As Trevor Noah sat behind his desk at the Daily Show for the last time earlier this month, he looked out over the audience and began to reflect on some of the lessons he’s learned during his time here in America.
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While Noah made observations about the American culture at large, it struck me how accurately his observations applied to the church in America.
Over the years, there has been increasing division rising up among us. The last three years have especially poured fuel on that fire. We hope that the church could rise above such division and not be so influenced by culture. But alas, the very nature of culture means that it will impact the subcultures within it.
You see, cultural environment is just that: an environment.
When the environment gets cold outside, you notice that inside your house it gets cold as well. Maybe not as cold, but the indoors of your house is affected by the cold, nonetheless. You need controls to make sure that your home doesn’t end up in the same situation as the outdoors. That’s why we call them “environmentally controlled rooms.”
Similarly, things that happen in the culture around us impact us within the church. It doesn’t mean that anybody has a particularly nefarious agenda. The church within the United States of America exists as a subculture within a larger cultural context. Therefore, the environment of the larger cultural context is going to have an impact on the environment of the church as a subculture.
Here in America, there are so many different kinds of churches even within the Christian faith. I’m not saying everything is going to be the same. Rather, I’m simply saying that the cultural trends of America will impact—for good or for ill—the church and the environment within our local churches.
Noah’s observations about American culture have profound applicability to the church. So to close out this year, I am going to write a three-part series addressing these things.
The first observation is this: issues are real, but politics is a made up way of trying to solve those issue.
Saying it another way, “Issues are real and your favorite talk show host or your favorite political commentator is formulating ideas and ways to solve those issues based on his own ideology or based on who pays his paycheck.”
We get so locked into our ideological camps and forget that we’re all dealing with real-life issues. They may differ from person to person, but the issues are real.
We’re all struggling to pay for something. We’re all struggling with feeling a certain level of opposition in life.
Sometimes we inflict opposition on ourselves, such as when we dilly dally around and don’t do something meaningful with our lives. If don’t find a good job and stick to it and build consistent behaviors in our lives and consistent income, then we’re gonna struggle—no matter what background we’re from or what current setting we’re in—with being able to pay for everything that we need to pay for in a month.
These issues are real.
The prison system in America has long needed reform. Prison reform is not Democrat or Republican, it’s a real issue people face. Trump happened to bring about a level of reform within the prison system. Just because there are many things we may disagree with Trump over doesn’t mean we have to inherently oppose the prison reform he attempted to bring into place.
If we’re not careful, even those of us within the church can be so impacted by the larger American culture that we reject a good solution to real and felt issue because it’s coming from someone we don’t like.
Even if we don’t vote or participate directly with the political systems, it highly influences the way that we look at these issues. We quickly become tribal in the way we talk about solutions for these issues. Before we know it, one tribe begins to act as though the issues another tribe seeks to address isn’t really an issue. But we can’t forget that everything politcal leaders or cultural commentators address are experiences of real human beings.
Affordable housing is a real issue people face.
Clean water is something real people need.
Inflation is something every one of us deals with.
Various people will come up with different plans on how to solve these issues, and we may agree with them sometimes. Just because we disagree with them and everything else doesn’t mean we have to reject their solutions to real-life issues.
We have to learn how to lean into each other’s stories in order to understand the issues each other is facing and in order to understand why each other thinks a certain solution can help solve the issue.
People face real issues and in our day and age of social media and internet, we spend so much time talking about what we think should be done about issues without actually dealing with them.
It’s important for us to remember that if an issue has reached the national conversation, real people must be facing it. Just because I’m not dealing with it doesn’t mean somebody isn’t dealing with it somewhere. And just because the issues I am dealing with may not be a national conversation doesn’t mean people don’t care about solving my issues.
Furthermore, when it comes to the issues I am not personally dealing with, I may not have a very full perspective on how to solve the issue. In fact, someone who I otherwise disagree with may do or say something that is actually good and right and helps solve the issue. I can’t let my tribalism keep me from blessing that and being honest about it.
This happens within the church as well.
In fact, it can be more biting and more cynical in the church.
We have a hard time coming together as brothers and sisters, unless we all agree on the dotted line. When was the last ministry effort you were a part of where multiple denominations of churches worked together? It doesn’t happen because we are affected by the tribalistic way of thinking so prevalent in the larger cultural context.
We find it difficult to work together toward a good cause unless we can be completely uniform with a person or an organization. And, spoiler alert—that rarely happens.
I don’t think scripture even calls us to be uniform with people in order to work with them. The church itself is going to be extremely diverse. Therefore, we ought to lean into that diversity and allow the different experiences and perspectives to help us solve problems in more meaningful ways.
There are real issues in the world and people who don’t look like us or think exactly like us can, in fact, have good and proper solutions to those issues. How many problems go unsolved because we aren’t willing to lean in and listen?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
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