Seeing Culture in 3-D

Big Idea: We should critique culture by discovering, discerning, and deciding.

Passage: Paul in Athens (Acts 17:22-34)

• Paul goes to Athens after being run out of another town.
• Athens is the intellectual and cultural center of the world.
• If you want to find the best philosophers debating the current trends and worldviews of the day… you go to Athens.
• Where do you go to find some of the most well-known philosophers in our days… They are in Hollywood, New York, Nashville, etc. They are the ones creating movies, writing songs, designing video games.
• Paul engages with these men by understanding their worldview (using their idols, their poets, etc), using it to build a bridge to the Christian worldview, and ultimately directing them towards the gospel.
• Paul understand that to be a faithful witness to the outside world, we must also be cultural critics who understand the culture and are able to engage with it.
• The approach I’m about to give you for critiquing culture is by no means the only “biblical approach.”
• I doubt that Paul was thinking in the terms that we are about to use, but I do think we can see that this approach lines up with what he did.
• I have not developed this approach (It was developed by Walt Mueller and CPYU), but I think it is a great approach.

Main Points:

• DISCOVER by observing and asking questions.
• DISCERN by celebrating the good and exposing the bad.
• DECIDE what to do with it. 

Give Me Just the Facts… and a Worldview to Make Sense of Them

 

Introduction:

• Refresh from last week.
  • Two Things to Emphasize – References are not endorsements, and Parents know best.
  • Culture is a form of worship
    • When we create culture, we worship – God or something or someone else.
  • Culture is full of God’s footprints
    • There are often good things in pop culture that can point us toward God.
  • It’s not enough to reject culture, or to blindly consume it, but rather we should be critical consumers of pop culture.

Attention Funnel: Optical Illusions

 Big Idea: Critical consumers of pop culture look for the worldview.

Main Points

• A worldview is the beliefs and understanding through which we make sense of the world.
• Everyone has a worldview, but not all worldviews are equal.
• Weigh the worldviews of pop culture against a biblical worldview.

Woodworking, Cooking, Writing Papers, Lady GaGa, The Fault in our Stars, and Martin Scorsese

 Attention Funnel: Mashup Movie Trailers – Taking Pop Culture and Making More Pop Culture out of it.

Where are we going with this series?

• Biblical Understanding of Culture
• What’s in a Worldview
• An Approach for Critiquing Culture
• Movie Night
• Movie Critique and Small Group Song Critiques

Introduction:

• Why do a series on Pop Culture??
  • Because it’s influence is universal!
    • I would be willing to bet you all listened to music this week, watched a TV show or movie, or read part of a book.
  • Because our Faith should affect every nook and cranny of our lives.

Infection Lesson #5: Setting the Heat

Infection #5

Setting the Heat

Attention Funnel: Animal Videos of Animals acting different then we would expect.

• These videos are odd or unique, because these animals are acting or behaving in a way that we don’t expect them too. Monkeys aren’t friends with dogs, hamsters don’t go out on valentines date. That’s not how they normally behave.
• How do we know this? Because we know something of the culture of animals. Hamsters run on wheels and eat hamster food. Dogs chase cats. Deer run away from dogs, etc, etc.
• These things stick out to us because they go against what we expect from the animal’s culture.

Introduction:

• What is a culture?
• This word can mean several different things. Perhaps one of the main things we think of when we hear this word is: the arts, food, dress, and language of a particular time and place.
  • ILL: I love the sights, smells, and tastes of the Spanish Culture. The way they dress, the music they listen too, and the food they eat is fascinating
• For the sake of this lesson I want you to think of culture as:
  • the attitudes and behavior characteristic of particular social group
  • the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture.
  • I love the way that people live in Costa Rica. Time is not such a pressure. People are more hospitable and relational, and families are more tight-knit.

 Big Idea: Leaders influence the groups they belong too.

• A thermostat, rather than a thermometer.
  • One simply reads the heat, the other reads and sets the heat.
  • We are in unique groups that we have the opportunity to shape and change, rather than just conforming.

Main Points:

• We can create and change the culture we belong too.
• The gospel should shape our culture.
• Leaders don’t wait… they initiate.