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Pop Goes the Church 2
By John | May 13, 2008
**Here we go with Chapters 2 &3 of Pop Goes the Church by Tim Stevens. Tim’s a part of Granger Community Church’s executive leadership team and focuses on blending innovative outreach and discipleship. In Pop Goes the Church, Stevens wants his reader to be able to leverage our culture’s media saturation into opportunities to share the good news of Jesus.
Can you speak Christianese ?
Here’s a test:
You’ve been saved by God’s grace though faith in Jesus Christ!
Do you have any idea what this means? Have you ever said anything like this? If so, you must have a working knowledge of Christianese. People who speak Christianese have what Tim refers to as a ‘curse of knowledge’. This curse allows Christians to speak to one another in their own language (Christianese) and be understood, but it also alienates those who don’t know the language.
PROBLEM: Christians are called to communicate with people who don’t speak this language.
SOLUTION: Figure out how to express the same valuable, life-giving concepts in a new language: preferably a language that the majority of non-Christianese speakers speak.
In the U.S., this language is pop culture. Plain & simple. Because people, on average, have chosen to spend between 3-8 hours per day watching t.v. or surfing the web, the language of pop culture is discernible to practically everyone.
And it’s not as if pop culture is a spiritual void. Now, more than ever, people are searching for something to quench their spiritual thirst, and since they speak the language of pop culture, they get their spiritual guidance from the temples of Oprah and Dr. Phil, the altars of CNN & FoxNews headlines, and the sanctuaries of the Simpsons & Star Wars. I’m not immune to this: one of my favorite lines from the Simpsons is here & watch the clip here (oh wait - you can’t watch the clip because FOX pulled it off of youtube and hasn’t put it up on hulu yet. ARGH!).
The good news in all of this is twofold:
(1) People in our culture are searching for God & spiritual meaning.
(2) They know & speak the language of pop culture - but so do Christians!!
How fluent are you in these two languages (pop culture & Christianese)? Where do you see spiritual seeking in pop culture?
Topics: Books |
May 13th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I do not know if thiswill get to the correct place in the “blog” but here goes. This relaes to communication…language, in particular.
First…There are many people like I, who are out of phase with the new culture and this is our first contact with this thing called a blog. We are afraid to ask a lot of sources how to do things for fear we will get trapped into something that may possibly take over our computers or cost us a lot of money. Could you have a section that tells us neophites how to use a blog and what a lot of the words and so on mean? Being in a Cristian blog, it would not worry us as much. Then you would see more participation from some of us older people.
Second…I represent several shut-ins. Since we are netering this mechanized world of computers could you set up something so we could see the video of the 8:00 service while we listen to it on the radio? I’ll bet some of our hot-shot young gurus could do it.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Thanks for your thoughts Chuck.
For more information about blogs and blogging - please follow this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
For more about Faith Emergence and why we blog, please follow this link: http://www.faithemergence.com/about
As to your second question about video streaming our worship services at Faith, the sermon player on our website here http://www.faithappleton.org/worship.html has the capability to stream live video. However, we don’t have any cameras installed in our sanctuary yet. Someday (hopefully soon), we’ll be able to offer this valuable way to communicate with people all over the world - including those in our Faith family who are ’shut-in’.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
It’s our duty as Christian ambassadors to reach people in a way they can understand. As Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:
“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”
The Way of the Master does a pretty good job of using Law and Gospel in contemporary terms when doing evangelism. Check out their humorous checklist for “How to Botch an Altar Call”:
http://www.wayofthemaster.com/botchaltarcall.shtml