Rev. Stuckwisch often offers tasty tidbits of reflection at his blog, Thinking Out Loud. If you haven't added it to your blog reader, you should. I hesitate to call them tidbits as they are usually rich and exhaustive.
He blogged about this past week's Indiana District Professional Church Worker's conference, specifically on a presentation by Dr. Rast of the Fort Wayne Seminary. There is far too much to quote verbatim here. Consider these words especially:
thinking-out-loud: Engaging the Culture
The Church not only learns to know herself, she is herself, as she lives in the Divine Liturgy of the Gospel-preached and the Sacraments-administered. That clarity and confidence of identity, of being who she is in Christ, frees her and enables her to engage the culture of the world. She is not deliberately hostile, nor compromising, nor aloof, but forthright, patient and persistent. It would be no real engagement with the world simply to accommodate its culture; nor simply to attack it. The Church does not predetermine how she and her Lord will be received. She confesses what He has spoken to her; she speaks as the oracles of God. She gives what she has been given. It is with these things of Christ that the world is then engaged: broadly, as the world is confronted by the Church living as the Church, but also more personally in the daily interactions of faithful Christians with their neighbors.
In my experience, the Christians who set the bar in living their faith and life, engaging the world around them with the most consistent integrity, are the little children and the youth. The little children talk about Jesus with real zeal and no guile. They cannot imagine life without Him in it. Jesus is their "world-view," the way they think about the world and life and death; so of course they speak of Him. The youth, too, have convictions and values, which they do not hesitate to discuss and debate with their friends of every color and stripe. Not only that, but they do so while moving comfortably within the culture, taking things in stride, setting some things aside, embracing others, but not driven or defined by the world's culture. I'm not talking ideals, but what I have consistently witnessed in the young people of my congregation, including my own elder children as they've made the transition to college in recent years.
Instead of focusing on the culture of the world, the Church ought to focus on her own culture. Not to escape the world, but to be who she is in the world. After all, Christians live here on this planet; they live and work in the place where God has put them; they interact with the culture of the world all the time. What they need, therefore, is not an education in the ways of the world, but to be formed and shaped, encouraged and strengthened in the Church's proper and peculiar culture, which does not come naturally but only by the grace of God through His Word and Spirit. They need to be cultivated by the ongoing catechesis of the Church's liturgical life. It is imperative, then, for the Church to be herself. When the focus is shifted to the world's culture, the Church becomes less and less able to engage that culture, because she has less and less of herself with which to engage anything. The more she is making it her aim to accommodate or adopt the culture of the world in which she lives, the more passé and pathetic she becomes.
photo credit: The Wandering Angel
