Pastoral Calling and Cultural Understanding: A Conversation with Mark Sayers – Part 2
Mark Sayers, Senior Leader of Red Church in Melbourne, Australia, is passionate about spiritual renewal and the future of the church. He is also a respected cultural commentator whose perceptive insights into faith and contemporary culture help Christian leaders faithfully carry out their calling to pastor and disciple others. Mark is the author of seven books, with his eighth due for release in May 2022. What follows is part 2 of 3 adapted from a transcript of Mark’s recent conversation with Covenant Seminary’s Dr. Mark Ryan. See part 1 here and part 3 here.
Mark Ryan (MR): If I can shift gears more towards you helping us grow in naming and navigating the culture that we’re a part of, let me just ask you to parse out the difference, as you see it, between the church’s quest to be culturally relevant and the church’s need to be culturally discerning. As a rule, I’m a little concerned about the first, and quite on board with the second. But am I too naive? How do these things fit together really?
Mark Sayers (MS): Yeah. So, one of the things I think we can look at by way of background is that period, beginning in America after World War II, when you had the rise of mass culture. In this moment we had the rise of suburbs as we now understand them, of broadcast TV and mass media, also of mass university education. Indeed, this is one of the things that people don’t talk about anymore, but more people going to university has really changed the world. So, we have this rise of mass culture, with popular culture becoming huge—Hollywood, rock-n-roll, everything. And, in a sense, certainly in some places, the church’s response to that was to attempt a kind of missionary work. You had people like Donald McGavran who’d returned from the mission field, Peter Wagner, and others too, who said, “Let’s bring that focus back to a home base,” for want of a better term.
On the one hand, I think there were some good elements in that, specifically in terms of how we more clearly communicate the gospel and how we move past some of the religious trappings which are extra to the gospel and that don’t need to be there. On the other hand, there was also a danger. In the midst of this, there became this sense of offering people all the goodies of the culture through a Christian veneer. And in this there was a lack of discernment. The emphasis fell upon providing a culture-friendly package or program which looked like the world’s, but we didn’t teach people discernment.
In the last five or ten or so years, I feel like what’s happened is that suddenly, people who had gotten this message—“Okay, well, we can have a Christianity that’s a lot like the world”—did so while there was still an assumption that a lot of things operating within the world were still somewhat aligned with the Christian moral worldview. But then, suddenly, things seemed to move radically. And those people who weren’t taught to discern culture were caught off guard. I think this is what’s happened for many. We’ve gone from a mass culture to a fragmented culture (and to an all-invasive culture), and that’s happened rather rapidly. So, in a sense, the real thing now is discernment.
Moreover, the apologetic problem that people saw before was that church was too unlike the culture—that it was old fashioned and traditional—and therefore if we were less traditional, less old fashioned, then the world would come running to us. Now, that has been blown out of the water. In this the next season, we’re going to see an increased pushback on the church, even in its new forms. (People may feel like that’s happening now, but I think we’re going to see it even more). In terms of a church’s pursuit of cultural relevance, people today don’t care. You can be the coolest cats in town, but people are not going to care. Because you have a profoundly different worldview narrative going on than the culture, you will still be shunned. I think this is going to be an education point for a lot of relevance-seeking churches. In this light, discernment, resilience, and responsiveness—a gospel responsiveness to the culture and the changes happening in the culture—are what we must cultivate.[1]
MR: If we are to think about discernment as a key posture or gesture, many reading this exchange will likely be asking some version of the question, “But how do I do this?" If someone is listening to or reading this conversation, or has been listening to This Cultural Moment, and desires to develop his or her cultural competency, to move towards discernment, how do you direct that person? How does one begin?
MS: I get one sort of email message, or message sent to me over social media, which is like, “Hey Mark, listening to This Cultural Moment. What’s the one book that’s going to help me understand culture today?” I hear this, and yet part of my ability to look at culture comes from the fact that I studied intercultural studies at seminary and missiology and these things. There isn’t just one book. Yet, there are people, like Paul Hiebert, who looked at worldviews and all this sort of stuff, and when reading him on Papa New Guinea and tribal culture, etc., your brain will start to go, “Oh, hang on. What’s our version of that?” All to say, I think his books on anthropological worldviews[2] are a good starting place.
Another moment for me—I forgot to mention this at the first question—was with my brother on a family holiday in Sydney. I was probably 16 or 17 and we were staying up late when on TV, at 11 o’clock at night, there was Francis Shaeffer’s documentary series. I was just blown away. He showed this incident, as if on a news broadcast, that had been shot from two angles.[3] I was fascinated. Even though some of what he was talking about was in the 1960s, reading Schaeffer’s How Then Shall We Live?[4] is still helpful. I also like Jamie Smith’s book on secularism.[5] It’s helpful to see someone doing that now. But the thing I would encourage people to do most is to learn how to read the culture versus looking for a shortcut to understand the culture in this moment. Even with This Cultural Moment, things have already changed since then. So, Hiebert, Schaeffer, Smith, that sort of stuff, is helpful.
MR: Now Mark, when you say, “learn how to read the culture,” that rolls off your tongue in a particular way. Others of us want to do exactly that, but where does one gain that competency? If a new topic, a new issue, sweeps across your view and you don’t fully know what it means, are there some beginning points, some foundational steps you’ve learned to take, to begin to read this cultural trend or artifact?
