"Preaching against culture..."

With all the brouhaha lately regarding the Emerging Church Movement, I've recently begun to take a more serious look at what the ECM leaders are actually saying, by both reading source materials... ah, from their source (ahem - what a concept), and by reading secondary materials (by that, I mean works from those within the movement looking at themselves and describing what they see -- getting their "take" on what they are). That means for me, primarily, doin' the bloggin' thang...

To be honest, the more I read and hear from ECM-types, the less concerned I'm becoming regarding Emerging practice (heck, we were Emerging before Emerging emerged, if all you're looking at is a fluidity of style and not exalting a certain cultural context as being "Christian"). Of course, the more I read and hear from ECM-types, the more deeply concerned I am about Emerging doctrine... well, mostly more of the implications of Emerging doctrine... but that's the subject of another several thousand posts, so I won't dive into that one just yet.

...all that aside; in reading through a blog by an SBC pastor who is into the whole Emerging thing, and reading about what was said at a recent conference in Seattle, I ran across this quote that he... ah... quotes... and I thought it was actually quite profound and worthy of remembering:

Preaching against culture is like preaching against somebody's house. It's just where they live.

Why is this such a smashingly good quote? Because it's another way of saying, "you can't expect unbelievers to act like believers. They don't know any better; they don't need to reform, they need to be reborn. They don't need to 'clean up their respective acts,' they need to come to Jesus." Besides, you can barely expect believers to act like believers nowadays...

Anyway, good thought-provoking quote.