The Missing Voice of the Christian Counter-Culture

Michael Spencer (aka “Internet Monk”) strikes again:

My students will hear hundreds of moralistic, pietistic and privatistic applications of the Gospel for every time they see or hear the Gospel lived out in Jesus shaped ways. If evangelical sermons and publishing is our measurement, then economic, missional, socially redemptive discipleship is far less interesting than end times scenarios and diets.

My students will be encouraged to accept the evils of society as the unfolding of the end times plan a dozen times for every time anyone tells them to go out and personally do something to make a difference in that world. After abortion and homosexual activism, the average evangelical’s engagement with social issues goes off the radar.

My students will be told that church should be fun, entertaining, cool and better than a mall a thousand times for every time they see a church embodying the suffering, justice, poverty, prophetic truth and radical love of Jesus for the poor and the sinful.

My students will hear the siren songs of evangelicalism endless times for every time they hear about a truly prophetic, counter-cultural, compassion-passionate Jesus shaped spirituality.

I’m waiting for the birth of truly counter-cultural Christian voices; voices as arresting in these times as Guthrie, Dylan, Ochs and Seeger were in theirs. Christian voices that don’t require us to go to non-believers to hear the authentic message of the compassion and present power of the teachings of scripture on justice and mercy.