How to use
Teaching text from the supplied slides, with each slide beside the part it goes with. This is a reading edition of the deck; a full talk script has not been supplied.
Christianity as Counterculture
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
Romans 12:1–2 MSG
A generation of deconstruction
A Generation of Deconstruction & the Post-Christian Culture
"Think about the implications of how we answer that question (Is there a Creator and creation?): If there's a Creator, then there's design... If there's design, then there's intent... If there's intent, then there's morality... But if there is morality, then there is accountability... And all human beings avoid accountability, which makes this a vulnerability that is easily exploited." ...... "But the problem is, if there's no accountability, there's no reality."
John Mark Comer, Live No Lies
How culture shapes us
How culture shapes us & Why Christianity is a counterculture
Rebuild the temple
death to deconstruction & REBUILD THE TEMPLE
Spiritual formation as part of culture making
“Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.”
Jesus, Matthew 12:33
“The secret of transformation into Christ-likeness is to realize that if you change the inside, the outside will follow.”
Dallas Willard
“Spiritual formation cannot, in the nature of the case, be a 'private' thing, because it is a matter of whole-life transformation. You need to seek out others in your community who are pursuing the renovation of the heart.”
Dallas Willard
We plant gardens by growing people.
We plant gardens by growing people.
The slides
Eight teaching slides. The personal-conversation slides are omitted from this reading edition.
Bring it to your group
These resources may be used in churches, small groups, classes, discipleship cohorts, workshops, retreats and personal study. Before you lead one:
- Adapt the examples to your local context.
- Keep the biblical and theological structure.
- Don’t remove the formation practices just to save time.
- Prepare your facilitators before the group begins.
Full facilitator guides, with setup, timing, safety notes and discussion questions, are available on request. For teaching, publishing, translation, partnership or licensing, contact The Garden Project.