Pop goes the Church: Should the Church Engage Pop Culture?

Just read Tim Steven’s new book Pop Goes the Church, great read. I am preparing for my talk on Saturday on Acts 17 where Paul stands on Mars Hill and preaches to the Greeks using culture to show that Jesus is the Messiah, so it was a big help. I got a ton of ideas from it.

I have always felt like Christians spend too much time keeping the culture out instead of trying to engage it and critique and redeem it. I went to a Christian school and Bible college and it always felt like I lived in a bubble, a sub-culture within a culture. The funny thing is, this is the opposite of what Jesus prays (John 17:15). We are not to be scared of the world, we are not to blindly embrace it, we are to confront it, interact with it, work within it. We are to engage culture so that we can move culture forward and move the culture towards God. The funny thing is, we don’t need to move the culture towards God because God is already in the culture working and moving (through movies, music, books, TV, and other media outlets). Our job is to find him, engage with him and help people find what they are longing for.

Here are a couple of things worth writing down:

• Where is the church known more by what they do than what they say? Where is the church whose members do not hesitate to invite their unchurched neighbors because they know the neighbors will be significantly influenced – their lives will never be the same? Where is the church that is offering weekend services about which the entire community is talking?
• If Jesus physically entered 21st century America, I believe he would do much as he did in the 1st century. He would hang out with normal people in the real world, and he would reserve his strongest words for the entrenched religious leaders who love their traditions more than they love their people. He would leverage the culture. He would read our books, go to our movies, watch our TV shows, look at our magazines, and surf the internet so that he could better understand the culture.
• So many Christians are caught up in the Christian sub-culture and are completely closed off from the world. We go to church on Wednesdays, Sundays, and sometimes Saturdays. We attend small group on Tuesday night and serve on the Sunday school advisory board, the financial committee, and the welcoming committee. We go to BBQ’s with our Christian friends and plan group outings. We are closed off from the world. Even if we wanted to reach out to non-Christians, we don’t have time and we don’t know how.
• In the New Testament, only the gospels were written with the general public in mind. Yet many in the church read pop culture in light of Peter, Paul, and John’s letters. Books of the Bible intended as “in-house” documents, designed to purify God’s people, have been used inappropriately to correct the broader culture.
• It is interesting to me that Jesus didn’t make many lists of things not to do; he focused more on lists of character qualities to embody.
• How can we leverage the culture to reach as many people as we possibly can without comprimising our biblical message? How can we show our community how much they matter to God without them thinking we want anything in return? How can we use this to help us impact some of our friends and neighbors who have never shown a previous interest in attending church? What are some topics we can address from the Bible that will really help people at their biggest point of need?
• Without a relevant topic, people will not listen. They will feel like you are talking at them and not to them.
• Relevancy is a tool, not an objective; a means and not an end. You can be relevant without being helpful – that’s important to remember. Equally important is the reality that the converse is not true. We cannot be helpful without being relevant. We cannot lead people to Jesus if we refuse to meet them where they are, using methods that do not alienate them.
• You have to decide your goal:  Focus on reaching new people or focus on keeping disgruntled people. You can’t do both.

You can also go to the book’s site and get some more information, as well as see the videos that Tim refers to in the book.

One of my favorite parts of the book was the chapter on “20 Churches, 20 Stories.” Love hearing how other leaders are leveraging culture. This is definitely a book to read.