Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Christianity Today "Beautiful Orthodoxy" Book of the Year in 2016.
Keep Christianity Strange.
As the culture changes all around us, it is no longer possible to pretend that we are a Moral Majority. That may be bad news for America, but it can be good news for the church. What's needed now, in shifting times, is neither a doubling-down on the status quo nor a pullback into isolation. Instead, we need a church that speaks to social and political issues with a bigger vision in mind: that of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As Christianity seems increasingly strange, and even subversive, to our culture, we have the opportunity to reclaim the freakishness of the gospel, which is what gives it its power in the first place.
We seek the kingdom of God, before everything else. We connect that kingdom agenda to the culture around us, both by speaking it to the world and by showing it in our churches. As we do so, we remember our mission to oppose demons, not to demonize opponents. As we advocate for human dignity, for religious liberty, for family stability, let's do so as those with a prophetic word that turns everything upside down.
The signs of the times tell us we are in for days our parents and grandparents never knew. But that's no call for panic or surrender or outrage. Jesus is alive. Let's act like it. Let's follow him, onward to the future.
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Top Highlights
“It would be a tragedy to get the right president, the right Congress, and the wrong Christ.” (source)
“The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That’s why one could speak of ‘God and country’ with great reception in almost any era of the nation’s history but would create cultural distance as soon as one mentioned ‘Christ and him crucified.’ God was always welcome in American culture. He was, after all, the Deity whose job it was to bless America. The God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ, however, was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to ‘Amen’ in a prayer at the Rotary Club.” (source)
“In fact, the call to a gospel-focused engagement is a call to a more vigorous presence in public life, because it seeks to ground such witness where it ought to be—in the larger mission of the church.” (source)
“Worldliness means that we acquiesce to the priorities and the agenda of the systems now governing the world, in many cases because we don’t even question them.” (source)
“At their worst, Christian efforts at cultural and political engagement have been sometimes disastrous for the mission of the church. Such attempts have too often created subcultures of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ that divide people up into categories of ‘red state’ and ‘blue state’ rather than that of church and mission field. At their best, such efforts have reminded us that all of our lives are to be framed by what is permanent and what is ultimate: the kingdom of God.” (source)
- Title: Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel
- Author: Russell D. Moore
- Publisher: B&H
- Print Publication Date: 2015
- Logos Release Date: 2015
- Pages: 240
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Church and social problem; Christianity; Popular culture
- ISBNs: 9781430077619, 9781433686184, 143368618X, 1430077611
- Resource ID: LLS:9781433686184
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-10-09T17:58:32Z
Russell D. Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today. A widely sought commentator, Dr. Moore has been called “vigorous, cheerful, and fiercely articulate” by The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ, Adopted for Life, and Tempted and Tried.