Ken Myers of the Mars Hill Audio Journal is featured in this month’s issue of the PCA magazine byFaith. Here is a wonderful quote describing the disconnect so many churches, PCA and otherwise, between theology and culture. Go here to read the entire interview.

My work is really about producing thoughtful Christian faithfulness. If you start to think carefully about how you eat, how you spend time, how you think about place, all those things, some people may think you’re trying to achieve salvation by works. So my sense is that people with that kind of tendency–not just in the PCA–accept conventional ways of living from secular culture because they regard the effort to think thoughtfully and live deliberately as a kind of semi-Pelagianism [A view that man is partially depraved and capable, by his own free will, of cooperating in God’s work of grace]. And the idea that living deliberately is semi-Pelagian just baffles me. Because when you don’t, you end up living in accordance with a very post-Christian, and in significant ways, anti-Christian culture.

It seems to me that a large number of PCA pastors are really committed to theological rigor, and they want to nurture people’s enthusiasm about theology, as if that were the end of discipleship. But theology is a means more than an end. Orthodoxy serves to inform how we live, and God cares how we live. So if all of our theologizing never challenges the cultural conventions that we have uncritically assimilated from the world around us, then our theology isn’t doing what it should.

At the same time there are some in the PCA who, for the sake of evangelism, want to accommodate contemporary culture in significant ways, as long as no biblical law is broken. My sense is that a lot of those people don’t realize the meaning of the cultural changes they’re endorsing. They tend to think that culture’s just a matter of meaningless, arbitrary style. So basically what matters is getting people saved, but there doesn’t seem to be a vision of Christian discipleship that would include challenging how people live from the bottom up.