The Rev. Canon Phil Ashey

One of my favorite Anglicans, John Stott, once reminded us that we need to be Christians who have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.  Granted, that was in the old days when people actually read newspapers!  I’m sure today he’d say we need to have our eyes on the Bible as much or more than we do on internet news and social media.  But the point he is making is that if we want to reach people with the good news of Jesus Christ, we have to know not only the good news in the Bible, but also what is happening in our culture, so that we can engage it.

And the news in our culture is very challenging.  From a biblical standpoint, we now find ourselves in what Carl Trueman and others have documented as the rise and triumph of the modern self.  We live in a culture obsessed with the nature of human identity divorced from any conviction of the existence of objective truth .  It is wildly unpopular and politically incorrect to believe there is absolute truth and that one can know it.  The relentless sexualization of human identity is a feature and symptom of this abandonment of objective truth.  

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