Contemporary Western Culture

We need to examine the culture that we're living in if we want to be successful in the 21st century. Here are some characteristics we need to be aware of:

Constant Change
We live in a culture that is constantly changing. We have been changing and growing technologically by leaps and bounds. Also, we saw a lot of change in our culture in the mid-1900's. We had the advent of television. And we had a major cultural revolution in the 1960's. Unfortunately, many of our churches are in a sort of "future shock", and still act as if it were pre-WWII times. Perhaps we haven't updated our music, or our old-fashioned presentation styles. Or maybe we didn't notice when post-modernism became so prominent in our thinking. Even some churches that try to be contemporary, are still a decade or more behind (in musical styles anyway). If we want to engage our culture, we must understand that it is a culture that is continuously changing, and therefore, we must keep up.

Our TV Culture
We live in the TV and Internet age. Television and marketing has affected our culture, and will continue to affect it for years to come. If you watch the News, you will notice how fast-paced everything is. The show is broken up into convenient morsels. There are constant camera angle changes, constant cutting to news footage and live interviews, stock market tickers, headlines and animated graphics dancing in the corner of the screen. You are barraged by information and visual stimuli. Then there are the commercial breaks every 15 minutes (which reduce our attention spans). Television also tries to avoid silence, and the "talking head" (when the program is centered on one person, talking).

But, as Rob Warner points out, going to a church service is like stepping into an alien world for most of us: "Monday to Saturday we live in a world shaped by TV. A world imbued with prodigious pace, variety, colour, informality, fast-moving debates, a huge number of personal stories, and very few 'talking heads'. On Sunday mornings we enter an alternative world, in which one or two men ... conduct a safe, predictable, slow-moving presentation, almost exclusively centred on 'talking heads'." For this reason, the Church should make use of multimedia: Powerpoint, videos, drama, music, interviews, etc.

Our Shopping Mall Culture
Today, businesses understand that marketing and presentation are almost as important as the product itself. That's because people today assess the quality of a product by it packaging. If you don't believe me, what would you think if my website looked like this, or like this!?
If you go to a shopping mall, you will see that the stores themselves are packages. Most of them are designed down to the last detail! So in a culture in which first impressions are so important, how do our church buildings stand up? How does this reflect on our "product"?

Our Post-Modern Condition
Since sometime last century, a major cultural shift had taken place. Our culture had changed from being predominantly modern, to post-modern. Here is a comparison of the two worldviews to help you better understand:

Neither the older Modern, nor the present Post-modern model align with God's Word. Each one has good and bad points. Modernism was actually quite arrogant as it believed that human reasoning could find absolute truth and even prove the existence of God. Post-modernism believes that since we are all flawed and biased, truth can never be found. The reality is, of course, that we are sinful, perverse creatures; but that is not to say that there is no absolute Truth, or that we can't know the truth to a degree. We will never know truth perfectly, for only God is omniscient.
Possibly the most important thing to note about the Post-modern state of our culture, is that it is very receptive to relationships. The Church should, as it always should have, focus on building relationships with others. After all, 9 out of 10 people come to Messiah as the direct result of relationships.