Walter Bruggemann is a theologian I'm currently knee-deep into. He has an over-arching premise regarding the role of ministry in society/culture that I've been wrestling with. He lays this out over 19 points but I'll summarize it for you in 4:- Everyone lives by a script and we are socialized into that script and it is outside our control.
- The dominant script in America is "technological - therapeutic - military - consumerism" and it makes failed promises of happiness and safety.
- It is the task of ministry to de-script that script and present an alternative script whose key character is the irascible, illusive, and sovereign Triune God.
- Since most of society is ambivalent and ambiguous about this script, ministry is to also manage that ambivalence in faithful ways through preaching, liturgy, social action, education, justice, and good neighboring of all kinds.
For me, this is really helpful in illuminating the tensions that I often feel regarding church and culture. There are competing and differing scripts at war with one-another....and that war plays out throughout culture. And that war has little to do with "worship style preference" or "quality of our church campus" and everything to do with how followers of Jesus choose to live.
This is how I now see the "principalities and powers" that we, as followers of Jesus, fight against.
They aren't (usually) overt and explicit expressions of evil...but subtle choices to live according to a new narrative - a new script.....and that is TOUGH - full of TENSION - and ultimately demands us to trade in our sensibilities for a life of risk that is radical, provocative, and unsafe.
