Christ and culture? I'll sleep on it.

I am in church because it is unresponsive to culture.

I know that sounds anachronistic in a church-culture that is dying to stay in touch with what's "next." What I mean is that I was drawn to church because of tradition. Because church doesn't change.

When I was in my early twenties, fresh out of the best education money can buy, cued up with critical-thinking skills to attack the world and make my mark, instead of being a world-beater, I found myself crushed by the lack of available guidance about how to be a human being.

I wanted to fall back, like falling spread eagle on a big bed, onto a tradition. I wanted to discover - and be held - by a long tradition, one that has systematically explored, generation after generation, questions of what it means to live as a human.

I wasn't going to find what I needed on the internet. I wasn't going to find it on my own by searching. I wasn't going to find it in my self-selected group of friends. What I needed rested in something old. Something more durable than present-day taste-making or popular wisdom can conjure.

I found Jesus. Jesus (I hope) gives a shape and a depth to my human being. I like what Jesus does to my body and my spirit. And by "like," I mean the kind of like that is not always comfortable, but feels bone-deep "right." Many people share this understanding of Jesus. People today as well as people who lived long, long ago.

Eventually, I would come across H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture, and discover that there is a long and ongoing argument about the Christian tradition's relationship to culture. If you haven't read it, and these questions interest you, you should do so. It will, among other ways that it affects you, deepen your appreciation for why Christianity is at the same time both vitally responsive and adaptive to a given culture AND dismissive and apathetic about the culture.

I know I'm supposed to be energized about the future of the church and how it responds to, adapts to, and even transforms the culture around us. But part of me stiffens... or yawns at the conversation. Part of me finds it crazy-making. Part of me wants to fall back again into the part of the church that is willfully ignorant about cultural forms. Part of me is determined to be non-anxious about cultural change... knowing that form without substance is empty. And the substance of church is that it is a place where I am held and can hold other human beings. When that happens, church happens. Culture be damned.