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iQuestions Faculty, Ted Baehr 
 
 
Question: 
 
If the Church doesn’t have an impact on pop culture, how can the 
Church be effective at all? 
 
Answer: 
 
A lot of the interns who come to work with us—and a lot of the parents 
are asking me similar questions—they‟re saying: “Has the Church 
become irrelevant?” “The Church doesn‟t have an influence.” “The 
Church is not able to be „salt and light.‟” “What good is it anymore?” 
 
In fact, there was a study at USA Today that said the majority, 83% of 
the kids were leaving the Church. Do you know why they‟re leaving 
the Church? Because they feel that the churches are not engaged in 
teaching them really serious material. They say it‟s sort of a “pizza 
night teenage group.” 
 
Teenagers are smart enough to know that they don‟t just want an 
irrelevant church. The Church has to be engaged in considering the 
great issues—whether those are moral, political, or media issues.  
 
One of the things I teach my class at Berkley is that the Church had 
the most well developed Philosophy of Art.  
 
There‟s a series of books, each one about a couple thousand pages 
long, by Von Balthasar on the history of the Church‟s aesthetics where 
the Holy Spirit was—that part of the Trinity was concerned with 
aesthetics.  
 
 
 
The aesthetics of the Church—the Philosophy of Art—was so well 
developed that people may not have been great Christians, like da 
Vinci and Michelangelo, but they made great art that glorified the 
good, the true, and the beautiful. 
 
We have to rediscover that fact that the Church needs to be engaged 
in shaping the world around it with the great ideas. Calling people to 
higher standards; calling people to the good, the true, and the 
beautiful.  
 
That will inspire them to create things that are incredible and inspire 
the culture to raise the level of the culture from the debased, from 
being engaged in the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh, to being 
higher and more engaged in the higher pursuits that help people fulfill 
their God-given talents and gifts.  
Baehr -2- 
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