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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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