Our excellent discussion with George Barna last week on BlogTalkRadio kicked open the door on Christian or biblical worldview discussions. So tonight on BlogTalkRadio, our good friend Wayne Bridegroom will be joining me to continue the conversation. Wayne and I have been bantering back and forth about this all week, so I thought we would just let you in on the discussion. I must admit, a lot of my thinking on worldview is in process. I have long been concerned that most attempts at creating a Christian or biblical worldview are not getting it right, but I’m not completely sure I know why, so you have to realize my thoughts are reaching for something I don’t think I have fully grasped.
I do believe that the whole purpose of a Christian worldview is to have an informed understanding of the culture we inhabit for the purpose of building bridges for the gospel. Here at the Catch, our vision is to introduce the Gospel of Welcome — grace turned outward — to everyone, everywhere. Therefore, in order to communicate with non-Christians, we need to understand them — how they think, what is important to them. The main underlying emotion being compassion.
Most Christian worldview teaching may start off well, but it always seems to veer off track and end up the opposite of what it should be doing: building walls instead of bridges.
What we (as Christians) think about ______________ (fill in some cultural component here like “political correctness”), becomes: what should we think about ________________ , which eventually becomes, “This is just one more thing wrong with the world, and why we need to fight for the right way — our way of thinking,” which ends up throwing more fuel on the fire of a smoldering culture war. We may start with an attempt to understand the culture, but we seem to always end up judging and condemning the culture and separating ourselves further from it in our disagreement.
I just listened to a testimony on a popular Christian worldview website where one of the people who had gone through the program was saying, “Someone brought up critical race theory and we talked about it. We dissected it as a case study, ‘Okay here’s what critical race theory thinks, what do we think about it as Christians?’” So far, so good, but the problem is there’s often no discussion about where we go from there. Regardless of what we think about critical race theory, how do we lovingly engage with people for whom critical race theory is important and/or viewed differently?
“What do we think about such-and-such as Christians” is set up as the most important thing, when it is the least important. Who cares what we think about it? Only other Christians. Non-Christians don’t care what we think about it. It’s much more important that we care what they think about it. Only then can we enter into the discussion with respect, and not to win our point of view, but to build a relationship.
I honestly don’t think Jesus cares what we think about critical race theory, He cares that we care about the people to whom critical race theory is important. Do we care about them? Are we trying to understand them? Do we love them?
If the goal of our worldview is building bridges in the world, not walls, then we want to find out what they think, why they think that way, and what about what they think can we connect with? (That would be a bridge.)
If the goal of our worldview is to correct all the wrong thinking in the world, we will only be building walls. What we think is only going to start an argument.
Don’t miss BlogTalkRadio tonight; it’s going to be a good one.
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