 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to Unfiltered. Pastor David, welcome. Thank you, John. Pastor, this question is going to probably take a couple of unfiltereds to answer. And it has to do with the culture and the church. And I want to just formulate this question and then allow you to share your input on it. But it's cultural defining the church. And as that is, as culture is, you know, we probably think it is, we see this brainwashing that has been occurring to our children, but what's the difference between that, the brainwashing of our children with gender roles and all this, versus the Christian parent who doesn't bring their children to church or there's a lack of parenting at home, is there a difference with that? And how does that fit in with culture defining the church? Well, the culture does. It's interesting that on the one hand obviously the culture is going to influence the church because we're not the first century church. We don't have the same culture that was in the world 2,000 years ago, whether it be the Hellenistic culture, the Greeks, or whether it would be the Jewish culture where the gospel first penetrated and spread from. So obviously we're not first century Christians. We're not living as first century people. We're not Jewish and we're not Gentiles of the same stripe that were part of the countries that had been Hellenized and even in the Roman provinces. And so on the one hand obviously culture changes, you know, because cultures will transform their essentials of culture that remains stable and all of that. But the fact is that over the centuries things adapt and things change. Well, as culture always influenced the church, I'd say, yeah, to a degree. Even from the beginning when the first real problem the church had to deal with was related to the Hellenized, the Greek culture, Greek-speaking Jews, the widows being neglected and the Jews who were natural born in the land Jews who were Jewish by culture and first language, etc. There was that division that began because of difference in the way that the Gentile Jews were looked at, the Gentile, the Grecianized Jews, etc. So what is it that united them? Well, what united them was a strong group of individuals who knew the gospel, who knew the power of the Spirit, who could unite them around the right kinds of things. And so culture has always influenced the way that we practice our faith and thus the faith is always adapted to the culture that it's part of. With that said, sometimes the culture can overwhelm the church and so what you have today in the church may be not so much church services but different kinds of discourses or perhaps what you'll have in the church today may be smoke and lights and things during worship to try and create some kind of otherworldly feel or it becomes a rock concert or a pastor who's taken on the personality of a politician or a famous person or there's a thousand ways that he may become adapted to an environment and begin to transmit his own cultural preferences to the church. So yeah, the culture around us, culture surrounding us, even in the United States is different. So you have a West Coast approach to ministry and then you can have all the way across to an East Coast approach. You know, the West Coast and the Calvary chapels, for example, many of the Calvary chapels are more exuberant in our worship where you get to the East Coast, many of the Calvary chapels there are a little more demure, a different kind of vibe that you have. So culture does influence and the cultures that we're reaching into will influence. So the thing that remains the same, though, is the emphasis of the Word of God and how it transforms the people within that culture. And so culture does invade the church through the educational system, through the entertainment system, through the literature that is being presented by the movies or the songs that are played. All of that is conforming the mind of the Christian to the world. And that's why Paul would say that we're not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. That's why we're to dedicate ourselves as living sacrifices. That's why, because the world is putting us in its mold. And so each culture may be different. There are different essentials to the culture, but the church has to have the biblical answer for the things that are missing within that culture. Because the cultures miss, they all miss the same thing. They miss love. They miss joy. They miss peace. They miss the things that they would understand within the framework of what those things are within the culture. They're missing all of those things from a biblical perspective because they're pursuing the things that the enemy has convinced them is joy or peace or prosperity, if you will. And so Calvary Chapel has not conformed itself to the culture, but has performed within the culture. And we have asked God to move us in the direction that keeps us pure. And the way he does that is by concentrating on the word of God and our teaching and living and the power of the Holy Spirit that has all been made possible to us by the grace of God. And so in every Bible study that we teach, we want to make sure we're teaching the word of God, not caught up in tangents of what's taking place right now. You need to know the truth for the moment, but rather the eternal truth that will take us through that truth of the moment, if you will. And we need to have the power of the Holy Spirit that gives us the strength and ability and gifts to be able to not only perform, but to transform within this culture. Amen. Tomorrow, when we record again for Unfiltered, I want to touch a little bit more on that in the culture as you mentioned that it invades the church and it's pretty much been doing it with our children and then has the church plateaued and declined. So I want to talk a little bit more about that and we can do that in our next session. I do want to invite you, though, to our Wednesday evening service tomorrow evening where we're celebrating communion after the Bible study and you're taking us through Romans chapter 15. Chapter 16. John, where were you? And so look forward to that. Invite your friends and family to come join us and again we'll be celebrating communion after the Bible study. Come on out. Pastor David, thank you so much for sharing on this and in our next recording we'll touch more on this and we look forward to seeing you at church. God bless you. Thank you for tuning in.