By John Stonestreet
Worldview Work Isn’t Optional:
We Were Saved to Be Truly Human
Some are saying that Christians have lost the culture.
But what if it was never a war to win, instead it was a calling to embrace?
IF
THERE is an overarching theme for BreakPoint—
starting with Chuck Colson and now with Eric
Metaxas and me—it’s culture. Specifically, how Christians
can understand it, engage it, confront it, even restore it—
through the clarity of a Christian worldview.
As Brett Kunkle and I explain in our book, A Practical
Guide to Culture, what we mean by culture is not some
mysterious thing cloistered in art museums. No, culture is
the sum of everything we as human beings create, write, say,
do, and think—the marks we leave on our world.
In that sense, “engaging the culture” isn’t really optional.
It’s human. It’s as much a part of being alive as breathing is.
We don’t decide whether we’ll engage the culture. Just how.
I say this because lately, a few people have suggested that
Christian efforts in the culture have failed. One gentleman
recently wrote me saying that worldview-style training like
the kind we do in our Colson Fellows Program or at Summit
Ministries or other places like that just hasn’t worked. We’re
losing the next generation, he said, and mainstream culture
is as dark as ever.
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But I want to push back against this idea, at least on a
couple of fronts. First, it just isn’t true! You can’t convince
me that the work of people like Francis Schaeffer, Chuck
Colson, David Noebel, or the work of groups like Summit
Ministries or the Colson Center, teaching Christians how to
approach culture from a Christian worldview, hasn’t made a
difference. I’ve seen young faces light up when they get this
Christianity thing for the first time, realizing it’s true, and
that faith relates to culture. I’ve seen too many to believe that
it hasn’t made an impact. I was one of those faces in 1994
thanks to Bill Brown and Gary Phillips.
And stats back me up on this. Far from the doom and
gloom we often hear in the media, and from Christian
sources, the Church isn’t collapsing in America. In fact,
evangelicals have one of the highest retention rates of their
young people of any Christian group.
And to say that “worldview hasn’t worked” is to ignore
the incredible inroads made in the academy in our life-
time. Consider that the entire discipline of philosophy was
flipped on its head in the late 20th century by people like