Lesslie Newbigin, who wrote the words in italics above, was in no doubt about the answer: modern Western culture. Newbigin went on to challenge western churches with the stark view that they were “an advanced case of syncretism”: churches had allowed the gospel to be squeezed by the modern Western story. The result is that the gospel has often been reduced to a private religious message about an otherworldly salvation postponed to an indefinite future.

How had Newbigin come to this conclusion? Having spent 40 years as a missionary in India, on his return to the West he could see things that those of us who have spent our entire lives in the West fail to see.

So how can Christians in the West live out God’s Big Story as revealed in Scripture (creation-fall-redemption-renewed creation) while living in a culture dominated by the Modern Western Story (MWS) of material progress based on science and human reason? That’s what the Level 5 Diploma students have been thinking through this term in our course on Secular Humanism – part of the World Religions course.

What then might this Christ-like life look like? Neither complete rejection of the MWS - it wouldn’t be faithfulness to go and live in a commune somewhere in Fiordland, - nor complete acceptance of it – which would lead to us being, at best, Sunday Christians, rather, critical awareness of the pervasive culture all around us. And that will lead to us subverting culture, but also creating culture, as part of God’s call to us to be culture-makers in Genesis 2:15. And in this, we erect signposts as God’s people that one day, on his return, Christ’s Kingdom will fully come here on earth, and the MWS will be no more.

By Lewis Varley
Photo above: Vinny with Martin Campbell at the Cambridge Community Marae