New Blog (Part 2)

I swear I'm not schizophrenic. I did start a new blog at wordpress.com because they beat the heck out of blogspot. It's at http://bradedwards.wordpress.com/

Enjoy, it looks a heck of a lot sexier, and is a lot more fun. I would recommend wordpress to anyone interested in blogging or even writing for fun. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Cultural Relevancy and Gospel Centeredness

Partially due to the article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but also because we seminarians are strange, dorky people, I've had a few really good conversations in the past couple days about culture and theology. This of course was related to the discussion of the emerging church, but even more importantly it is a topic that absolutely MUST be understood by pastors and seminarians preparing for ministry. The following quote, by Mark Driscoll, is an incredibly insightful synopsis of this problem:

"Seminaries are, for the most part, terrible at understanding the culture in which ministry is done. While the seminary may be an expert in teaching the thinking and theology of great men of the past, they gravely mistake that we still live in the past alongside those men. They fail to understand issues of contextualization and missional theology that is rooted in a deep understanding of the gospel. As a result, they produce pastors that are as culturally irrelevant as the schools they attend. Our churches are filled with pastors who understand the gap theory, but fail to see the gap between their church and the cultural context it exists in... Pastors must study theology in order to understand the gospel, but they must also study culture in order to understand the people to whom the gospel must be preached.

Missionaries have known this for years. They have studied foreign cultures in order to understand the prevailing philosophies and customs inherent to the indigenous people they have been sent to. This can be no different for the church in America. Pastors must be missiologists who understand the language and thought systems of the people in their culture in order to preach the gospel in a language that is understandable. The problem by and large is that pastors have not considered the missional nature of church and have instead considered modern tactics of marketing in order to grow their churches to the size of a small country. All good marketing targets a certain segment of society with the product being offered. Most churches that operate through typical principles of church growth, market themselves to those in particular sub-cultures leaving the people in the broader culture completely unreached."

Fortunately, I firmly believe Covenant is a huge exception to this statement. Being surrounded by the likes of cultural warriors like Dr. Jerram Barrs, Anthony Bradley, Dr. Phil Douglass, and others, it is easy to see that this seminary at least, is rising to the contemporary challenge of cultural relevancy.

But cultural relevancy is just one part of a bigger issue. It is easy to be culturally relevant if your theology and doctrine is sacrificed upon the altar of "tolerance" and "diversity." Liberal theology (and various other compromises, such as prosperity theology) "pads" the truth because they don't want to "offend" a culture by something as "gory" or "violent" as a Christ who died for us.

As Driscoll aludes to in this post, one must be Gospel-Centered. What is Gospel-centeredness? Well, this was a lot to chew on, so I'll leave that to the next post. Stay tuned. :-)

SBC v. The Journey

Dr. Sean Lucas, professor at Covenant Seminary, wrote a glorious analysis on the Post-Dispatch article I wrote about in my previous post. PLEASE READ. It is well worth your time.