MS: Yeah. Well, I really believe with Scripture that eternity is written on our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). And so, I look at everything through a religious lens. When I was young, I remember reading a small book by Spanish historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. He talked about going to this football match in Spain as an alien, and the alien watches the game, everyone is bustling around, and the alien interprets the game as a religion. When I read that, a click went on in my head. Before, I thought of sport and religion as two different things. Afterwards, I looked at everything religiously—because I believe that we’re creatures with a God-shaped hole in our lives; we’re restless until we find out our rest in him, as Augustine said.[6] So, my starting framework is always religious. And I think that gives you a different viewpoint.
A related lens is: what’s the story being told here? What is the utopia that it points toward? I think it was W. H. Auden who said that no one should be allowed to speak in public without explaining what their view of the perfect utopia would be at the end. So, what’s that sort of teleological point that this is all heading toward? What’s the moral worldview behind it? Who are this person’s sinners and who are their saints?
So, I would say the starting point of seeing everything through a religious lens is a frame for me. And this frees me from just reacting. I’m an evangelical, I’m socially conservative, but sometimes what happens is there are things that come across the cultural dashboard which are designed in certain ways to get reactions from us. Newspapers are selling digital content now which is all about getting our reactions. So, I have my clear views of what I believe in, but I also have a chance to step back. Not step back from my ethical beliefs, but step back to ask, “What is happening here?”
Take cancel culture as an example—it’s a big topic now. I just read a story of an evangelical vicar in the UK who was referred to the anti-terrorism task force by a school for basically suggesting that an orthodox view of sexuality could be a viable alternative to model or look at.[7] I have two reactions to that. One is that my heart breaks that this is happening. But then I must step back and ask, why is this happening? Part of me says, I don’t think most of the people in the school were that upset. Rather, you had a very small group of people who functioned as an activist group, who were able to use a network to mobilize opinion against this person. And so, I’m asking, what’s the structural change in culture? It’s the move from a hierarchical, institution-driven culture, to a networked culture that is enabling people to assert themselves in this way. There are these structural things in culture that I always try to note. I’m holding on to my evangelical beliefs, but I’m asking what’s the biggest thing happening here? And I am striving to not be as reactive.
MR: Thank you. Helpful. Still on the train of listening and discerning, you’ve mentioned Schaeffer, but here’s somebody of a different stripe: Paul Tillich. He talked about what he called “reverse prophetism”—how our culture can sometimes, albeit unconsciously, speak back to us.[8] While I appreciate Tillich’s concept, I’m just wondering how we discern when the culture is directing our attention to something truthful and something to pay attention to versus and when it’s selling us a lie?
MS: That’s a great question. And I think it’s becoming more of a pertinent question because I think we’re in a season such as Chesterton talked about. He made a comment that the virtues have gone mad in the world.[9] And so, there are these virtues that go out into the world but if they’re not brought under discipleship and lodged with the church, they go out and wreak havoc, even though their origins may be Christian. I think there’s something like that happening at this moment.
One of the big trends in the world is really the rise of a protest movements, beginning, I think, with the Arab Spring. Again, part of this is a structural change in the world where, suddenly, technology means you could more easily mobilize and shed light on particular subjects through cell phone footage and so on. That has just been growing. I think it would have been the big story of 2020 if the pandemic hadn’t happened. We had protest movements happening everywhere all over the world. And we saw that continued particularly with the protests in the wake of George Floyd in the US. There’s an element there that is a prophetic frustration in the culture. We’re at a point where there’s this sense of increasing dissatisfaction with how the world is being run. The church is hearing, a “knocking at the door” by people who are saying the world needs to change. I see this as a hunger for revival and renewal in a secular form. Sometimes it’s going to be misdirected. But some of it is going to be spot on. So, yes, to Tillich’s point, there is this voice coming from outside. The key, however, is discerning it in alignment with a biblical worldview.
So that’s one of them. To summarize, yes, I do think that happens. The Holy Spirit will sometimes use these moments. But you must be careful because sometimes it’s more like a zeitgeist moment where it’s just hard to know whether we are sensing the Holy Spirit or just the spirit of the age. That’s something you’ve always got to discern. But if it aligns biblically then that might mean going back to Scripture and acknowledging, “Wow, we’ve missed what the Scripture was saying, and we now need to listen to that.”
See part 1 of this conversation here and part 3 here.
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Dr. Mark Ryan is Director of the Francis Schaeffer Institute and Adjunct Professor of Religion and Culture at Covenant Theological Seminary.
Notes:
[1] Mark has more to say about the history of relevance in his Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience (Moody, 2016).
[2] Paul Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Baker Academic, 2008). I would add: Paul Hiebert, The Gospel in Human Contexts: Anthropological Explorations for Contemporary Missions (Baker Academic, 2009). The latter was Hiebert’s final work on anthropology for mission.
[3] The clip in question is the first 4 minutes as found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jianKzB753M. This clip is from Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live (Gospel Films, 1977), episode 10.
[4] Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (L’Abri 50th Anniversary Ed., Crossway, 2005).
[5] James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Eerdmans, 2014).
[6] St. Augustine, The Confessions, book 1, chapter 1. See: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm#link2H_4_0001.
[7] One account of this story is found here: https://christianconcern.com/ccpressreleases/school-chaplain-reported-to-terrorist-watchdog-and-forced-out-of-job-for-sermon-on-identity-politics/.
[8] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Three Volumes in One (University of Chicago, 1967), 214
[9] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Thomas Nelson, 2000), chapter 3: “The Suicide of Thought, 191–92. Or see: https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodoxy/The_Suicide_of_Thought_p1.html.
