I have been busy this week.
What a stock phrase that is, and for most of you not at all unusual, but it is for me. I am not used to being busy. I am not used to doing a great many things at any time. I also have a terrible habit of praying for specific things and forgetting that I did, and I have a sinking feeling that a month or two ago I asked God that I might be stretched more than I have been recently. Well whether I asked for that or not, it’s happening alright. And it’s both good and bad.
But that’s boring, so let’s talk about cultures instead.
Cultures are slippery things. When you think of culture, you probably think of national cultures. And why wouldn’t you – they’re the biggest, the most pervasive, the easiest to spot (at least at some level). Spend even a month or two in another country and you’ll start to notice all sorts of small things about their culture. Even more interestingly, if you really take a good look at another nation’s culture, really take note of all the funny quirks of their behaviour, you’ll suddenly start to compare it to your own.
This is a funny part of life, I think. Obviously anyone who grows up somewhere will know the culture in the sense that they talk the talk, walk the walk. They don’t even need to be told the rules, in much the same way (you could say in just the same process) that they learn to speak the language without anyone telling them about syntax, verb-phrases or prepositions.
A brief tangent to illustrate this: adjective hierarchy. If you put multiple adjectives before any noun, in formal writing or informal speech, you always, always, follow the same rule for their order. That order is:
Opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.
Pour example: “the old red toy car”. Not “the red old toy car”, not “the toy red old car”. Try any combination you please, this rule is shockingly ironclad. And you didn’t know it (unless you read the same nerdy stuff I do…) until now. And yet, on a much deeper level, you already did. You’ve been using it for years.
And but so the same is true of culture – grow up in one and you know all the rules, follow them effortlessly, feel your intuition telling you when someone else commits faux pas, yet you’d struggle to write a list of even some of them, especially the truly ingrained ones.
There is an evangelical culture. If you, like me, grew up in the church, you too may not have noticed for a long while. It is the water you swim in, the air you breath. But it is there.
As I said above, the really deep habits and movements we learn from this culture are hard to find, but there’s three arenas of church-going life where I personally have noticed this in particular: Bible studies, public prayer, and sermons.
All this and more… next week…