There has been an ongoing debate through out the church’s history of the relationship of Christianity with the world.  On the one hand, fundamentalism tells you that Christians are to be totally removed from the outside world, and the evangelical ghetto was developed.  On the other hand, liberalism tells you that Christians should embrace the world, and thus the Christian distinctives were removed.  Neither option are right, so what are we to do?

We are to look to Jesus Christ.

Jesus prayed for his believers that they be “in the world and not of the world” (John 17).  If they are to be salt, they are the salt of the earth; if they are light, they are to be the light of the world. Jesus wants His people to love sinners and at the same time pursue holiness.  As we are conformed more and more into the image of Christ, part of that will mean we live in the world incarnationally as Jesus did and love sinners with authentic gospel-devoted lifestyles.

John Stott, in his great little book Our Guilty Silence: The Church, The Gospel and the World, shares about the “holy worldliness” of the Son of God who became flesh.  Consider Stott’s words as you continue to cultivate community contacts.

Of the Son’s ‘identification’ with the world into which He was sent, there can be no shadow of doubt.  He did not remain in heaven; He came into the world.  The word was not spoken from the sky; ‘the Word was made flesh’.  And then He ‘dwelt among us’.  He did not come on a fleeting visit and hurry back home again.  He stayed in the world into which He came.  He gave men a chance to behold His glory.  Nor did He only let them gaze from a distance.  He scandalized church leaders of His day by mixing with the riff-raff they avoided.  ‘Friend of publicans and sinners’, they dubbed Him.  To them it was a term of opprobrium; to us it is a title of honour.  He touched the untouchable lepers.  He did not recoil from the caresses of a prostitute.  And then He, who at His birth had been ‘made flesh’, was in His death ‘made sin’ and ‘made a curse’ (John 1:14; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13).  He had assumed our nature; He now assumed our transgressions, our doom, our death.  His self-identification with man was utter and complete.

Therefore when He says to us ‘go’, this is what He means.  ‘As our Lord took on our flesh, so he calls His Church to take on the secular world’; otherwise we do not ‘take the Incarnation seriously’.  We are to go as He went, to penetrate human society, to mix with unbelievers and fraternize with sinners.  Does not one of the Church’s greatest failures lie here?  We have disengaged too much.  We have become a withdrawn community.  We have been aloof, instead of alongside.