What is "engaging the culture?"
It is a precept that many churches use to convey a sense of belonging and associate themselves with acceptance, which they claim "seekers" need on church grounds.
Words like "acceptance" send out such a positive connotation that it makes people ready to join that specific church. After all, the end goal of engaging the culture says that sermons and church events should feel "seeker-friendly."
Church organizers like to hear that the congregation is actively taking an interest in their pastor's words and would like them to be around similar people who radiate passion about faith.
Church audiences, in turn, would also like to be around others who share the same interests. They would think that "engaging the culture" results in such a community.
People may like organizations that are run “by locals, for locals” because these organizations are kind of like special clubs that foster a sense of identity and belonging.
Since organizations run in the community encourage positive feelings, churches are proud to advertise themselves in their promotional material.
Is "engaging the culture" a fad?
Everyone knows about fads. Whether they be hot new toys or the car a person just has to have, fads are very common in world history and our modern society.
Consider the Tulipmania phase that occurred in the 1600s within Holland. Searching for a quick buck (or thousands of them), the Dutch decided that investing in tulips was a good idea.
There were enough vendors purchasing and reselling tulips that many involved in Tulipmania got big profits, and the tulip prices rose to shocking levels.
In due time, Tulipmania withered away, and most of the investors’ profits wilted, well, like a flower, because they did not clean out their tulip inventories before the fad evaporated and prices were reduced to normal levels.
"Engaging the culture" could be considered a fad in the same vein as Tulipmania. Churches engage with trending media or doctrines, occasionally to their detriment. However, unlike Tulipmania, their fad hasn't stopped.
In today’s culture, some type of Christianity is the prevailing view, but it's occasionally mixed with concepts that are considered heresy and even weak, overly grace-reliant, “God-loves-me-He-can’t-help-it!”-type statements, and it has stuck like that since at least the mid-2010s to the 2020s.
Some recent examples from different denominations
April 2024: James River Church, a large Pentecostal church located in Springfield, Mo., had a monster truck party in a men's conference and a Barbie-inspired women's Bible study.
A monster truck is not evil in and of itself; the big trucks are comparably benign to other "engaging the culture" stories. However, some people argued that the conference and women's ministry could have had more obvious Biblical themes and content. And, as would be expected from trending media, the 2023 Barbie film included LGBT actors and inferences.
September 2026: The Episcopal female pastor at a Brightfield, Mich., church stated that Jesus commanding Lazarus to "come out" meant that Jesus wanted him to come out of the closet. However, the obvious answer is that he meant Lazarus would rise from the dead.
Her false beliefs are quite respected in society, but she is one of those who intentionally misinterpret Biblical text for ideology that Jesus already considered sinful, contradicting all of the morals he stood for, and showing no comprehension of the events or doctrine.
October 2026: The St. Sebastian Catholic parish located in Milwaukee, Wis., will import a Lutheran woman pastor to promote LGBT content.
Again, the ideology is presented as a purportedly laudable concept, a way to "welcome" people, and the vehicle it takes mirrors the Episcopal pastor incident.
Moral of the story
The Bible has influenced millions of lives in the past and present. It is therefore likely that millions more will be changed in the future by it.
It is the best-selling book in all history. Some statistics posit that as many as 80 million Bibles have been printed yearly and that 19 million were printed somewhere in the U.S.
Over the past two thousand years, Christianity alone has had the greatest effect on Western civilization, touching on all areas: economically, socially, politically, and culturally.
Truly Christian art or church events would teach solid Biblical truths, but such content made only for money or attention would just look like worldly art with pseudo-Christian words slapped onto it to appeal to a Christian market. Art flows out of the human instinct to create and, in the right hands, becomes a very effective tool to spread the gospel message.
If the church as an institution is too involved in something of the world, it loses its first love. The church will soon grow to love worldly content, and that will bring a tragic end.
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