From Greg Forster’s excellent book, Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It:
Exile is our permanent state in the New Testament church because we have now been commissioned – sent on a mission – to the nations. Jeremiah sent the Israelites out to a long period of exile in Babylon, but they were always looking forward to the promised return. Jesus sent the church out to permanent exile everywhere.
The church’s new mission reorients the exilic challenge. The New Testament church is not a cultural lifeboat for a specific civilization, as the Israelites in exile were. In Babylon, God’s people were not keeping alive just God’s message and ways, but the remnant of a whole foreign civilization, temporarily sustaining it as best they could until it was time to return and replant it in its native soil. For us, however, there will be no return and no replanting until the world ends. We must keep alive God’s message and ways, but we cannot think of ourselves as a separate civilization. Because the church has a mission within every human civilization, we must build godly lives within our home civilization rather than trying to cultivate a separate one. That means working hard to contribute to the well-being and flourishing of our civilization. Otherwise, we’re not loving our neighbors.
However, because the church is in exile, we cannot simply identify the church with our host civilization. We cannot reduce the church’s work merely to the flourishing of civilization. The church still has to sustain a zone of cultural activity that represents revelation and Holy Spirit transformation. Inevitably, this will mean resisting the dominant culture in some ways. Maintaining balance between mission and exile is one of the central challenges of sustaining the church’s identity.
