Mockingbird’s purpose is “to connect the historic truths of the Gospel with the realities of everyday life in as fresh and down-to-earth a way possible.”

That means we use a lot of illustrations. Whether it’s the films of Whit Stillman or Pixar, the music of Elvis or Michael Jackson, or recent headlines from the world of sports or psychological research, we’re always beginning with analogies, stories, illustrations, and examples to explain things like sin, grace, love, forgiveness, and redemption. At times, people object: should Christians be listening to/watching/reading that “culture” stuff?

Definitely.

Why? Because people generally don’t want to hear what we have to say.

The late Robert Short wrote in his 1965 must-read gem of a book, The Gospel According to Peanuts (where I got the cartoons in this post), that “the objection all men have to the Church’s message is fundamentally the same: it is that universal hardness of heart lying far more deeply and steadfastly within them than any objection men can usually hold consciously.”


As a result, he advocated what Soren Kierkegaard called “indirect communication” as a means of talking about Christianity with non-adherents.

Kierkegaard wrote: 

“If one is to lift up the whole age one must truly know it. That is why those ministers of Christianity who begin at once with orthodoxy have so little effect and only on so few. . . . One must begin with paganism. . . . If one begins immediately with Christianity then they say: that is nothing for us–and they are immediately on their guard” (The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, ed. and tr. Alexander Dru. Oxford, 1938. 201).

That’s why we’re here, folks.