Week 4


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Week 4

Welcome!  Please help yourself to coffee and snacks  Please make a name tag for yourself  Please fill out the information card on the table  Please consider serving:

Sign-up to bring refreshments to a class

 A season is set for everything, a time for every

experience under heaven: A time for…. What value then, can the man of affairs get from what he earns? I have observed the business that God gave to man to be concerned with… He puts eternity in their minds…. …whatever God has brought to pass will recur evermore…. What is occurring occurred long since, and what is to occur occurred long since…

 What does the author of Ecclesiastes tell us about time

and events?  What is the question that he poses then for man?  What is his answer about what it is that God wants of man in light of time and current events?

 Last week Tim walked us through the basic four ways

Christians tend to respond to culture:  Fundamentalist Withdrawal

 Critiquing Culture  Copying Culture  Consuming Culture

 In light of the Ecclesiastes passage, what do you think

interacting with culture should look like if we realize God has put eternity in our minds?

 Integrity: Is a particular aspect of culture making the

culture more whole, more faithful to the world of which it is making something?  The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they might have life and have it abundantly. John 10:10 (NAS)  The good and the bad: Torn down house, child labor

 Only way to “change” culture is to “create” culture  Culture is:  Accumulative

 Full

 So will only change if something new displaces the

existing in tangible way

 In the political world, we experience the wave’s peak

moments through events like elections or policy wins, but we don’t always recognize the undercurrents and conditions that lead us there. In the world of art and culture, many of us help construct the conditions that lead to this climax. Culture is a space where we can introduce ideas, attach emotions to concrete change and win enthusiasm for our values. Art is where we can change the narrative, because it’s where people can imagine what change looks and feels like.

 Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Public sentiment is

everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” It is essential for us to think about these words in the context of the wave, because artists shift and frame public sentiment as they create the cultural ocean we live in every day. You may attend a rally or vote, but you also read books, listen to music, engage with visual art, turn on the radio and create your identity through culture. Artists are central, not peripheral, to social change. To have the movements that make the wave, you need cultural workers.

 What examples of people and/or organizations

“creating” culture to displace something existing can you think of?  What impact did it have or is it having?

 In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loves

us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 John 4:10 (NAS)  No one has taken My Life away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down…. John 10:18a (NAS)  All is a gift we have not earned and are not entitled to  Need to think about cultural creativity in light of this

 Where we’re called to create culture is at the

intersection of grace and the cross  Where do we find our work producing “awe-inspiring”

fruit?  Where do we find ourselves identifying with Christ on the cross?  Next Seven Weeks….

 Where, in your life, do you think your particular

giftedness can intersect with culture?  How might you ask God to help you see what cultural work He may be calling you to?

 How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer  Culture Matters by T. M. Moore  Christ and Culture by Richard Niebuhr  The Naked Public Square by Richard John Neuhaus  To Change the World by James Davison Hunter  Blue Light Jazz by Donald Miller