Weekly Feature
Creating A Culture Of Influence
Source: Mal Fletcher
It is fundamental to the Christian worldview that human beings were created for influence. According the Gen. 1:26-28, the first calling God placed upon the shoulders of humankind was command to influence. We were enobled and enabled to influence our environment more than it influences us; to shape our world more than it shapes us.
Influence is hardwired into the human condition. One way or the other, influence will flow. Either we will influence the godless, egocentric culture around us or it will most certainly force us into its mould.
All around us everyday, there is a battle for influence going on. Light vs darkness, flesh vs spirit, temporal vs eternal, spin vs truth, political correctness vs prophetic correctness.
Either you will invent the future or someone else's vision of the future will re-invent you!
When we fell from grace, we lost some of that capacity for influence, becoming in many ways the influenced rather than the influencers.
When Christ died, his redemptive work bought back everything we had lost in the Garden including our ability to shape and influence our environment more than it shapes and influences us.
As Christians, we have been re-positioned to influence our world.
Romans 12:2 shows us that it is our right and privilege to be transformed as our minds are renewed, so that we are able to overcome the world's pull on our hearts and minds, and live out the good, acceptable and perfect will of God.
Abraham Kyper, the nineteenth century journalist, theologian and Dutch Prime Minister, wrote: 'There is not one part of our world of thought that can be hermetically separated from the other parts, and there is not an inch in the entire area of our human life of which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not cry "Mine!"'
While some churchmen of his era taught that Christians should retreat from everything relating to the secular world, Kuyper borrowed from Paul's teaching to give us the idea of 'sphere authority'.
This is the idea that church and state are both of divine origin, yet both serve different functions.
Each must obey God's laws: the state must not try to be neutral towards God, but must recognize his supremacy over the civil sphere of authority. Government policies and procedures must respect God's moral precepts, so they must uphold the sanctity of marriage and the family; they must restrain and punish.
No one is entitled to rule absolutely, for that is a divine prerogative alone. God delegates authority to human agents in family, church, school and state, and those who govern in such spheres are accountable to God in the discharge of their duties and in the exercise of their limited authority.
This means, for example, that neither the state nor the church is to intrude upon the other spheres. Each should seek to protect the rights of the other to operate freely.
Kuyper's concept of sphere authority contradicted the basic principle of socialism that would give the state the right to regulate life in practically all of its aspects, economic, political and social.
According to Deuteronomy 28, God's people are destined for leadership; to be the head and not the tail; to be above and not beneath. Leadership on any level begins with creating a culture.
Culture begins with an accepted way of seeing reality. A culture is the reflection of a world-view, applied to a group of people in a given environment. A culture is a way of interpreting what is good, acceptable and normal.
It is a fact of sociology that the group within a society which has the strongest and most well-defined culture will become the leading voice in that society. In any group of people, the one who builds the strongest culture always takes the lead.
For churches and leaders to influence our highly secularised society, they must establish a culture of influence within the church which is stronger than that of the surrounding environment.
We need to build into the people we lead a sense that influence is their right and responsibility; that God has called them to shape events in their world and equipped them to change the city more than it changes them.
That begins with answering three fundamental questions: What kind of city or nation do I want to be living in 10 years from now? What kind of city or nation would God want me to be living in? And what am I prepared to do now to set that in motion?
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