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The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is that the church is called to the work of cultural transformation only insofar as the church is called to help people grow as disciples of Christ in every facet of their lives.
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The cultural mandate is the command to exercise dominion over the earth, subdue it, and develop its latent potential (Gen. 1:26-28; cf. Gen 2:15). God calls all humans, as those made in his image, to fill the earth with his glory through creating what we commonly call culture.
The cultural mandate is given to all people. In Genesis 1:26-28, it’s given to Adam and Eve as the only people and as representatives of all humanity. In Genesis 9:1 it’s given to Noah as the representative of all humanity.
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Corporate witness. Some missional authors rightly emphasize that the church’s corporate witness hugely impacts its faithfulness and success in carrying out the mission God has given it.
Missional living. Missional writers rightly urge evangelical Christians to adopt a missional posture, gearing all of their lives around fulfilling the Great Commission.
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According to Scripture, the local church’s mission is to proclaim, preserve, and display the gospel.
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The basic premise of the missional church is that mission is the very essence of the church. This is a larger claim than saying that every individual member of the church is a missionary: it is a claim that the church itself is a sign, a foretaste, an instrument, and an agent of God’s kingdom reign on earth.
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The short answer is that some individuals identifying themselves as “emerging” get the gospel right and some don’t. And often it’s not easy to tell whether someone has “crossed the line” and denied the gospel. Some individuals affirm the right things but emphasize the wrong things. Others affirm the right things but entirely redefine them. Still others affirm parts of the truth and say nothing about the rest of the truth.
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In order to answer that question we need to put a few biblical and theological pieces into their proper place:
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Absolutely not. The main point of the gospel is the forgiveness of sins through the death of Christ (Luke 24:47).
One promise of God that is bound up with the gospel is that one day God will graciously re-create a new earth in which his people will dwell with him in perfect harmony (Rom. 18-25; Rev. 21:1-22:5). So, one day there will be a totally transformed culture, composed entirely of God’s perfected people dwelling in a new earth.
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See the question “What is the emerging church?” for the necessary caveat that it is difficult to accurately generalize about the emerging church. Still, somebody’s gotta do it.
Basically, what’s wrong with the emerging church is that it takes the postmodern ideology and cultural mood as its starting point—its “given”—which then relativizes Scripture’s role as our authoritative norm for life and doctrine. Examples? Proponents of the emerging church tend to:
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The emerging church is an incredibly diverse movement that sprung up out of evangelical Christianity sometime in the 1990’s. Since it has had no confession of faith, no formally recognized leaders, no denominational structure, and no official institutions, it is difficult to speak accurately about the emerging church as a whole. That said, here are some traits that characterize many within the emerging church movement. Participants in the emerging church conversation tend to:
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God is Lord of the entire universe. As Abraham Kuyper put it, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’”* This means that all humans are accountable to God for all of their actions, including the most mundane or seemingly unspiritual.
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Jesus prayed that his followers would be in the world but not of the world (Jn. 17:11, 14-15).
Therefore, all of Christian cultural engagement should be pervaded with a sense that our citizenship is in heaven, our hope is in heaven, and our affections are fixed on heaven (Phil. 3:20-21; Col. 3:1-3). We’re not of the world, so we should not share its values and hopes and goals.
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Know the history of the problem. In order to understand present racial tensions, one must know something about the history of race relations in one’s context, the history of the church’s involvement in racial oppression, and the particular historical experiences of different minority groups.
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A lot of people today are talking about contextualization because it’s a fancy way to justify targeting the subset of the population they like best.
Some people argue that we have to “contextualize” the gospel and the church into punk rock culture, or elite urban culture, or artsy hipster culture, or rich suburban culture in order to reach such groups of people.
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In order to develop a biblical perspective on ethnicity Christians should recognize that:
