Saturday, December 22, 2012

Christians in a transient culture

In my personal experience, most "Christians" who scream, "don't conform to the world's culture" don't mean it. What they REALLY mean is, "make sure you're conforming to the culture of days gone by, regardless of the wrongs it contained."
Where is the discernment? Are we content to look at past cultures through rose-colored glasses and always be a generation removed from the current culture that surrounds us?
What benefit is that? Is all the church stands for merely a throwback culture; a place people sick of dealing with trends and fashion waves can go and make themselves feel better because they now have a "moral" reason to not follow what's going on in the world around them?
Such an attitude won't last. Eventually, people will wake up. Eventually, they'll realize they don't need a moral reason to not conform to the prevailing social trends. They'll realize that they only need to have a different preference and enough backbone to stand out because they want to.
Such an attitude is happening today.
Such a wake-up call is making pastors sound like fools and Christians who hold to yesterday's trends and cry that it's "for moral reasons" look like idiots.
Why? Because it wasn't too long ago that anything below a woman's neckline was too much skin to show. Because now the same church that said a piano was of the devil, only fit for bars and pleasure halls is screaming that a church without a piano is sinful.
Because the church has set its foundation on a base that is as transient as the next social revolution, not the truths of Scripture.
You can cry, "thou shalt be modest," "thou shalt be above reproach," but any thinking individual will look at you and say, "that two-piece suit was grossly immodest a few generations back, and in twenty years, my jeans and turtleneck will look just as over dressed as you," and walk away; justifiably so.
The church is holding people to a standard that is changing, and yet preaches that we serve a God who never changes.
Such a double-standard will not win a generation that can think.
So are we to do away with standards? No. But we must make sure our standards are not transient. Rather than concern ourselves with whether a modest neckline is four finger widths below the collarbone or a span, maybe we should set standards that are more immutable. If I journey to the jungles of Africa where the women typically run around topless, suddenly my five-finger width below the neckline standard is grossly over-the top.
What is the solution? Admit we're wrong. Admit that not every "standard" is absolute. Yes, God does give us standards that are absolute. But there are some things, like what is modest, that He left to our disgression. If He wanted to give us standards for modesty, He could have easily given us the pattern for the garments He made Adam and Eve after the Fall.
He didn't.
In His Wisdom, He left some things undefined. Why He did so is a subject we can debate from now until eternity, but there is no point to it. We might as well debate how many angels fit on a pinhead for all the good it will do.
He did define this: "I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father but by me." That coming gives us plenty to work on without worrying about such transient things as culture.