In my regular, daily Bible reading over the past year I read through Proverbs 3, a passage I've studied and preached through many times. But during this reading, I realized that in verses 3 through 12 we have all the themes of the rest of the book, and therefore a kind of mini-guide to faithful living. There are five things that comprise a wise, godly life. They function both as means to becoming wise and godly as well as signs that you are growing into such a life:

Part 1: The Big Issues facing the Western Church 

1. Local The church has to support culture-making.  Most of the young evangelicals interested in Integrating Their faith with film-making, journalism, corporate finance, etc, are getting Their support and mentoring from the Informal networks or para-church groups. Michael Lindsay's book  Faith in the Halls of Power  shows That many Christians in places of influence in the culture are alienated from the church, Because They get, at best, no church support for living Their faith out in the public spheres, and, at worst , opposition.

1. The opportunity for EXTENSIVE culture-making in the U.S.  In an interview, sociologist Peter Berger That Observed in the U.S. evangelicals are shifting from being Largely a blue-collar constituency to becoming a college educated population.

His question is - will Christians going into the arts, business, government, the media, and film a) assimilate to the culture Existing baseline narratives So They Become In Their views and values he same as other secular professionals and elites, or b) will they seal off and privatize Their faith So THAT from Their Work, Effectively, They do not do Their work in any distinctive way, or c) will they do enough new Christian 'culture-making' In Their fields to change things? (See http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/HHR_Archives/AfterSecularization/8.12PBerger.pdf )

I am often asked: “Should  Christians be involved in shaping culture?” My answer is that we can’t not be involved in shaping culture. To illustrate this, I offer a very sad example. In the years leading up to the Civil War many southerners resented the interference of the abolitionists, who were calling on Christians to stamp out the sin of slavery. In response, some churches began to assert that it was not the church’s (nor Christians’) job to try to ‘change culture’ but only to preach the gospel and see souls saved. The tragic irony was that these churches were shaping culture. Their very insistence that Christians should not be changing culture meant that those churches were supporting the social status quo. They were defacto endorsing the cultural arrangements of the Old South. (For more on this chapter in American history, see Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.)
 

Over the holidays I read a good (and devastating) review of William P. (Paul) Young's The Shack in the most recent print edition of Books and Culture: A Christian Review (Jan/Feb 2010.)  It was a reminder that I was one of the last people on the planet not to have read the book. So I did. So why write a blog post about it? It had sold 7.2 million copies in a little over 2 years, by June of 2009. With those kinds of numbers, the book will certainly exert some influence over the popular religious imagination. So it warrants a response. This is not a review, but just some impressions: