Lexham Press is proud to announce an exciting partnership with Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Over the next few months, Lexham Press will be publishing three new books in collaboration with SEBTS. The first of these books is written by Bruce Riley Ashford, Provost and Dean of the Faculty at SEBTS.
In Every Square Inch: An Introduction to Cultural Engagement for Christians, Ashford shows how God wants our whole lives to be shaped by Jesus? lordship. We must remove the barrier between ?sacred? and ?secular,? and allow the gospel to inform everything we do.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to Every Square Inch: An Introduction to Cultural Engagement for Christians:
In 1998, at the age of 24, I left the United States for the first time in order to become a university English instructor in Tatarstan, a predominantly Muslim republic in a Central Asian corner of Russia. I had never traveled farther west than San Antonio, farther north than the tip of Maine, farther east than Nags Head (North Carolina), or farther south than Miami. Can you imagine what a never-ending carnival of cultural wedgies the next two years were for me?
My first week in the country, for example, I was introduced to a special drink called ?kuhmis,? which my buddies told me ?will taste a lot like an American milkshake.? And truly, it was white and frothy just like a vanilla milkshake. But it turns out that it was white and frothy because it was fermented mare?s milk. At some point in history, an entrepreneur had decided to milk a horse, allow the milk to rot, and then bottle it as a delicacy. Later that week, I also was served fish gelatin for breakfast.
But before long?culinary oddities aside?I was immersed in a cultural context that was a mixture of Eastern European and Central Asian, and which had been shaped in various ways in the past by Sunni Islam and Soviet communism, and more recently by global capitalism and postmodernism. These religious and ideological influences shaped everything in the culture, including the arts, sciences, politics, economic, education, entertainment, family life, and even sports competitions. I found myself wondering what it would look like for me to live a faithfully Christian life in that particular context.
This small book that you are reading is written as a little introduction for Christians who wish to live faithfully in their cultural contexts. It shows how all of life matters to God, and how every Christian can serve powerfully as a representative of Christ, even if he or she is not an international missionary or a pastor. It is meant to show that God cares not only about the goings-on within the four walls of a church building but also about the goings-on in every corner of society and culture. He wants us to take seriously our interactions in the arts (music, literature, cinema, architecture, interior d?cor, culinary arts), the natural sciences (biology, physics, chemistry), the social sciences (psychology, sociology), the public square (journalism, politics, economics, law), the academy (schools, universities, seminaries), sports and competition, and homemaking. Every dimension of our lives relates in some way to Christ and can in some manner be directed toward him.
The digital edition of Every Square Inch: An Introduction to Cultural Engagement for Christians is now available for pre-order.
