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Gunn_inline“Pastors should be exegetes of both Scripture and culture,” says David Gunn, editorial director of publications for Regular Baptist Press and managing editor of the Baptist Bulletin. His workshop was titled “When the Pulpit Meets the Newsroom: The Ministry of Analyzing and Expounding Current Events and Cultural Trends.” It’s a crash course on the why, when, and how of integrating this unique emphasis into pastoral ministry.

According to Gunn, there is a major need not only to impact the unchurched culture, but also to interpret and expound culture through the lens of a Biblical worldview for the benefit of churchgoers. “Only 20 percent of self-professed Christians claim to read the Bible daily. And even they only spend an average of 3.5 hours weekly in the Word of God. A whopping 23.1 hours weekly are spent watching television.” These statistics suggest that, much as pastors might want to think otherwise, the primary force shaping their congregants’ worldviews is secular culture, not Scriptural precepts. “People are inundated with current events, cultural trends, and extra-Biblical messages on an hourly basis,” Gunn says. “If their pastors don’t equip them to interpret these messages in a Biblically faithful manner, then who will?”

Gunn’s proposal is not novel: even during the apostolic era there was a need to engage current events and cultural trends critically. Writing to the Philippians, Paul used the example of Christ’s self-abasement as a stark contrast to the culture’s emphasis on social stratification. He also routinely made use of cultural lingo to contextualize his uniquely Christian message to a pagan world (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12). Jesus’ criticism of the seven churches in Asia Minor is even more pointed: In the letter to the church of Laodicea, He specifically condemned them for buying into the cultural norms of their unsaved countrymen, such as trusting in financial wealth, thriving industries, and medical miracles. (It’s a message remarkably well-suited to 21st-century America!)

But Gunn isn’t interested in turning the Sunday morning sermon into a news broadcast. “I think we’ve all known pastors who considered themselves professional culture warriors,” he says. “Every Sunday morning sermon would routinely turn into a game called ‘let’s hopscotch through the newspaper and denounce society’s sins.’ This approach is deeply flawed. It robs God’s people of the opportunity to sit under the regular expository preaching of Scripture.” Instead, Gunn urges pastors to find other venues for dedicated analysis and exposition of current events and cultural trends, such as prayer meetings, Sunday evening services, blogging, and social media. Special dates, such as Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, can also provide a good opportunity for this kind of critical cultural engagement.

Turning to methodology, Gunn recommends Kevin Vanhoozer’s approach presented in Everyday Theology (InterVarsity Press, 2007). “Vanhoozer’s method is great, but he tends to be rather abstruse,” Gunn says. “So we can boil his guidelines down into basically four non-negotiable principles for doing cultural exposition: First, always interpret contextually. Second, be mindful of governing presuppositions. Third, don’t cut corners or settle for reductionistic accounts. And fourth, always relate everything back to the Biblical worldview and metanarrative.”

One way that pastors can get a head start on orienting their congregations to cultural engagement is by using Current Culture, the latest adult Sunday School curriculum by Regular Baptist Press.