Already at 8 a.m. it was getting warm. The sun was bright in the sky and I sat in a small café in Morocco trying to drink my coffee. It was easily the strongest and most thick coffee I had ever had, the kind that doesn’t just put hair on your chest but puts hair on your knuckles and toes too. I was sitting in an open-air room watching highlights from soccer matches while Arabic men, smoking, sat around me reading their news papers. They were both aware of my presence and markedly disinterested. My friends were back in the hotel packing up their things for the day’s excursion; women were not allowed in the café, it was for men only. I ate some fresh fruit, paid my bill and returned to meet with my friends. What was I doing in that moment? Despite popular opinion I was, in that moment, engaging culture.
We have a tendency to think of culture simply in terms of movies, music, and books. Or if you’re a high brow consumer, you think of culture in terms of paintings, sculptures, and architecture. But culture is all around us and we are always engaging in it. I believe in the importance and power of media. I believe that movies and music, that television and Facebook, deserve our careful analysis (if for no other reason than that they are the common language of our context). But we have not sufficiently engaged our culture by watching The Social Network and talking about it with friends. Nor have we sufficiently engaged culture by utilizing our MySpace page to post Bible verses. “Cultural engagement” must also happen while I am pumping gas, shopping at the grocery store, and doing the mundane things that my daily living consists of. The truth is that I have had far more opportunities to point people to Jesus over coffee than around my Xbox. We must not ignore the mundane as part of our cultural engagement. Hipsters would do well to remember this, but this whole explanation and critique assumes something that I think Fundamentalists would do well to observe too: that culture is not inherently evil. Let’s explore this premise in more detail next week.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 