You can never be too incarnational, for properly understood that’s akin to asking whether you can be too Christ like. Towards the end of the Gospel of John, Jesus prays “I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.”

In others words, Jesus calls us to move within this world without being of this world, to engage with our culture and his teachings simultaneously, without distancing ourselves from either. If Jesus is truly our axis mundi, the centre of our world and our way, then we will live like him and challenge our culture from within.

But often that’s not what we find. Frequently what happens instead is we find Christians either isolating themselves or capitulating to the culture. Both ways lead to blunted witness. A worse option is even more common, that of being “of the world but not in the world,” whereby Christian compromise with culture and gloss it over with layers of ‘churchianity’ that effectively cuts of further cultural engagement.

Go on, be missional, relational and intentional today!