Cultural Enslavement: Breaking Free into Abundant Living

By David Wenell

Abundant life. Who doesn't want to live life to the fullest? Jesus offers us life to the fullest, but few of us feel we have attained it. Jesus calls us to be in the world, but not of it, because we have been made citizens of God's Kingdom. Too often, however, we get too drawn into the world's ways. Often our culture can enslave us.

Cultural Enslavement: Breaking Free into Abundant Living takes a look at ways we become captives of our culture as well as ways to break free of them. Abundant living is Christ's desire for all who follow Him. Discover how to throw off the shackles that hold you back and how to experience life more fully.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621895503

David Wenell

David Wenell is a graduate of Northwestern College and North Park Theological Seminary. He has worked in church and camping ministry, education, and as a stay-at-home parent. In addition to blogging at wandering-in-the-wilderness.blogspot.com, he has been published in The Covenant Companion and RelevantMagazine.com. He resides with his family in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Book preview

Preface

While part of me has been longing to be a published author for a long time, part of me is hesitant to put my name on a book that others will see. I haven’t been perfect in my life. I have hurt people. I have made some mad at me. But I have tried to make as much right as possible. I have tried to confess my sins when I can. I try to move forward and allow myself to grow more like Christ (and more like who He made me to be). I know I have a ways to go. I will probably hurt and offend more people along the way, but I hope that I am also loving as best I can.

I fail a lot. We all do. There are times when I wallow in my failure. When I’m doing well, though, I learn from my failure and try to grow. This is God’s desire for me, I know. I am a sinner, yet I know Christ’s saving grace and love. He redeems me. And so I know that I can write this book, as much as for my own sake as for anything.

I was once at a ministerial retreat where, after some of those personality tests including the Enneagram and discussion over them, I was labeled a prophet at one point. One colleague even nicknamed me Obi-Wan Kenobi—which, as a Star Wars fan, I secretly enjoyed. However, the prophet thing kind of scared me. I wasn’t sure I liked that. I’m still not sure what to do with it. Prophecy—often because of the gloom and doom we sometimes associate with it—usually has a negative connotation.

But I think at its core, prophecy is about speaking the truth. It is about calling people away from the things which distract us from God, and back into His loving arms. I prayer that at the very least, this book does some of that.

I still don’t know that I’m a prophet, or that I want to be one—and hope you won’t hold it against me if I speak as one.

I simply am trying to be a follower of Jesus Christ. I have stepped away from that journey on many occasions, but Jesus patiently awaits my return, beckoning me back with loving arms. I deeply desire to walk daily with Jesus, practicing the presence of God. I have a lot to learn and a ways to go, but there is no other journey I would want to be on.

I write this book as much for myself as for anyone. I need the reminders of places in which I am in captivity; I am still working toward a more abundant life. Maybe this will speak to others, maybe it won’t. My success in writing matters not if I have placed it—or anything else—ahead of Christ.

David Wenell

August 8, 2012

Part 1

The Trap

Cultural Enslavement

"Now there’s an interesting point.

Is a slave a slave if he doesn’t know he’s enslaved?"

—The Editor (Simon Pegg), Dr. Who

A great poet once said: ‘All spirits are enslaved that serve things evil.’

—Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart),

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Imagine if tomorrow, as you wake up and start going about your daily routine, you notice the people around you are in shackles. The kind that prisoners wear in cartoons: hands chained together, feet chained together, dragging a large, black ball. But no one notices it. They go about their days oblivious of their enslavement. Then imagine your horror as you walk in front of a full-length mirror and notice that you, too, are in chains.

What a jarring discovery. A nightmare. Yet, in many ways it’s true. We are captives. We have become enslaved, not by a slave driver, but by ourselves. We have enslaved ourselves by aligning our mindset with our cultures’ instead of Christ’s. We have fallen in love with the things of this world to the point where we put worldly ways before God’s ways. We live in bondage instead of abundantly.

