Preaching Dangerously...Continued from page 2

PREACHING: You talked about cultural influences. To what extent is it alright for a culture to influence preaching and worship? At what point to do we draw the line?

LABBERTON: I think biblical faith is fun­damentally, culturally embedded. God is without embarrassment culturally reveal­ing Himself throughout the whole Bible. Clearly there is no such thing as a culture-free revelation. There is a revelation that is more than culture, but it is always embed­ded in culture. So I don’t think there is an option to ever be culture-free. I think we are always culture set.

So then the question is: how do we expose and attempt to get a grasp of those influences? To see how culture has already shaped every act of language and perspec­tive and relationship and so forth, to enable our lives to actually be re-cast in light of the larger culture which is the kingdom of God.

In some ways you could say the king­dom of God is not the absence of culture but the re-creation of culture. Our goal as biblical people is to try to live into the greater culture of the kingdom, rather than the myopic and self-oriented nature of cultures generally. I think that is where the revelation of God meets us, first in the crisis of our own cultural patterns, and then hopefully delivers us from our culture, beyond our culture.

I think that one of the great gifts of the Bible is that it meets us in culture but then it expands our vision. So God is always particular for the sake of being universal. He is not particular for the sake of some­thing becoming small but for the sake of clarity and accessibility, and then it is for the sake of unleashing something that is much greater than that particular area.

So when God was the most particular in Jesus, He did the most universal thing for the world. It was in that very specific act that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ.

PREACHING: Your church is in a unique setting in Berkley California. Berkley is identified as an intellectual center but also as very politically engaged. Within your own local church setting, do you find yourself adapting worship and preaching to try to speak to that culture?

LABBERTON: I think the most relevant thing in the world is the gospel. So I think what we are trying to do is allow the inten­sive relevance of Jesus Christ to be made known to every generation. So our goal at Berkley is to simply do everything we can to lift up Jesus Christ?in every conceiv­able way we think is faithful and true?to every generation and every kind of person that may wander through our doors or that we may find in the highways and byways of Berkley.

Wherever you are, we want you to con­sider Christ and we want to be with you in that process as a community. We want to be with your in questions of doubt, as much as issues of faith, we want to be with you in questions of fault in complexities of the world and the economies and its injus­tices, and also in local practical realities of neighborhoods and schools and families and personal crisis.