He talks about Daniels  pagan education in Babylon at the best university with Nebuchadnezzer.

"Babylon has one simple goal to eliminate Daniels distinctiveness as a god follower and absorbed into the values of their culture."

- Peter Scazzero. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality 

Forbidden To Sew Of Study Law

"The center where they work is named after Amel Zenoune-Zouani, once a twenty-two-year-old law student with the same dreams of a legal career that I had in the nineties. She was killed at a faux barrage outside the town in January 1997 because she refused to abandon her studies. I try to find her family in Sidi Moussa in 2010 but am unable to locate them. I think of Amel Zenoune dead in the street when I look at the covered heads of every one of the teachers today in Sidi Moussa. Her death was meant to make them all obey. But Amel lives on in every small act of female resistance here, like going out to sew when going out to sew is forbidden."

- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. 

But You Didn't Change Hearts!

"The social struggle in my day was very lively and intense, almost, I should say, as much so as in your own times. Everywhere there arose groups of men and women professing poverty and preaching poverty in the church and the renewal of society. But nothing changed, because these people did not change hearts. 

No, brothers and sisters, it is not enough to change laws. You have to change hearts. Otherwise, when you have completed the Journey of your social labour you shall find yourselves right back at the beginning only this time it is you who will be the arrogant, the rich, and the exploiters....."

You can reproach me, go ahead. But I saw, in the gospel, a road beyond, a path that transcended all cultures, all human constructs, all civilization and conventions. I felt the gospel to be Eternal; I felt politics and culture, including Christian culture, to be in time. I was made always to go beyond time. 

- Carlo carretto.  "I Francis"

Self Initiations Price!

"For example, anthropologists who study initiation rites in tribal cultures tell us that in some of those cultures the rights are so severe and demanding that sometimes a young man or woman does not survive the rights, but dies during the initiation. Our present sensibilities are horrified by that. We cannot imagine allowing something like this to happen, Elders subjecting their adults to trials and ordeals that can lead to their deaths. Yet they lose few young people during those initiations, while, in our own cultures, thousands of young people die every year trying to self initiate, trying to find their own way into adulthood. There is a tragic irony here: we are horrified by what seems to us primitive and cruel, even as thousands of our young people died on necessarily in prematurely because they have no one to help them sort out the meaning of their own Energies. But that is the struggle, and none of us is exempt."

-Ronald Rolheiser. Sacred Fire. 

Accepting The Defects Too?

"The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this is hardly desirable."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Harvard Address, June, 1978

Despising Values

"How short a time ago, relatively, the small, new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Harvard Address, June, 1978

Riddles and Suprises For Western Thinking.

"There is the concept of “Third World”: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient and deeply rooted, autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Harvard Address, June, 1978

Transcultural Truths

"Trust combines exegesis with ethnology as one tracks the transcultural truths of the faith. The AncientFuture Christian lives out of the past, not in it."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Contemporay Static

"To avoid becoming an obedient lapdog or a rebellious hippie, leadership that is missional, relational, and incarnational must learn to distinguish between that which aids in the transmission of the gospel and that which is merely contemporary static.

 A missional, relational, and incarnational church gladly uses all the technological advances of culture to help it witness more effectively to a technological world. The only authentic inculturation is “inculturation from below,” in which “below” includes whatever is on the streets, from the poor and oppressed to popular culture."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

The Church Through Time

"The incarnational Christian realizes that the gospel travels through time not in some ideal form, but from one inculturated form to another. In the words of one theologian, the “fiction” of a “‘pure’ and ‘naked’ Christianity” has done much damage. What missiologists call “the culturally indigenous church” is the aim of the incarnational church. Max Stackhouse makes a distinction between the “textuality” of the church—its faithfulness to the gospel—and its “contextuality”—its faithfulness to the world in which it finds itself. That distinction is absolutely critical." 

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

The Gospel is Supranational

"Lesslie Newbigin rightly insists that the gospel only retains “its proper strangeness, its power to question us … when we are faithful to its universal suprarational, supranational, supracultural nature.”

