Semi-Coherent Missional Lessons Learned on a Binge
A couple of weekends ago, I went on a binge… of 80s music. I discovered a website that allows one to stream music based on any of several parameters, so I subjected the kids to a constant stream of some of the best guilty pleasure music out there. This stuff is not hard to come by in our part of the world anyway, so they already have a pretty good handle on the music of the decade, but in a three day stretch even Cheryl and I heard stuff we hadn’t remembered.
It is an incredible world we have slid into over the past few years. Stop and think just how small your world has become… both as distances around the world have seemed to erase, but also how our circles of influence have become more focused and therefore smaller. Social networking is an ever present aspect of life in the 21st century. (How dated does a reference to “MySpace” seem now?)
We may feel like we have more and better contact to more people from our entire lives these days—from Kindergarten classmates to second cousins—and yet we also now define our cultural circles. It used to be that we had cultural commonalities with a vast percentage of people in our culture, when there were three TV channels. Forget about the thousands of entertainment options on TV today, people create their own subgroups of consumerism and entertainment.
If we wish to influence culture and have an impact on circles of relationship these days, we have to be precise in our focus and diverse in our scope. For people of faith who want to share hope with people around them, cross-cultural ministry is no longer a luxury for those who feel adventurous. There may be hundreds of different cultures in one large apartment complex that are each merely a small branch of connections reaching right across the globe.
It is an incredible world we have slid into over the past few years. Stop and think just how small your world has become… both as distances around the world have seemed to erase, but also how our circles of influence have become more focused and therefore smaller. Social networking is an ever present aspect of life in the 21st century. (How dated does a reference to “MySpace” seem now?)
We may feel like we have more and better contact to more people from our entire lives these days—from Kindergarten classmates to second cousins—and yet we also now define our cultural circles. It used to be that we had cultural commonalities with a vast percentage of people in our culture, when there were three TV channels. Forget about the thousands of entertainment options on TV today, people create their own subgroups of consumerism and entertainment.
If we wish to influence culture and have an impact on circles of relationship these days, we have to be precise in our focus and diverse in our scope. For people of faith who want to share hope with people around them, cross-cultural ministry is no longer a luxury for those who feel adventurous. There may be hundreds of different cultures in one large apartment complex that are each merely a small branch of connections reaching right across the globe.
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