Why Your Church Needs to Listen to the Culture

By: American Decency Staff

Early in my ministry, I found myself suddenly in the middle of a culture war, with no idea where the trenches were. I was a youth pastor, in my hometown, just down the street from an Air Force Base. Like every other evangelical youth minister, I received constant advertisements from curriculum-hawkers telling me how I could be “relevant” to “today’s teenagers,” usually by “connecting” with them through popular culture. I couldn’t do that well, though, so I just fell back on being me, and preached the gospel the best I could.

There were two groups that divided the youth group there in Biloxi. The first group was made up of “churched” kids, those who did what was expected in the Bible Belt and made professions of faith, followed by baptism, as young children.

These kids knew the gospel, from start to last, and could rattle off the right answers at will. The gospel neither surprised nor alarmed them. They knew how to embrace just enough of an almost gospel to stay within the tribe, without embracing so much gospel as to encounter the lordship of Christ.

The “unchurched” kids laughed at the Bible studies based on television shows or songs of the moment.

But as time went on, another group of teenagers started to trickle in to our Wednesday night Bible studies. The second group was mostly fatherless boys and girls, some of them gang members, all of them completely unfamiliar with the culture of the church and with the message of the gospel.

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