And Another Thing . . . Culture
The culture has quit coming to church, so we are taking the church to the culture. Jesus would have been amazed at the way we cloister. Cloistered means enclosed. Monks who lived in monasteries with enclosed inner courtyards were said to be cloistered. They cut themselves off from the world and tried to spend their time meditating on God inside the protection of this sequestered environment. Of course, “the world” is not really an external thing; it mostly resides between our ears and behind our eyes. We carry the world in our hearts and heads. We can change the external stimulation, but, for most of us, an internal fire still rages.
Our modern cloistering is different from what the ancients practiced. Many today have resolved to cloister God rather than themselves; to cloister faith life solely within the walls of church services and calendars. The attempt is not to lock ourselves off from the world, as much as it is to lock God away into a small manageable corner of our life. Places we can visit and then leave. We cloister, enclose, compartmentalize the part of our lives we let God into, and take no notice of him as we pursue our “secular” lives in the world. Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” God will not be cloistered inside of our church services or our designated “holy times.” We can find God in those moments because he is present everywhere. God is in our worship services, just as he is in our workplaces, hospitals, courts, malls, jails, houses, cars, showers, bars, restaurants, streets, sidewalks, . . . you get the idea. The last thing Jesus tells his followers in the book of Matthew is, “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
We cannot cloister God. He is always everywhere.
Psalm 139 says:
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
New International Version (NIV) Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica
When the people of God gather, they are called the church. When we say we are taking the church to the culture, we mean that we, God’s people, are going to join him where he already is. He is everywhere and the church needs to expand the number of places where we seek to reveal him.
Rich Mullins once wrote,
And go to the city and sing out the song
For the walls of the Temple will be shaken
And the music will transcend the concrete and the chrome
And the minds of the children will waken
O Come All Ye Faithful, Rich Mullins, Sparrow 1983
The message was never meant to be kept inside our walls. Let’s shake it out of our temples and into our streets.
And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!
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