Let us take note that slavery is alive and thriving in America. While the Thirteenth Amendment went into effect nearly 140 years ago, forms of slavery still exist. Sadly, human trafficking and bondage exist in many forms in America. While we will not discuss that here, I encourage you to research and get involved in anti-trafficking movement). The slavery to which I refer, however, has bound many of us. It is also a much more deadly form of bondage. It is deadly because it effects our souls, not just our physical lives. It is cultural enslavement.

Before we delve into what cultural enslavement is, let’s take a brief look at the history of the Christian church and its interaction with the culture around it.

Looking at how Western culture and the church interact has been largely shaped by H. Richard Niebuhr’s book Christ and Culture, published in 1951. The basic premise was that throughout history Christendom and the rest of the world have interacted in one of five ways which Niebuhr labeled as: Christ against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ transforming Culture.

Following the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the early believers brought Christ’s teachings into their Jewish faith. Paul came along, preaching to the Gentiles, and looking at the prevalent Hellenistic culture in light of Jesus’ teachings. The early followers of Christ sought to bring Christ into their culture—getting rid of the bad and redeeming the good, like what Niebuhr would call Christ redeeming Culture.

Ever since Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity and brought it into the Holy Roman Empire, the church and the culture it has been in have had an interesting relationship. The church has often fluctuated between trying to transform all culture into Christianity like the Holy Roman Empire or the European nations which created state churches, or completely staying away from the world’s influences altogether (such as some post-reformation groups like some Anabaptists—look at the modern Amish for this example). Today’s evangelical church often sways back and forth between the two—adopting cultural beliefs and practices in order to better fit in or appeal to the unchurched, or boycotting culture to try and take a stance. In either case, the church has not had the spiritual influence in the world that it is capable of having. Miraculously, God has kept the church alive in the world despite all our efforts to advance our own agendas.

At present a large portion of Christianity has ignored culture altogether, or at least ignored the effects culture has on us. That, or we’ve ushered it into the church indiscriminately, trying to make our worship appeal to the culturally-driven. In both cases, we’ve often lost any influence on culture and let it creep into the church and gain more influence than it should.

Each of Niebuhr’s categories has some merit, but none quite hold the fullness of our relationship with Christ and culture (you can search online for simple summaries of his five points). I mention Niebuhr’s philosophy here, not to get into a discourse on the philosophy of the relationship of Christianity and the world, but to show that we can’t completely ignore culture. It goes on around us, whether we acknowledge it or not. Culture is inescapable. The problem is that too many of us have overlooked the influence culture can have on us.

Many people attend church one day a week, but live the next six days without the influence of Christ in their lives. All too often the view of church is that it is good for teaching our children morals and for earning points in Heaven, but that it has little application for the rest of our lives. We’ve been deceived into thinking we live in the real world apart from our spiritual lives, that we can divorce the spiritual from the secular and vice versa. We believe we can compartmentalize our lives, separating the different parts without contact or influence between them: church, work, school, family, etc.

This, unfortunately, has led too many of us into a condition of cultural enslavement. We didn’t mean for it to happen. We may not even be aware that it has happened. But, over the years, culture’s power has stealthily snuck into our everyday lives, diminishing Jesus’ influence and slowly trapping us in the ideologies and behaviors of the world.

We must remember the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight (I Corinthians 3:19, NIV), and that we are to not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our minds] (Romans 12:2, NIV). Becoming Christ-like instead of worldly requires a conscious daily effort to let the Spirit continue to transform us. The issue isn’t so much our culture itself, but our own surrendering of self to it instead of Christ.

I firmly believe that Jesus did not come to start (or even reform) a religion. I believe that he came to bring transformation; I believe that He came to bring us closer to the way God created us to live before the fall. This includes living in a gracious and merciful relationship with God and others.

Christ didn’t just transform individuals; He used transformed individuals to transform systems. Look at his interactions and teachings with those in Israel. He didn’t come to make Judaism better; He came to transform it. Women were given status in His eyes such as when He stopped to interact with the woman at the well. Lepers weren’t castaways anymore; outsiders had a place to belong. What Jesus practiced wasn’t the same sort of Judaism (and yes, Jesus was Jewish) that the rest of the culture practiced.

