Five Things the Church Can Do to Change the Culture

Christians like to talk quite a bit about changing culture. This is a concern for people especially as we see the continued moral decay of our society, and a church that continues to accommodate itself to the ideals of the time. Yet, the ways that the church has tried to have a positive impact on society have often been less than helpful.

While, as a Lutheran, I don’t think it’s the church’s primary role to “redeem the culture,” I believe that as Christians, we should care about what happens in the left hand realm. If we care about our neighbors, we should care about broader society. And the church can and should aid in the welfare of the society in which it exists.

Here are five things that the church can do to positively impact the culture.

1. Don’t treat Christianity like another chess piece in conservative-liberal politics.

The American church has too often tried to change the culture by the imposition of Christian morality on the people through influencing political policies. This began with the rise of the “moral majority” and the influence of Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell. Evangelical leaders tried to befriend influential politicians and get the right people in power, with the thought that such actions would stop the moral decay of society. The negative affects of such a move are apparent today. Politicians view the “evangelical right” as another group who needs to be pleased for the sake of more votes. This has mostly just given politicians an excuse to give a false profession of faith in order to coerce Christians into giving them a vote. Another affect of this approach is that the church has sometimes neglected to do its duty in proclaiming repentance and the forgiveness of sins by instead adopting a particular political agenda as its Sunday morning platform.

2. Preach the gospel.

God called the church to one primary mission: to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins. It may seem counter-intuitive to think that the culture could be changed by focusing on something other than changing the culture. But preaching cultural change will ultimately do nothing to amend the hearts, minds, and actions of broader society. It is only through God’s regenerating power that people are made new, and that their mind, will, and affections will be aimed toward God rather than the self. When people are converted, lives change, and sometimes, cultures change.

3. Let your worship be public.

In the early church, worship was not a private sphere in people’s lives that were otherwise completely secular. Worship impacted their life day to day. The canonical hours were an ordinary aspect of Christian life, wherein God’s people set aside specific times each day for prayer. This practice was known by many in the broader culture, as Pliny mentions the practice. Christians also made the sign of the cross over themselves, and lived a particular way of life which differentiated them from the broader world. People could visibly see Christian worship in the manner of life Christians lived. The modern church has, unfortunately, bought into the lie that worship is a private matter that is restricted to Sunday mornings. If worship is viewed in this way, we should not, as a church, expect to have any positive impact on society.

 4. Give your children a Christian education.

Too often people fragment their lives. The Christian faith is for Sunday morning, and maybe a small devotional time in the morning or at night. The rest of the day, then, is secular and divorced from one’s life in Christ. This is evident in the way that people look at education. Instead giving our children the opportunity to be taught about the world through a Biblical perspective, we send them to government schools. And then we somehow expect an hour of Sunday school on one day of the week to counteract the secularism which surrounds their daily life. This is why we are losing are children. Now, I understand that Christian schooling is not possible for everyone, but if you send your kids to public school, it’s your duty as a parent to supplement that education at home. Catechesis is not merely the job of the pastor, but of parents.

5. Model Christian ideals in your life.

It’s easy to point the finger at the secular culture, but the church has to first take a long hard look at itself. The cultural shifts we’ve seen in recent years are largely the fault of the church. We can’t fight against homosexual marriage but simultaneously hold to an overly romanticized view of love, which leads to divorce and adultery. We tell our children to push off marriage until they are finished with college and established in a career, all the while tempting them to live in sexual sin. The best thing that we can do to affect the values of society is to actually be examples of those values in our own lives. We need to live in our family lives as God calls us to. Only when the church begins to do this will anything in society change.