The 60s Counter Culture Movement and the 21st Century Church

Am embarking on a 10-week course (Apr 9 - June 25) in my home church where I will be exploring the 60s countercultural movement and its impact on Western culture and its impact on Christianity.

Much of the material will come from Os Guinness's classic The Dust of Death - and I am still in the process of reading as much as possible to glean further knowledge.

Part of the reason I proposed the course was to try and get Christians to understand the current cultural and social context in which the church is placed within. This, as I explained, was due to a growing disenchantment with modernity especially in its false myths of science, human reason and progress (within a secularized framework). In art, the depiction of a fragmented and despairing human was portrayed superbly in the works of artists like Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon (the 20th century English painter).

Later works of art, for instance, Jackson Pollock's Convergence (just one of many of his random-splashes), Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup cans and even Samuel Beckett's Breathe all highlighted the existential anguish and meaninglessness that the post-modernity movement have come to associate themselves with.

The 60s countercultural movement then, was an attempt to breakfree from the naive optimism upon which Western culture (with its Darwinism beliefs) was built upon. This revolt was not unexpected, however, the solutions that were proposed (Eastern mysticism, psychedelics and violence) were not any better. For the Christian church, the question would be: what then are our alternatives? How then should the Gospel of Jesus Christ be positioned (I am not arguing for a social gospel) in order to challenge and transform a broken humanity? Do we see the mighty power of our God and the thundering truth of the revealed Logos? Only when we do so are we then worthy of our Christian calling.