Which Came First?

It's the age old question.
Which came first? The chicken or the egg.....
Of course if you believe the Bible you would gravitate to the chicken answer. How could you have an egg if there wasn't a fowl to lay it.
That being the case, I have kind of been chasing something around in my mind.
It's not an earth shattering thing and I don't believe the fate of the free world hangs in the balance, but.........
Which came first......
God or culture?
You may be asking, "Why would you consider this in the first place?"
I see a lot of churches using culture to assimilate God into their services.Is this a bad thing? I don't know if it is bad if you measure it on an eternal scale. On the other hand, I don't know if it's a good thing either. I think we discount God and His ability to speak to humanity. That somehow we have to clothe and couch every word in the language of our culture or how else will people understand. We spend so much energy in this, that we forget that God is the great communicator. That at no point in history did God fail because He could not communicate with humanity.

I remember back when I first started at the Vineyard. No one else (as far as churches in our area) was doing a "contemporary service". By the time I came along, contemporary had gone beyond guitars and "Pass It On". We never considered the idea of using culture as a means to reach people. We simply sang and played what we knew. We were in love with God and expressed it the only way we knew how. If you ask some of the old timers at Gadsden Vineyard, we thought we had created Contemporary Christian Music.

So, are we suppose to use culture or do we simply allow God to use it? Do we simply cooperate with the plans of God? I think so. It's not my call to look around at other churches and see what they do and how they do it and then copy it. I think I remember somewhere in Scripture where it says, "Unless the Lord builds the house, we labor in vain."
I think we need to quit relying on culture as a means to communicate with people and let God use culture instead. It a very simple matter.....
We quit so He can.
We don't so He can...
We cooperate so He can.
God on you............
mb