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Jesus Dressed, Spoke, and Lived The Culture

"When Jesus dressed, he did not dress in a generic, cultureneutral way or put on clothing that set him apart from everyone else of his day. He dressed himself in the customary garb of the day where he lived. He spoke the language of the day in which he lived. He fully inhabited the cultural space of the first century."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Are We Really a Church Above Our Times?

"The problem with the countercultural model is that it creates an artificial wall between Christians and the world God loves—a love so deep and wide that God sent Jesus to die for it. Jesus did not ask God to take us out of the world. In fact, Jesus’ opposition to the temple-based religion of his day, which led more than anything to his condemnation and death, was precisely because he opposed the temple cult’s concept of holiness as separation. We are not somehow grandly “above” the political, economic, scientific, technological, or artistic influences of our times."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0 

The New Spirit Or The Now Spirit?

"These churches become so painfully “politically correct” that any attempt to articulate a transcultural value judgment, a moral absolute, or a biblical truth is quickly shuttled away to a committee or task force (a representatively correct one, of course) instead of witnessed to the world. 

The church is to identify with the world’s needs, but not its desires. As St. Augustine pointed out, “We move spiritually not by our feet, but by our desires.” When our desires are shaped by the culture and not by the Spirit, we become children of the times, not children of the Spirit. The “new spirit” promised by the Scriptures becomes a “now” spirit. We are to be “at home” but not “at peace” with God’s chosen place and time for us. There is a basic incompatibility between the church and whatever time in which it lives.

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0 

Golden Retriever Churches

"Everyone knows these “golden retriever” churches. If the culture throws a stick, “golden retriever” churches go bounding after it, slobbering and eager to please. Even those who happily own these indiscriminately accepting animals bemoan the fact that if a burglar broke in, the dog would just hold the flashlight for him. Too many inculturated churches are holding too many flashlights for too many burglarizing forces and figures."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

"Why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage ... frustrating all efforts to walk around it?"

 - Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), xviii–xix

A Church That Understands Culture

“...... "the destiny of the world” hinges on “the Church’s dialogue with the cultures of our time.....
A faith which does not become culture is a faith which has not been fully received, not thoroughly thought through, not fully lived out.”


- Polish Pope John Paul II on establishing the Pontifical Council for Culture in 1982

Jesus In All Cultures

"Sighting Jesus in Every Culture First, Jesus the Christ remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. But our experiences of Christ depend on our personal and cultural coordinates. Jesus is not an alien force, a nonnative source, or an import that comes into a culture. Jesus is an indigenous illumination of what is already there.

Some years ago, the distinguished southern churchman and theologian Albert Mollegen was lecturing to a group of laypeople in Virginia on the topic of “Revelation.” It was loaded with technical distinctions and sophisticated analysis. At the end, the professor entertained questions from the audience, and a bewildered and slightly defeated woman arose and said, “Dr. Mollegen, how does God speak to you?” The great man thought about that for a moment, and then abandoned his professorial demeanor. “In English, ma’am. With a Tidewater accent.”

Jesus transcends every known culture. God comes to the Chinese in a Chinese accent. Jesus appears to the African in a Swahili cadence. Jesus appears to the American Indian in a Shoshone beat. Jesus appears to a West Virginian in an Appalachian accent. All cultures share in the pre-Incarnation mystery. Even the culture of first-century Palestine couldn’t contain but one look at Jesus—there is not a single story of Jesus, but four basic stories, with multiple stories within those stories. When Jesus rose from the dead and ascended, he became the exalted Christ, a universalized presence and power. He did not take his Jewishness with him into heaven. In the garden with Mary, Jesus says “touch me not” or “do not hold on to me” (John 20:17). In other words, Mary, I’m not what I used to be. Things are different now."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Ministry In The Moment

"Ministry can’t get-to-the-point without it first being willing to get-to-the-moment."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Culture has Changed For Christendom

"The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not yet disappeared, yet another civilization had begun to take its place."

— Harvard’s George Santayana in 1913