Rick Hiemstra, a researcher, from EFC recently had some comments on evangelical congregations in our Canadian context.
Essentially, we're increasingly finding ourselves on the periphery of culture. That is because there is a fairly aggressive civil religion emerging - WYRA (who you really are). The central notion is not that humans are separated from God, but that we lack knowledge of our true identity. Our culture proclaims that when we discover who we really are, we will discover a superhero or someone who has all the pieces put together. The orthodox Christian story is that who we really are is broken, warped people who need to meet Jesus and through transformative grace and healing come to look more and more like him. This is the heart of the conflict we are experiencing with our culture, differing views of our essential character and identity.
Questions about where we root justice and what's right and wrong are answered with: "right or wrong is based mostly on what I feel." So this emerging civil religion is built around personal subjectivity.
Christians need to find means for inserting an alternative story to this dominant motif. That God created good things, which we broke through our self-centred search for identity within ourselves. Restoration calls for re-orienting our lives around Jesus and a focus on God's kingdom concerns, rather than our own. And this is the foundation of social justice not rooted in personal subjectivity.
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