Living Counterculturally

I took a class on intercultural communication in my second semester at Moody Bible Institute back in 2018. My professor and I ended up clashing over several different things in that class which likely comes as no surprise to those who know me.

One of the major arguments that my professor was making was that we ought to be like those we are trying to reach. We need to be part of their culture. While I can definitely get behind the need to understand their culture, it is not necessary, nor helpful in many cases, to truly be part of their culture. You see, culture is not actually a “neutral” thing. Each culture in the world has good things and bad things. Some of it is neutral, but more often than not it has a mixture of good and bad things. For example, in the United States, we are highly individualistic. Believe it or not, this is a bad thing. Humans are meant to be both individuals and part of a group. This can be seen quite clearly in Scripture. The culture of the US tends to lean heavily on the “I can do it all, and I don’t need help” side of things. My professor would have argued that this is a neutral trait that one would need to embrace in order to reach Americans. This idea simply isn’t biblical.

One of the biggest things I have learned in my studies and walk with God is that we are supposed to stand out from the culture around us. If we blend into the culture around us, how are we being effective witnesses for Christ? Jesus was and is countercultural, and he calls us to be the same. We should stand out from those around us. Why? Because God lives in us! If we aren’t different from who we were before Christ, then we aren’t doing something right. Something has gone horribly wrong. This means we aren’t living as adopted sons and daughters of God. Jesus gives his example in the Gospels. He spent his time with the undesirables, but he stood apart from them in his ways. It was the cultural norm back then to not have anything to do with the people that Jesus was hanging out with. This was especially true for a rabbi. But Jesus lived in a way that was fundamentally different from those around Him, so much so that people couldn’t help but ask, “Who is this man?” Those are the types of words that we should strive to hear others say about us. Only we will then tell them that it isn’t us but Christ living in us that makes us the way we are. Yes, we should learn their culture and customs to help us understand how best to reach them, but the most important thing is to live as God’s sons and daughters, and more often than not, that means we must be fundamentally different from them. David Wells states, “This is a two-sided practice: “Yes” to biblical truth and “No” to cultural norms if they damage our walk with God and rob us of what he has for us in his Word. Being transformed also means being unconfirmed.”¹ Are there good things in culture? Yes! However, culture can never be used to trump what God’s Word says on a topic. We cannot truly live for God if we do not hold to the Bible over cultural norms.

Culture is a human thing. God didn’t create each individual culture directly. He made us creative individuals who also need to be in community. When we chose to try to prove that we were as mighty as God at the Tower of Babel, He confused our languages. Therefore, those who had similar languages clumped together. Different cultures came out of that. God then gave the perfect culture to the Israelites. The moral law of the Old Testament (as lived out by Jesus) is the perfect culture. Unfortunately, humans are incapable of following that culture which is why we needed Jesus to fulfill the law and give us another way to come to God.

Jesus was and is the perfect example of God’s perfect culture. He was a Jew but not in the way that every other Jew was. This is why he repeatedly tells the Pharisees that they are doing things wrong or that they don’t understand the law. They were doing things wrong, and they didn’t understand the law. Jesus showed them what it actually means to be a Jew, but if there is no perfect culture, which seems to be the stance of most people even Bible scholars, then Jesus was in the wrong for telling them that they were wrong. He showed them that they had to be different from the world. He showed them that the culture they had was not correct. Yes, there were good things in their culture. They got some things right, but they also got some things horribly wrong. This is in the same way that every other culture in the world gets some things right but many things wrong. This is why we must live as Jesus lived. We need to be radically different from the culture around us because that culture isn’t God’s design. How Jesus lived is God’s design for culture.

As Christians, we are not of this world. We are also told not to conform to the ways of this world which is anything apart from God. Culture very often fits into that which is not from God. There is a fine line that we must walk. We need to remove as many obstacles as we can that will hinder us from spreading the Gospel. That involves learning about their culture and conforming to things that the Bible says are okay, but we need to remain separate in order for our lives to make an impact for the Gospel. Here are some verses for you to study on this subject: John 17:14–16, John 15:19, 1 John 4:4–6, Romans 12:1–2, James 4:4, 1 John 2:15–17, John 18:36, Philippians 3:20, 1 Peter 2:11–12, and Ephesians 5:1.

Jesus told us to expect the world to hate us. Why? Because we are not of this world and this world doesn’t understand us. Additionally, He warned us that being liked by all is not a good thing. Luke 6:26 says, “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.” They spoke well of the false prophets because they were of the world. All true prophets of God are more often than not rejected by the people they are trying to reach so it is okay to be different from the world. Actually, it is a very good thing. God calls us to be fundamentally different from those around us.

¹ David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-Love of God Reorients Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 17.