Common Culture Up Front

This is the second post in a series about the power of a common culture and how it relates to the currently debated topic of so-called Christian Nationalism.

You can see the first post here.

The Common Culture Up Front

The local church is comprised of individuals. Those individuals in their marriages, families, neighborhoods and civil boundaries are to be salt and light. They are to express their cultural imprint in all of these areas. That cultural imprint will be derived from their personal attachments (hearth and home), but it will also be the expression of their common culture in the local church. Those Christians ought to have the confidence that their common culture, derived from a well-ordered church, and their well-ordered home, can be shared, promoted, advocated, and extended to others. The extended circles from a subsidiarity of close proximity to the larger circle beyond should be confidently influenced by the common culture of the well-ordered life from a well-ordered church. In other words the power of the church culture makes a common culture.

When the common culture of the local church is up front, then the goodness of that culture is shared for the benefit of others. Even those who don’t believe the gospel will enjoy the benefit of the cultural order that comes from the church’s well-ordered life. I heard the story of when revival came to a small Prairie town, the bars closed down. It wasn’t a ‘close the bar’ campaign. It was a change in the common culture of the town that was driven by the expansion of the common culture of the church. So is the only way forward to hope for more conversions so that there are more Christians in the West to make this cultural transformation possible? It is the way forward, but not the only way.

The Power of Common Church Culture

In all the debate about Christian Nationalism, one of the features that is prominent but not named is that many advocates of CN have strong, well-ordered church cultures. They have a common culture that they belong to in their church. Whether the features of those common church cultures are the same features you would agree with is a different issue. But there is power in this common culture.

By contrast, many individual Christians who advocate for intense political activity lack any committed local church membership, any awareness of Christian ethics, or any sense of the fear of the Lord in the ordering of their lives. For those folks, it is not that they are Christians who are getting too political. The problem is that they have not tapped into the power of the common church culture in the fear of God, in step with his Spirit, and heeding his Word, according to the gospel of the Son.

Practical Terms for Improving Common Church Culture

In practical terms, the pursuit of a healthy Christian Nationalism needs to start with more 9Marks work. What I mean by that is that the 9Marks program is building healthy churches. The book by Jamie Dunlop and Mark Dever, The Compelling Community, ought to be the top of the reading list for anyone with a desire for Christian influence in the West.

In other words, church order (and Presbyterians and Anglicans have their own church order manuals), ought to be vigorously and joyfully applied. This will create a well-ordered, well-disciplined common culture in the church. Different ethnicities will have their backgrounds re-shaped by that common culture. And they will learn how to make common cause with other sinners for the common good. Learning this and promoting this kind of common good is the program of Christian Nationalism in its best form. It also guarantees that any promotion of Christian Nationalism is not merely a single ethnic group’s particular culture advocated but the common culture of well-ordered churches.

Also in practical terms, the common culture of the church today will always have features of its ethnic genealogy in its culture. Christianity came from Jewish roots, with Hellenistic features, a Latin-European expanse (as opposed to a dominant non-Latin, Eastern expanse), and the extension of European, Anglo and American missions. Now we see global missions sourced from South Korea, neo-puritan theology emanating from places like Zambia, Colombia, and Wenzhou, China. Ignoring this genealogy leads to distortions (eg. China’s Three-Self Church, or Black Hebrew Israelites). Often what is rejected as ‘white-European’ culture in the church is a rejection of the historic spread of Christianity and a desire to cut out the genealogy that are unwanted. Of course as Nigerian Christians or Korean Christians continue to deepen their applications of the gospel and share their common church culture in their society, those churches will take on certain features that will be more unique to churches in those cultures. They will sing new hymns in their own language, but they may still sing Rock of Ages in translation.

To Be Continued

ACTIONS🥅🥅

1. In the relative "scale" of your energies, do you give more energy to ordering your home, family worship, church attendance, church volunteering, evangelizing, etc., or more energy to facebook campaigning/ debating, local political organizing, etc.? (Try and be honest about time and energy).

2. If you were able to be more orderly in your home and church, do you think you would have enough energy to apply Christian ethics in your vocation more consistently? What would change in your schedule, your priorities, your hobbies? How would your work change?

3. If you are able to be well ordered in your home, your church and your work, what select areas would you want to engage in political advocacy? Can you see yourself doing political activism as the outgrowth of your well-ordered culture in the church and at home?

RESOURCES

Conrad Mbewe, Can I Practice My Culture Without Compromising My Faith.

Dever and Dunlop, A Conversation about Compelling Community

Joel Beeke, A Succinct Puritan View of a Christian’s Mission in Society