counterculture or kingdom?

My day job (besides taking care of my own babies) is helping families build healthy and sustainable sleep foundations for their babies and toddlers. One of the first things I try to instill in every set of parents I work with is the following principle:

Respond, don’t react.

When you respond to your baby’s crying in the middle of the night, you might pause for a moment and listen. You might evaluate the sound of their cry. You might compare it to how they normally communicate with you when they’re hungry, sick, cold, or just annoyed. Based on all of that information, you’d then decide what kind of response they need, and offer it to them accordingly.

This way of operating allows your baby, not yourself, to be the guide of your actions—in contrast with when you simply react, rushing to stop the crying in any way that you think might work, even if it’s not what your baby needs.

I think a lot of us as believers and believing churches could stand to work on this.

Among congregations that highly value the Bible and the holiness of God, there is a temptation to recoil from the secular culture and go in the opposite direction—ironically, instead of actually following the guidance of the Bible.

We react instead of responding.

Consider one example from my formative years: A book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye was published in 1997, at the height of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board’s extremely popular and widespread “True Love Waits” abstinence campaign. The book and the associated purity culture movement gained enormous traction in evangelical Christian circles. And it was a reaction to the Sexual Revolution’s influence on church youth in the 1970s and 1980s.

But instead of achieving any meaningful “purity” or teaching a healthy sexual ethic, sound data now overwhelmingly indicates that the principles of purity culture primarily succeeded in warping an entire generation of Christians’ understanding of sex and sexuality (see the work of Sheila Wray Gregoire).

Or how about another that is both as old as time and very current (and, clearly, on my mind): The effort to stop any movement toward true mutuality in husband-wife relationships, let alone toward equality of men and women in a church setting, has in the past several decades largely been a reaction to the feminist movement. More recently, it has gained a new momentum as we recoil from the confusion in society around gender and the gender binary.

And instead of putting on display God’s glorious Genesis 2 vision, in which men and women work in equal partnership to achieve His goals on earth and reflect His nature, the church’s grip on complementarianism has only succeeded in handicapping our witness by Christianizing the idea that some human beings naturally rank higher than others. This idea is anti-Scripture, anti-Gospel, and anti-Christ, but nevertheless has been used by the church to justify atrocities throughout history, from slavery to the Holocaust to many forms of abuse.

When the Bible calls us out of the patterns of the world, it doesn’t say “Observe the way the world is going and run in the opposite direction.” Instead, the Word of God calls us to discernment. Discernment is what we need to navigate an environment that is rarely black-and-white. Discernment is what we need if we intend to respond instead of react. Discernment is what we need when the answers aren’t easy.

Discernment is what keeps us off the endlessly swinging pendulum of react, react, react.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

- Romans 12:2

Like taking a moment to breathe and tune into my baby’s cry in the middle of the night prevents me from acting out of my own panic or frustration and allows my baby’s need to dictate my response, taking the time to investigate the Scriptures and listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit when we notice unholiness in our culture allows God, not the culture, to be the leader of our actions.

Doing a 180-degree turn away from the culture does not make us holy or our culture better. There are often pieces of goodness even in the parts of our culture that we find most abhorrent, and in our haste to react, we lose the good along with the bad. Thus the traditional Christian church, desiring rightly to uphold Scripture’s clear teachings that men and women are not interchangeable, at the same time lost hold of Scripture’s clear teachings that God made men and women absolutely equal in both calling and value.

Holiness comes through transformation—transformation that takes place through the renewing of our minds. Our thoughts, intellect, reason, perceptions, judgments, and determinations must be made completely new. We think of the kingdom of heaven as the “upside-down kingdom” not because it operates exactly opposite of how earthly kingdoms do, but because it operates in a way that is entirely foreign to all of us. It is not instinctive, it’s transformative. To be part of that kingdom, we can’t just change course; we must be born all over again, into an entirely new way of thinking, understanding, judging, acting.

Then alone can we discern the heart of God, which doesn’t fit neatly inside any of our comfortable categories.

But if we study our Bibles through the lens of our culture, it will be culture, not Scripture, that gets the last word.