Christianity Today Poll - Should Churches Teach Cultural Literacy
Christianity Today has posted an interesting poll today asking: “Should churches teach Christians ‘cultural literacy’ as well as biblical literacy?”
The choices are as follows:
- Yes.
- No, Cultural literacy is not important to Christian life.
- No, Christians should learn about culture, but not necessarily from the church.
69% of people who have responded so far say “yes” 4% Say No, it’s not important 26% Say No, they should learn about it elsewhere
(out of 301 results so far as of 1:00PM EST)
My personal thought is that churches should teach biblical literacy and the teach people how not to box themselves into the christian ghetto such that they become culturally unaware, which is what we typically do, which is why this question is even important in the first place.
Christians need to be culturally aware, if only so that they know how to interact within the culture, how to “speak the language” of the culture, and thus, bring Christ’s message to the culture in a way the culture can understand.
“Learn about culture”… This kills me. It sounds like “build a relationship” and “invest time”. What is this, business marketing? How ignorant can someone be of their own native culture? Shouldn’t that be our own “Jerusalem”? (Judea… ends of the Earth)
How is the Church going to teach culture, anyway? To be honest, I think it’s teaching McDonalds/Marketing/Capitalism culture already pretty well. Should it?
Here’s a good poll question: Should right and wrong be decided by polls in the Church?
“How ignorant can someone be of their own native culture?”
It’s amazing how ignorant we can be. If we avoid the music, the media, the people who aren’t inside our little spiritual huddle, we can close ourselves off completely and be totally blind to what’s happening across the street, downtown, in the state… I see it everywhere.
This poll killed me too, which is why I took time to comment on it. How sad.
Final poll results:
sigh Fortunately the current poll shows that most people think Evangelicalism is in need of a total overhaul.
It’s not that we need to learn about the culture, like some student in a classroom, (oh… so most people have no idea who The Newsboys are? Fascinating…) it’s that we need to be involved in the culture. What we need to learn is how to DISCERN from the culture, how to bring the gospel to it. Some people are saying we need to “exegete” the culture, which I think is a very very good way of putting it.