The Church as Counter-Culture: What It Means to Be Genuinely Different

The question of the right relationship between the church and culture is among the oldest and most debated in Christian social thought, from the early apologists through Augustine's two cities to H. Richard Niebuhr's classic typology to the more recent conversations about church and culture in post-Christendom contexts. The current moment in American Christianity has made the question newly urgent. The cultural accommodation that characterized much of mainline Christianity's engagement with modern culture produced institutions genuinely relevant to the culture and gradually indistinguishable from it. The cultural isolation that characterized certain strands of fundamentalism preserved theological distinctiveness at the cost of genuine cultural engagement. Neither pole has produced what the New Testament seems to envision: a community that is genuinely different and genuinely engaged.

Counter-cultural does not mean anti-cultural. The church that is genuinely counter-cultural in the New Testament sense is not defined by what it opposes — by its list of cultural no's — but by the positive and compelling alternative vision of human life and community that it embodies. The early church was counter-cultural not primarily because it refused to participate in Roman religious practices but because it embodied a way of life visibly and compellingly different: communities that crossed ethnic and social boundaries, that cared for the poor and the sick in ways the culture did not, that faced persecution and death with a hope the culture could not account for.

"The church is counter-cultural not by its list of refusals but by the compelling alternative it embodies — a visibly different way of being human in community."

What Counter-Cultural Actually Means in Practice

The contemporary church is counter-cultural to the extent that it embodies genuine alternatives to the culture's most fundamental commitments. In a culture of radical individualism, the church offers genuine community. In a culture of productivity and achievement as the source of worth, the church offers worth as a gift rather than an achievement. In a culture of tribal hostility, the church offers the reconciliation of genuine enemies. In a culture of entertainment as the primary leisure category, the church offers silence, depth, and the unhurried encounter with the holy.

The pastoral challenge of leading a genuinely counter-cultural community is that the counter-cultural community attracts people who have been shaped by the culture — people whose imaginations and desires have been formed by the very forces the community is called to resist and offer alternatives to. Building genuine community in people formed for individualism. Cultivating Sabbath rest in people formed for endless productivity. This is not quick work and it is not simple work. It is the long, patient, ordinary work of formation — sermon by sermon, practice by practice, relationship by relationship — over the years and decades in which a genuine community culture is built. That is the calling. It is worth every year.