Harambee on Culture
The term "culture" literally means to cultivate and create. Culture is something that man has made in his own image. In Genesis 2:15, man was told to go into the garden and to “Cultivate it and keep it.”It was our mandate, along with God’s help, to cultivate the ground while He brought forth the rain (Genesis 2:5). Man continues to do what he was created to do: cultivate the land. Genesis 3, however, adds tension by recording the details of the fall of man and its devastating effect it has on culture.
Because of sin, no matter what man does, including his best intentions, it often ends in oppression, injustice and indifference. We are called as the church to cultivate God’s peace to those that we encounter, building redemptive communities that proclaim and live a holistic gospel that establishes God’s people in the midst of culture and not separate or syncretistically connected.
The church needs to be separate from the cultures oppressive paradigms, and work toward the benefit of the culture, and the proclamation of the God’s love to all nations (Jeremiah 29:7). We are called as people of God to begin to shape the culture we live in by serving and proclaiming and loving the nations we are called to. There is no doubt that the gospel of Jesus Christ is shaped by the culture, but it is imperative that we live and teach in such a way that we begin to shape the community with the gospel, not with our traditions, and denominational particularities.
We need to embody this word by moving outside of our church walls, and serve the people. We need to teach God’s love by being God’s love to a fallen world. This will mean that we proclaim not with the aim to convert, but with the aim to serve and love our neighbor, while we let God do the work in their lives as He sees fit.