The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) National Conference addressed the gospel and cultural engagement through topics such as politics, race, religious liberty, parenting, millennials and sports.
Held Aug. 26 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, the conference featured pastors, authors and professors who spoke on what the Bible says about cultural engagement and how to avoid cultural Christianity.
Russell Moore, ERLC executive director, noted that politics has weaved its way into a form of religion in the United States.
Moore referenced a statement he’s heard frequently in recent days: “This is the most important election we have faced in my lifetime.” But this idea leads to two things, he said.
“The people who are with you become disillusioned and angry,” Moore said, noting those same people will ask, “Why don’t we have all of the things you told us we would have?”
The second outcome is that some will become cynical because of the way the original sin and common grace interact with one another, The Christian Post reported. Sin and common grace have no final victor and no final defeat, Moore explained.
‘Responsibility to contextualize’
“We have a responsibility not only to speak truthfully. But we have a responsibility to contextualize not only to the present culture but to the future,” Moore said to the more than 900 conference participants. “We have to speak in words that we can live with for future generations of evangelical Christians and our neighbors. And as we’re doing that, ensuring the fact that the gospel is clear.”
Dallas-area pastor Matt Chandler spoke during the conference too, noting the Bible Belt has “churches that are filled with unregenerate [people] in a culture where any type of conservatism is just lumped in to being a Christian.”
Pastors in the Bible Belt, Chandler said, often have to work hard to help “really moral folk understand that they’re non-Christians.”
‘Hidden in darkness’
“If people in the Bible Belt don’t know that what it means to be a Christian is for the rest of their life they’re to be repentant in their life, then every little struggle they have will be hidden in the darkness because they will believe that they did that when they got saved,” said Chandler, pastor of The Village Church in Texas. “I just can’t tell you the sheer volume of people I know who are enslaved to sin and feel like they can’t tell anyone about it because they got saved 15 years ago.”
Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Baptist Church, Hendersonville, Tennessee, pointed participants to a two-fold strategy Jesus gave the Church to engage the culture — an invitation to follow Him and an investment in others.
“We’re going to change the culture the same way Jesus changed the culture and that’s with an invitation to follow Him,” Gallaty said. “We will never affect the culture publicly until we have been transformed by the gospel privately.
“Intimacy with God always precedes ministry,” he said. “Who we are in Christ trumps what we will ever do for Christ.”
Other speakers included Andy Crouch, executive editor of Christianity Today; Greg Thornsbury, president of The King’s College in New York City; Trevin Wax, Bible and reference publisher for LifeWay Christian Resources; and Jackie Hill Perry, poet and artist with Humble Beast Records.
Breakout sessions were held on race, religious liberty, parenting, millennials and sports. And an all-female panel discussed women and cultural engagement.
The 2017 National Conference is scheduled for Aug. 24–25 at the same location with Christ-centered parenting as the theme. (TAB, BP)
Share with others: