Dealing Intentionally with 3 Levels of Culture {a guest post}

Culture. It’s a word that has been used for years to define something; a group of people, the traditions of a country, the atmosphere of an organization. If you Google a definition you’ll find these three things at the top of the definitions:

The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively
The customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group
The attitudes and behavior characteristic of a particular social group

Culture, in a nutshell, is the environment we allow ourselves to experience every day. Lately I’ve been trying to breakdown how culture breaks us down as Christians and Christian families and wanted to to present an analysis and a challenge.

Most of you reading this are probably American so I am going to direct this toward typical American culture. In our culture, there seem to be three distinct levels:

Our immediate culture (our family)
Our adjacent culture (our friends and extended family)
Our extended and ubiquitous culture (the crowd of people which we find ourselves among every day)

Now, faced with those three levels of culture, we have several choices to make.

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Shaping our Immediate Culture

First, how are we intentionally shaping and creating our immediate culture in our family? Is it a culture of Christ-centered living, decisions, dreams, and attitudes? Have you made a conscious effort to allow God’s Word to affect everything you do and say? If so, great! Keep it up! If not, take a step back and ask yourself how you can do this more intentionally.

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The Influence of Adjacent Culture

Second, are we allowing our adjacent culture (friends and extended family) to influence our immediate culture? If so, how? Is it a positive influence? Does our adjacent culture encourage and enforce the immediate culture we’ve purposefully established? Does it go directly against it? If it encourages it, that’s fantastic! Foster and feed the adjacent culture, encouraging and thanking your extended family and friends for consciously joining you in molding and shaping the long-term faith and lifestyle of your immediate culture. If your adjacent culture is in opposition to your immediate culture, there are really only two things you can do:

Challenge it. If you know your friends and extended family want to pursue an ever-deepening Christian walk and lifestyle but you’ve noticed some things that are unhealthy or downright unbiblical creeping in to the culture, you’re going to have to take a stand and challenge them. It’s a very difficult thing to do, yes, but the results, although they could be painful, will reap eternal benefits.
Remove it. Either remove it from yourself or remove yourself from it. If you can’t challenge the adjacent culture but know that it is unhealthy to your immediate culture, you need to remove it. Yes, there could be some pain involved, but pruning is a necessary part of healthy growth.

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How do we Handle Extended Culture?

The third choice we need to make is how we’re going to handle our extended and ubiquitous culture. What has come to be known as “normal” in American culture is causing a lot of problems. Normal lifestyles have us majorly in debt, treat divorce as “no big deal”, see relationships as things to “throw away and move to the next one”, view high amounts of alcohol consumption as normal, gossip as an exciting word, and more. We say things like, “Well, everybody gossips, drinks a lot, cheats, swears, watches vulgar movies, insert whatever here, so we might as well just do it, too.” We strive for normal (bigger house, more activities, successful jobs and kids) when weird and set apart (comfortable house, more free time, extreme generosity) would be a much better choice. (Read Craig Groeschel’s excellent book for a fantastic analysis on this very topic – affiliate link.)

We can choose to blend in with our extended culture or make an intentional choice to be set apart from it. I much prefer a literal translation of the Bible but I recently came across a version of Romans 12:2 from the Message and thought it was extremely profound and timely:

“Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

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Intentional Choices Yield an Intentional Lifestyle

As Ashley consistently writes about on this blog, her day-to-day living is intentional. We often do things “without even thinking” especially when it comes to how we view and accept cultural “norms.” “Well-adjusted to your culture” means that you’ve become completely unaware of how it’s affecting your spiritual life and daily choices. You fit into the culture and all of a sudden find yourself in a situation without any idea how you made it there and are desperate to get out, all because you didn’t intentionally choose to guard yourself, your immediate culture and your adjacent culture against the effects of the extended culture you’re a part of.

By no means am I saying that we should shelter ourselves from culture and not love them with deep compassion just as Jesus did. As well, we can’t become strict and legalistic to the point of not ever experiencing grace and freedom. Go into the world, have fun, love your neighbors, but all under the constant purpose and awareness that you have the choice to either “fit into it” or “fix your attention on God [and] be changed from the inside out.” Love Him deeply and make every decision intentionally based on what His Word says.

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What will your choice be? Share with us in the comments…

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about_photo_standard Ryan Egan is a follower of Christ, husband, father, musician and worship leader from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He blogs at I am an Offering with the purpose of encouraging church attenders and leaders to live a life of worship in every area of their lives, and he is employed as Social Media Specialist for homeschool curriculum provider Alpha Omega Publications.