 80% of the non-western Christian Church lives in a context of overwhelming need. Many countries where Church growth is the most dramatic are groaning due to intractable poverty, rampant disease, political corruption, dysfunctional societies, wasted resources and misguided foreign aid.

“The Church is hungry for answers to these problems … Since its inception in 1997, the Disciple Nations Alliance has been used by God to give fresh hope … rooted in God’s ancient promise to Abraham that all nations will be blessed through his offspring (Gen. 12:1-3) … The Disciple Nations Alliance  “school of thought” presents a Biblical worldview as the key to cultural renovation. Our training programs provide churches with practical, replicable tools that enable them to begin the healing and transformational process in their own communities using existing resources. Not surprisingly, churches that have put Disciple Nations Alliance training into practice consistently experience a marked growth as people in their surrounding communities experience the power of God’s healing love in practical ways.”

VOICE NO. 3. Dan Roseman, is the author of the blog, perfectlyfractured and a campus pastor at The Cove Church. Roseman writes,

“Why should we be involved in culture? Isn’t culture wicked and base? Shouldn’t we spend most of our time being involved in spiritual matters? The answer is not quite so simple … Beauty is most obvious when contrasted by brokenness. That’s the meaning of “perfectly fractured.” The world as it was created to be changed in Genesis 3 … I want to use this site to address many of these false views with the Bible. We can wade through the brokenness of sin and wrong views of God by exposure to the truth. So come on a journey with me. We’ll take a look at culture and worldviews that you see everyday. By exposing it to the gospel, we can see it restored. Through restoration, we can see our fractures perfected.”

OK. That’s it for now. I will note that it is refreshing to see young folks thinking big, thinking outside the box, thinking about culture and what God intended for it to be. Thoughts about such things are not what most of us grew up with in our evangelical churches.

I hope to introduce you to more voices soon. In my next blog, The Grand Narrative – Part XI, we will get back to examining more of God’s ideas about culture with a greater specificity.