Gabe: When Christians discuss culture, they often talk about being “in the world but not of it” and the classic principle of being salt and light. How should Christians respond today when they are in the middle of a culture that can be corrupt and decadent?

Mike: A couple of things come to mind. First, it is a society that is corrupt and decadent. Second, in the best sense of the word, not enough Christians are in the “middle of a culture.” I think it was Os Guinness who said we have enough Christians in society but they are not the right kind of Christians. If you are mixing it up with real live people in real live situations in the wider world, you’re going to get enmeshed in some pretty cruddy stuff, or sin. Historically, Christians have understood that there was a difference between sin that provoked us and sin that offended us. It’s not a real clean divide because your level of response has a lot to do with the health of your conscience. Remember, conscience is what God gave us that he didn’t give the animals; it demarcates us from the animals. It’s our moral compass speaking to us about right and wrong. Here’s the paradigm: the healthier the conscience, the more that evil and sin in the world provokes us. In the Scriptures, being provoked always leads to engagement.

Think about when Paul, for example, went to Athens. It was a highly pornographic city, yet he spent the whole day studying its sullied culture. Kind of like flying to Amsterdam and walking up and down the red light district really taking it all in. Yet the sin of Athens provoked Paul. Most Christians flee such a scene. And I can hardly blame them! Yet our ability to withstand such an onslaught of sin is directly proportional to the health and strength of our conscience. If you pull the lens way back you can consider Jesus Christ who had this wonderful existence in heaven as far away from sin as he could be. What was it like for Him to arrive in Bethlehem? Wasn’t it a pretty yucky world he dove into? Why didn’t he get a whiff – having never tasted sin – and high tail it to the hills? Or why didn’t he start a commune in Iowa just to get away from the big bad world? Because he was provoked by the sin. The sin of the world caused Christ to roll up his sleeves and say, “We have to do something about it.”

Now that’s one side of our response to sin. On the other hand, the weaker your conscience, the more the sin actually offends you instead of provoking. And offence leads to withdrawal. Don’t misunderstand – all sin is bad. But when you’re provoked, as God was with the golden calf, you roll up your sleeves and go after it. When you’re offended, you run for the hills. Sometimes it’s good to run for the hills. When Potiphar’s wife was hitting on Joseph, Joseph headed for the hills. Her sin was offensive, and it ought to have been offensive. That was a good move.

Obviously there’s no hard and fast rule here. It has a great deal to do with the health and strength of your conscience. That’s why alcoholics and rehabilitating drug addicts are very offended when other people drink around them and they can’t get near the door of a bar; they have probably defiled their conscience to a great degree. That’s sad but OK, in some regard. The challenge is not mandating that for everyone else. People who are offended very easily tend to mandate for other people what is appropriate for them and what isn’t.

Gabe: How can someone work on having a healthy conscience?

Mike: So few people have even written on it anymore. I would say to do all that you can do to pick up on the 31 times in the New Testament that the conscience is mentioned. Start with Paul who said, “I’ve lived my whole life with a clear conscience.” He was smart, but it didn’t mean that he got everything right. I would say a healthy conscience is someone who has got a lot of EQ, that is to say – they are self-aware. If you want to get serious about having a healthy conscience, I would get 3 or 4 friends that will be completely honest with you and ask, “What do you think I’m aware of? What do you think I’m not aware of?” See if it hurts so much that you shut down. If so, you probably don’t have a very healthy conscience. If you say, “I really want to know, I really want an honest response.” If you hear it and say, “You know there are some things that I’m not aware of. I really want to become self-aware,” you’re probably moving towards being a person of a healthy conscience.

Gabe: Is there an example that you could give of someone being provoked versus being offended?

Mike: I think today’s films offer such a setting. Consider the movies Avalon and Memento. I see both films as redemptive because they convey a truth about memories. Avalon shows the power of memory through passing on stories. Memento makes the same point but comes at it from a chillingly different angle: what if you could not make memories to pass on? Now some people are offended by Memento because it has violence in it – along with some language and the f-word. Others are provoked by that. People who are provoked see the point and feel the point of the film, even with the use of the f-word.

You do have to be careful. Nothing is gained by blowing someone out of the water. I often find that I have to set up the point of the film along with explaining provocation and offence. Otherwise you just watch people’s toes curl and check out from the film, and that’s not worth it.

Walker Percy said bad books lie; they lie the most about human condition. There are films of gratuitous violence or sex where there is no redemptive value. What you are always looking for is if it’s telling the truth about the four chapter story – even just one of the chapters. A film that is offensive is one that tells a lie. It lies about the truth. Or it glorifies the fallen and disordered state of our world and lives.

Gabe: Community is something that many churches talk about. They talk about creating authentic community. Can you help define for us what community means?

Mike: I was with a group last Friday morning and one of our friends had come back from Africa. He was saying, “What can I do about the challenges of Africa?” I responded, “Listen, don’t worry about Africa for the moment. Here’s a question: Do you think more people ought to take mass transit?” And he said, “Yeah.” I said, “Great. You just figure out what it would take to get 10% of our local village to take mass transit. Once you figure that out, then you’ll figure out what needs to be done in Africa.” He immediately began to see the layers and layers of players needed to pull it off. City councils, auto makers, rail lines, funding, etc.

So, what would community be? It would be a group of people who have engaged in this task – like throwing a ring in the mountain of Moldor. Think about community in terms of a fellowship and how Tolkien framed up fellowship. Fellowship was a task – they wanted to get something done.

Community, if you look at what any decent sociologist says, is merely yada yada until it becomes a habit. And therein lies our problem. Community is not a habit of American life.

We are pretty naive about what Alexis de Toqueville noticed all the way back in the 1820’s. He said that Americans coined a new word. It’s called individualism. And it is systematized; probably in the neighborhood you live. America still has the vast majority of the world’s single-family homes. In Switzerland, community is systematized. You don’t get anywhere without joining a community, and you have to conform your day to a community. In Switzerland, I can walk out of my hotel’s front door at 8 minutes past every hour and hop on a bus. From that point on, I’m connecting to all of Europe via rail. In the US, you have to take a car to get to the rail that basically takes you to very few destinations.

So if you want to talk about “developing a community,” steal a page from the recycling industry. Recycling has become a habit in our family. It became a habit because systems were put in place all the way down to the yellow barrels, and I can get the yellow barrels picked up and I can do my part. If you’re going to change habits, like getting people out of cars into mass transit or getting them to recycle, if you just take one area and work it out, you’ll say, “Oh my goodness! This is going to take a lot of people.”

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