Notes from 'Engaging' at the Plumbline Conference

Click to download the paper 'An Engagement Agenda'

A theology of engaging

We find that a many of the social ills we describe about today's dominant culture boli down to this one thing - disengagement. Disengagement from complexity, reality, one another and ultimately from God.

So, as well as framing the gospel message in a way which is contextualised (ie put into language that our generation can understand and relate to), we need to accentuate the practical ways in which God's mission and call can respond to the problem of disengagement.

What is the world?

In the Bible 'the world' is a phrase that appears hundreds of times. We often assume it means 'bad' but in reality the picture is more mixed. Three primary ways of describing this phrase are:

God's good creation (Eg in Genesis, the cosmos)
Inhabitants of the earth (Eg in Genesis, Noah's flood)
'The bad system' (Eg in Paul's writings about conforming)

If we have an incorect understanding of 'worldly' we may choose the wrong way to engage with it.

How does the church engage?

Robert Niebur's book Christ and Culture outlines four ways the church engages with the world.

An anticultural response (the church is in opposition to the dominant culture)
An incultural response (the church simply blends into the culture with no challenge of it)
A countercultural response (the church creates its own strong sub-culture instead)
An incarnational response (the church takes everything of the culture and subverts it)