The Bible In Culture
A minister walks into a building and up to the counter and proclaims: “I am here to free every prostitute you are forcing to work here!” The person behind the counter looks at the minister incredulously, and then raises their hands palm up in exasperation and declares: “Look around you. Don’t you know where you are? This is the public library!” The minister immediately apologies and with a voice mindful of their surroundings but full of righteous indignation whispers: “I am here to free every prostitute…”
The moral of this story is, we can declare a clear message and understand the response to that message but if we do not fully contextualize our ministry within our surroundings, we are in danger of committing absurdities.
Excerpt from the Bible in Culture White Paper.
My name is Vernon L. Harper and I have created The Bible in Culture to express the authentic ministry of Jesus Christ in today's culture. It is my belief the primary responsibility for this ministry is the local pastor and so I create content to engage the pastoral mind. However, I also craft content for any Christian who recognizes their ministry responsibilities to the Church of Jesus Christ as part of the normal Christian life. This content includes poetry, essays, Bible study, podcast and more.
The tides of this present world are increasingly pushing against the Church. Christian faith is being portrayed in our culture as a glorified nursery rhyme, dangerous superstition and various other absurdities. This cultural view of Christianity is “inoculating” our friends, neighbors, coworkers against the love of Jesus Christ. Just as a physician injects a patient with a small amount of a dead virus to build up a resistance to the living virus, we are being continuously exposed to small portions of this dead cultural Christianity so we will mistake it for biblical Christianity.
Our Churches are becoming empty monuments to our past successes as our youth increasingly abandon Christian faith. From elementary school to graduate school and from water cooler talk to living room conversation we are being force fed a large dose of Church as nursery rhyme. We are being taught that science has disproved faith, so an entire generation see Christian faith as something like the Santa Claus story, just something we tell children when they are young.
Our culture cannot access even a cursory understanding of the true nature of the Christian faith without relationship with Jesus and relationship with Jesus cannot be properly accessed without scripture and a serious examination of scripture is all but excluded from the rhetorical systems that shape our every day lives.
Here at the Bible In Culture it is my mission to express the ministry of Jesus Christ in culture through the various and changing rhetorical tools now available. This ministry will be one of the voices engaging the Church and the world with the aim of overcoming the obstacles in culture that oppose the authentic ministry of Jesus Christ.
It is also my desire to engage our fellow ministers with content designed to provide a direction of inquiry into evangelistic issues unique to our current day. The Bible In Culture Serialized White Paper is and example of this content.
I hope you will find this content a blessing and I thank you for visiting our site.
God bless.
Vernon L. Harper