What cultural issues are most pressing for the Church today? Where should Christians center their attention and priorities? When we seek to be burdened for all that burdens the heart of God, many Christians tend to desire to fight for every cultural issue. Yet, the Church has a responsibility to discern which issues take priority over others. In doing so, we are able to better steward our servitude for the glory of God. In this video, John Stonestreet depicts the balance Christians must maintain of prioritizing certain cultural issues over others.
- Issues Not Worth Fighting ForÂ
- Issues with Human Identity
- The Heart of the Gospel
Which Cultural Issues Should Christians Focus On?
The great atheist thinker Friedrich Nietzsche said, “All truths are bloody truths to me.” In other words, if I believe it, I’m going to fight for it and die for it. I think sometimes Christians can fall into that trap to think that everything is an issue that’s at the tip of the spear worth dying and fighting and bleeding over. I think we need to focus in, as the church, at some of those issues that are really the most important.
It seems to me that all the issues that we need to address have something to do with the issues of human dignity and human identity. You could talk about everything. As a dad of three little girls, I care a lot, not so much about the fashion industry because of modesty issues, but because we’ve actually set up a culture that treats women as nothing more valuable than what they look like. They’re being compared day in and day out to other human beings who don’t exist in real life.
In Regard to Sexual Issues
When you bring up all the sexual issues, it’s the same thing. It’s not just the sexual behavior that we’re moving on, it’s that we want to say somebody’s fundamental core, most important thing about them are their sexual inclinations and sexual choices. I think all of these issues go at the heart of the gospel because the gospel begins in, as Nancy Pearcey wrote in her excellent book, Total Truth, in Genesis 1, not Genesis 3.
It doesn’t begin with the fall. It begins that God created us in His image and in His likeness, and gave us a role and a responsibility and a place to play. That’s huge. Christians can speak to those issues whenever somebody is being dehumanized. That brings up issues of life, and issues of marriage, and issues of bioethics, and biotechnology because all of these have to do with the dignity and the value of the human person.
