Engaging with our culture

Acts 17 Paul used the philosophers’ own Athenianculture and engaged with it, to point them to Jesus Christ.He didn’t condemn them for their objects of worship, butrather used their interest in spiritual matters to engagewith them about Jesus.This principle is behind our ‘engaging with culture’approach, first used by Martin Robinson who wascommissioned by Bible Society UK to look at how BibleSocieties around the world could be more effective inevangelism in a post-modern culture.Here in Australia, it’s led to a range of innovativeprojects, including:
• The ‘Jesus. All about life’ project, which has now runin Adelaide and Canberra with plans now underwayfor Brisbane.
• Commissioning and production of resource material forchurches, based on the Narnia film series and the Da VinciCode film
• Commissioning and production of a board book for childrenaged 0 to 18 months called ‘ Because Jesus loves me’In all of these projects our aim has been to engage withpeople where they are and then lead them to consider theclaims of Jesus.
The Canberra campaign of ‘Jesus. All about life’ wassupported by 160 churches. The concept of using prime-timemedia to generate an awareness of Jesus and what He saidabout life has proved to be a great way of startingconversation with non-Christians.
With the release of the film of The Da Vinci Code, we havecommissioned a book and are running a series of seminarsentitled ‘Da Ciphering Da Vinci’. Again the aim is forChristians to use this book, which challenges Dan Brown’sversion of the Bible and how it came to be written, to engagewith friends, family members and work colleagues about thetruth of Scripture.
It’s all been extremely effective in helping churches andindividual Christians engage with our post-modern culture.

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