{"id":1664,"date":"2010-04-29T16:23:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-30T00:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/04\/29\/salt-and-light-questions\/"},"modified":"2010-04-29T16:23:37","modified_gmt":"2010-04-30T00:23:37","slug":"salt-and-light-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/04\/29\/salt-and-light-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"salt and light questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, I heard a clip of a prominent evangelical leader justifying the new evangelical decision to pull back from separatism. The gist of the statement was something like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#222222\" face=\"Verdana\">The fundamentalists lost any chance at influence of the world by their over-emphasis on separatism.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#222222\" face=\"Verdana\">Well\u2026<\/font><\/p>\n<p>Just how well is that influence thing working?<\/p>\n<p>Is North American culture today MORE or LESS influenced by Christianity today than 60 years ago?<\/p>\n<p>Is it the mission of disciples to be salt and light in such a way that they have influence in the culture of the world?<\/p>\n<p>If yes, how would we go about that?<\/p>\n<p>It appears that whatever the new-evangelical strategy was, it didn\u2019t work. I\u2019ll concede that if fundamentalists thought they would influence the world somehow, they failed also. So, let\u2019s just posit for a moment the notion that those who follow Christ are called to be salt and light in the world, and therefore to somehow have a position of influence in the world. One would presume that influence should be towards an increase in Christianity, for starters, but failing that, one would at least hope for some influence on the culture.<\/p>\n<p>So, again, exactly how should we do that?<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px\" title=\"don_sig2\" border=\"0\" alt=\"don_sig2\" src=\"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/don_sig28.png\" width=\"150\" height=\"50\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, I heard a clip of a prominent evangelical leader justifying the new evangelical decision to pull back from separatism. The gist of the statement was something like this: The fundamentalists lost any chance at influence of the world by their over-emphasis on separatism. Well\u2026 Just how well is that influence thing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[116,48,67],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-qQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}