When Paul went out on His missionary journeys, He didn’t tell new converts that they had to become Christians or even Messianic Jews. He simply invited them to follow Jesus. Paul went out to bring Christ to the Greek culture. This is why, as I understand it, he used the Greek version of his name rather than the Jewish Saul. He quoted Greek poets and philosophers in his teaching. He didn’t tell people they had to abandon Greek culture, only that they had to follow Jesus and be transformed by the Holy Spirit.

Paul used the culture of the Roman world to share Jesus with those who had never heard of Him. He used their poets to point to God’s existence. He even used their poets and their idols, such as one dedicated to an unknown god, to share with them who the living God is.

That transformation of people led to the transformation of cultures. Ireland is a prime example of this. Irish converts didn’t forsake their connection to nature; they began to see it as part of the goodness of God’s creation. They saw how the spiritual realm and the physical realm were inseparable because Christ was in the midst of both of them—incarnate on earth, but pre-existing in Heaven. He is there now, just as He has always been. He was there to create the world; He holds the world together (Colossians 1:17).

The majority of our Christian holidays originally were pagan festivals that Christians transformed into celebrations of the faith. They saw Jesus in the midst of them; they saw them as opportunities to connect to the rhythms of life as they created the church calendar. They connected the work of Christ to events that were already in their culture. The celebration of new life in spring became a way to remember the new life Jesus offers through His death and resurrection on the cross at Easter. The celebration of light on the winter solstice became a connection to Jesus’ birth, when the Light of the World came to dwell among us.

Modern missionaries are not calling people out of Islam or Hinduism or their culture, but inviting them to discover the Way which Jesus invites them to follow Him within the framework of their own cultures. Here in America, some missionaries have worked well with Native American culture to let them be Christians without westernizing them. Too many Christians have believed that in order to convert people of other cultures, they have to become like Western Christians. Christ came to transform people in their own cultures—not to conform their culture to another.

Paul urged Christians in the Roman world not to fall victim of this: Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will (Romans 12:1-2, TNIV). Unfortunately, most of us in Western cultures have too readily conformed to what is around us, rather than being transformed and being an agent of transformation. European churches crumbled because of their conformity; American churches are too readily following suit (for more discussion on this see Dave Olson’s book, The American Church in Crisis).

Transformation is an inward-out change; conformation is an outward-in change. The first changes us into who we’re supposed to be; the latter changes us into who everyone else wants us to be. Trouble arises when we are transformed by the culture around us instead of Christ. This conformity slowly and subtly ensnares us.

A few summers ago, I put our two boys in our bike trailer and biked to a park near us so the boys could play, hopefully meet some other kids to play with, and have a picnic lunch. While the boys were playing I watched a family arrive at the play area. It was a father and mother with a teenage son and a young girl. The young girl quickly ran off to explore the playground. The mother and son sat on a bench and the father walked over near where the young girl was playing. What I saw next was the impetus for this book.

While in proximity to the daughter, who was actively playing on a bouncing, safety-conscientious version of a teeter-totter, the father pulled out a personal electronic device and began playing around on it. I noticed that the mother and son had moved under the shade of a play structure where they, too, were glued to technological toys: the mother was playing a portable video game, the son listening to an MP3 player.

Actually, the play structure was in the shape of a pirate ship; the mother and son were sitting beneath the deck on a small wooden seat (possibly in the brig?). The daughter was enjoying the park, but she was forced to enjoy it without her family—even though they were present and she probably longed for them to play with her. While the family was all together on a beautiful summer day in Minnesota—upper 70s, slight breeze, no mosquitoes—none of them were actually together, enjoying each other, the park, or the beauty of the day.

This is the picture of cultural enslavement. We have become so imprisoned by our culture—our western, capitalistic, hedonistic culture—that we miss out on life. We have passed over our inalienable rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of personal happiness) in our pursuit of the American Dream. And while there’s nothing wrong with pursuing the American Dream, for most people it often turns into a myopic focus on