The Worship Leader | Christ In The Cosmos, Church & CultureSample

Jesus Leads the Culture 

H. Richard Niebuhr developed five models for how Christ deals not only with the cosmos and church, but also with culture. He suggested the following ways in which Christ interacts with culture: (1) Christ against culture, (2) the Christ of culture, (3) Christ above culture, (4) Christ and culture in paradox, and (5) Christ the transformer of culture. 

Think of the above like a car. In the Christ-against-culture model, culture is driving one way and Christ is standing in the way desperately trying to hold it back. This portrays Christ as weak. In the Christ-of-culture model, Christ is moving in the same direction as the car, and it portrays Christ as tortured teenager giving in to peer pressure. In the Christ-above-culture model, Christ works a higher way above and outside the car, but this can produce a view of God that’s deistic, detached, and removed. The Christ-in-paradox is the view that God gets inside the car with us and is sometimes the driver and sometimes the passenger (Jesus take the wheel comes to mind). This is the eternal schizophrenic God—always in search for his place. Lastly, in Christ-the-transformer-of-culture model, he takes the old heap of metal in that car, he obliterates it, reshapes it, makes it new, and completely redeems it. This last model is what I believe to be most consistent with the Christ of the Bible.

Earlier we discussed Jesus as our “minister” in Hebrews 8:2. Ironically and curiously, the same word used for Jesus in Hebrews is used in Romans 13:4 by Paul in referring to the secular and evil authorities of our world. Even those in worldly cultural leadership have been granted some authority by God to work their rhythms, liturgies (forms), shapes, and ideas into the soil of God’s world. They are in fact liturgists and worship leaders of sorts. 

All that is done in culture cannot be disconnected from worship. Everything is worship. What this needs to cause us to picture when we think of “worship leadership,” is that we all must engage Christ in our own spheres of influence in culture, and those Pastoring Churches should think much bigger than singing (even though this is crucial), and must think more about how to Pastor and equip people to allow Christ to shape people’s affections in worship in media, education, politics, business, family, church, arts, and more.