renew your mind

Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll remember that this passage slapped me in the face a while back (well, with a little help from gwill). Now I think its time to slap some other folks with it. Be ye slapped so ye therefore may also slap.

I know I've told this story here before, but years ago, at my job, I was informed I had to wear a necktie to work because, "we strive to adhere to biblical standards, rather than the world's standards." For sure this was the biblical way of saying, "no jeans, no t-shirts, no slinger 'dos." There is surely nothing wrong with the powers-that-be mandating a dress code, but why do we feel the need to justify it by pretending it is a biblical standard? Shall we add our desires to the canon? Doesn't the canon itself warn against this? What does this say about our understanding of biblical standards when we think they have anything to do with wearing a tie.
The profound irony here is that wearing a tie to work is the ultimate adherence to the world's standards. It occurs to me that it is the ultimate ridiculous illustration of Oestricher's comment that evangelicals have "swallowed modernism so completely many find it impossible to separate modernism from Christianity." We have become so conformed to our culture that we think the Bible was its source. Ties – a biblical standard?

Oestricher's comment recognizes that modern evangelical Christianity has conformed fully to modern business culture, so much so that it considers that culture with its fashion, hierarchies, and paradigms to be biblical standards. Next step is to assume that any different fashion, hierarchies and paradigms are indicative of embracing the world's standards. Ok, I give up. I can't express how deeply ironic this seems to me.

We worship and seek Christian community in a business model CEO paradigm, we get leadership advice from best-selling fortune 500 CEOs, we model evangelism strategies after successful business ventures, and we attempt discipleship like corporate in-service training programs.
We copy every nuance of style from the music, fiction, and cinema of the culture and then market, consume and enjoy it completely segregated from the culture from which it came. We are conformed to the culture, yet live outside it. We are so 100% conformed and segregated that when someone among us wishes to step back into it and to contribute to the culture from a Christian perspective, he is suspected of having become worldly and fallen away. It is not content, or style that differentiates the culture from the parallel culture, it is simply to whom it is marketed. In terms of music, if you market Christian stuff to a secular audience, it is no longer Christian. But if you market secular stuff to a Christian audience, it becomes Christian.

So what is meant by avoiding comfort in your culture? The answer is there in the same passage. Fix your attention on God. In other words, be conformed to the culture of the Kingdom of God. Surely we don't think the culture of God's Kingdom has anything to do with fashionable apparel, or architecture, or hair-dos. All that stuff will be burned up. Surely Mr. White shirt, black tie, white wall pompadour is no more or less fit for the kingdom than Mr. Tattooed arms, torn jeans, skateboarding, walkman toting, flip-flop wearer. Surely it hasn't anything to do with our personnel hierarchies. He who is first shall be last and he who is last shall be first.
Surely the culture of God's Kingdom is recognized by our relationship with God and other people. Love. Love Him, love them. Obedience to Him, service to them. In the world but not of it? In a world that needs love, of a world that has it to spare.