Easter is coming soon. The church across town has an Easter egg hunt. Your leadership team is talking about how this diminishes the focus on the true meaning of Easter. The culture is taking over the church! Then the discussion turns to the Easter Bunny. Rabbits don’t lay eggs. What is that all about?
Your leadership team makes an emphatic statement: “We’re a church that’s not going to let the culture invade this church.” The leaders have totally missed the point. They are 180 degrees off in their thinking. They are defensive. They could learn a lesson from their Christian ancestors who took a posture of offense: to overcome culture.
“Easter” is a word that comes from Eostre—the concept of fertility and new life. It is thought that Pagans in the northern hemisphere celebrated this festival, which is related to the phase of the moon in the spring (the time when new life is bursting forth). This explains why Easter is all over the March/April calendar from year-to-year.
Details aside, here is the point: Christians who understood the real meaning of new life and the Resurrection aggressively took over the secular celebration and poured biblical meaning into it. I don’t think anyone celebrates the Eostre Fertility Festival anymore. But billions celebrate Easter!
Focus on these issues:
- Instead of moping around about how culture is invading the church, go on the offense and creatively find ways you can invade this secular culture.
- How could your church or a group of churches in your area creatively invade the mouthpiece of this culture, the media, during “festival rituals?”
- What could you do, as a church, to reach people for Jesus during the Fourth of July celebration in the U.S.?
- What demonstration—outside the church—could you make, in your community, during Thanksgiving?
- How do you engage the rituals of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day?
- What does your church do to impact and care for men and women serving your country overseas—not just those from your church, but those from your community?
- In what way does your church honor your mayor, law enforcement, school teachers, public high school basketball team that just went to state?
In the spirit of your Christian ancestors, who were on fire for Christ and had a passion to reach lost people, get aggressive, creative, take the offense, and invade your culture. Abandon the fortress mentality.
Kent Hunter, founder of Church Doctor Ministries, is known as the Church Doctor. His most recent e-books are The Future Is Now and The J-Dog Journey, available at no cost. Contact him at (800) 626-8515, by email, Twitter, Facebook, or visit www.churchdoctor.org.
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