What was supposed to be a typical diversity breakfast to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., in Columbia, Missouri, surprised everyone when the morning featured a drag show performance. Most surprised were the middle school students who had been bused there without parental permission, to the dismay of their parents, and their school and district.
Local Christians disagreed on how to react. Some expressed anger. Some shrugged and didn’t see the problem. Christians who worked in the school, the district and at the state level debated whether they should loudly take action or quietly work behind the scenes to repair the damage.
Patrick Miller and Keith Simon, pastors at The Crossing in Columbia, wanted to lead their fellow Christians in biblical cultural engagement. And they wanted to make sure those Christians knew that there are many ways to bring shalom to the community, as long as they are rooted in joy. Here, Miller and Simon share how they did just that in their upcoming book, Joyful Outsiders: Six Ways to Live Like Jesus in a Disorienting Culture (Zondervan).
What did that breakfast controversy show you about how Christians struggle to engage with the broader culture?
Patrick Miller: It highlighted that Christians can’t agree on how to engage the world around us. We don’t have great categories for how to love our neighbor and also for how to resist what might be wrong in the world. As pastors, we have spent years counseling people to engage the world in a diversity of ways, and we realized we needed to show other leaders how to do it as well.
What role should a Christian play in the culture we live in—try to cultivate it, resist it or something else entirely?
Keith Simon: I don’t think there’s a single, simple solution. People have different experiences, different gifts, different religious and biblical convictions, and there are a lot of different ways for people to play a significant role in influencing our culture. Unfortunately, we have distilled things down to one way, and it tends to be whatever we are good at or what we feel called to, and then we expect everyone else to play a similar role.
But we think there is room for the kind of person who wants to engage the culture by sharing the gospel so that people come to faith in Christ. And we think there is room for a person to say, I want to be in the upper level of our government or a school system or a business so I can influence the decision-makers. There’s not just one way to engage with the culture.
Your book outlines six distinct ways Christians contribute to cultural improvement.
PM: The Bible calls us to hold in tension the cultivation of and resistance to the world around us. We believe the Bible gives us at least six different ways to do that. We find these in biblical characters and in history. God calls some of us to be artists who change the world around us by making beauty. He calls some of us to be spiritual trainers who change the world by discipling people and training them in new habits.
God calls some of us to be builders who change the world by building institutions and businesses that help people flourish. He calls some of us to be protestors who change the world by challenging injustice. God calls some of us to be ambassadors who change the world by sharing the gospel and bringing people to Christ. And God calls some of us to be advisors who change the world by influencing the influential.
Can you articulate that tension you mentioned? What do Christians do with that discomfort they feel?
PM: As I talk to Christians, most would agree that the world feels different today than it did just 10 or 15 years ago. In America, Christians are increasingly a smaller demographic of the population. Religious language is changing. Christianity is less prevalent and less prestigious in our culture. We’ve had something like 40 million people dechurch in the last 25 years, and you have a recipe for Christians feeling like we’re no longer part of the mainstream culture.
The Bible tells us that as followers of Jesus we are outsiders. He was crucified outside the gates of the city, and we were called to go and be with him. The Bible tells us that we are exiles. In fact, Peter calls people who probably were Roman citizens exiles. And he’s telling them that your ultimate citizenship and identity doesn’t belong in Rome, but with the kingdom of heaven. So actually, there has never been a time in American history where Christians were insiders.
We can love our country and we can want the best for our country, but our country is still a form of Babylon, a place we’re called both to cultivate and to resist. Nothing has changed on that front. God gives us everything we need not to be combative or conformist outsiders, but instead to be joyful outsiders.
KS: Seeing yourself as an outsider is really important. If you feel like you’re an insider, then you feel like something is being taken away, that there is something you’re owed. A lot of Christians feel that way because of all the changes Patrick referred to, and they’re angry about it and want to fight to take it back. I understand why, to some extent. But Christians were never supposed to see themselves as cultural insiders.
Ever since Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden of Eden, we’ve lived in exile, and we’ve lived in a broken, fallen world that doesn’t hold all the same values we do. If we own that and see that as part of God’s plan, it frees us up to be joyful outsiders, which is then attractive to our culture.
There is also the other extreme, where people are just willing to conform and go along and make peace with the culture. What we’re asking people to do is to think more like Daniel, who tried to navigate the culture, to be a light in Babylon. We are all exiles who are living in a position where we are outsiders, but we can be the light—not through anger or conformity, but instead through joyful resistance.
How is joy for Christians distinguished from joy in the broader culture?
PM: Joy is obviously not the same thing as happiness. Joy is a sense of fullness and robustness in life, even in the face of hardship. At the end of the day, the deep joy that comes from being an outsider is this: When we are outsiders, we are with Jesus. When we are outsiders, we are beside our king. When we are outsiders, we might be afraid, but we know we are with him. His presence, his mercy and his kindness are a joy the world can’t take away.
Why is it essential to recognize that Christians engage with culture in different ways?
KS: Every pastor is familiar with how the body of Christ works together, and that everyone is an eye or a foot or a hand. We need all of the people in our church with different gifts to make the church operate and function the way God planned. In the same way, not all of us have the same role in engaging culture. And a wise pastor, a wise church, is going to allow room for all of these different ways to engage culture, for people who have all these different views, to be a part of the same church and to be able to work together. When we don’t appreciate what other people bring to the table, then we get angry and start accusing people of compromising their faith.
Do church leaders tend to fall into one or two categories more than others? Is any role more right or wrong for church leaders to feel drawn to?
PM: I can imagine a pastor who fits virtually every one of the ways we’ve described, depending on their environment. For example, I know a pastor in Indianapolis who has allowed his church building to function as an art studio during the week. You have artists inside of the church (many of them are not Christian), but they’re creating beauty in a very impoverished neighborhood to bring shalom to it. That pastor is both a builder—he has created an institution—but he has something of the artist too. He understands that to change the world, you need to create beauty. I also know pastors who are protestors. They’re very willing to speak up and challenge what is unjust in our world.
KS: The goal of the pastor is to provide a place in their church for all these people to work well together and thrive. So a pastor needs to embrace their role, but also give space for other people with different ways of engaging the culture to operate and flourish inside their church.
What do you hope church leaders can glean from your book?
KS: Too many of us Christians right now are characterized as being angry and against our communities and culture. We’re seen as combative. I think what we all want is to be the kind of outsiders Jesus taught us to be: full of joy and embracing the role we have. We’re exiles who aren’t in cultural power, and that’s OK. The church has thrived throughout history and around the world when we don’t have power. We can influence and engage our world without sitting in political office. The only way we’re going to do that, though, is if we embrace joy.
PM: Conversely, we don’t want to be the Christians who are compromising and conforming to the culture. To do that well, we need to joyfully embrace the truth. We have always said we want to be a church whose community would be sad if we left. We want church leaders to lead churches that make an impact in their local community. And if you want to change your community, you have to give your people the tools to be change-makers.