GroshLink

The CMU faculty discussion group recently discussed A New Kind of Urban Christian by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, NYC. We found this an excellent piece, but hard to put into practice. Part of the time I gave testimony to the social, cultural, and spiritual impact of our family's local congregation Allegheny Center CMA. Toward the end of the conversation, one faculty member asked us to consider the University campus our neighborhood. And to ask the question, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? I really like this analogy b/c it is very much the case as the city/campus goes, so goes the culture.

Our next phase of pioneering ministry will explore how followers of Christ called to be lifers in the academy must prayerfully embrace their Kingdom responsibility in these strategic cultural-shaping centers. Please pray for doorways to relationships and conversations in which we can borrow/modify some of the below talking points from Tim:

1. Once on campuses, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture. It is not enough for Christians to simply live as individuals on the campus. They must live as a particular kind of community. Jesus told his disciples that they were "a city on a hill" that showed God's glory to the world (Matt. 5:14-16). Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city, an alternate human culture within every human culture, to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways.

2. It will not be enough for Christians to form a culture that runs counter to the values of the broader culture. Christians should be a community radically committed to the good of the campus as a whole. We must move out to sacrificially serve the good of the whole human community, especially the poor. Revelation 21-22 makes it clear that the ultimate purpose of redemption is not to escape the material world, but to renew it. God's purpose is not only saving individuals, but also inaugurating a new world based on justice, peace, and love, not power, strife, and selfishness.

3. Christians should be a people who integrate their faith with their work. Culture is a set of shared practices, attitudes, values, and beliefs, which are rooted in common understandings of the "big questions" -- where life comes from, what life means, who we are, and what is important enough to spend our time doing it in the years allotted to us. No one can live or do their work without some answers to such questions, and every set of answers shapes culture.