excerpted from a blog post about Spiritual Formation

from "Out of Ur"

I do think that as evangelicals we consistently underestimate the power of culture, and our attempts to “be relevant” usually end up as our weakness rather than our strength. But I believe in a certain type of counterculture—in Tim Keller’s immortal phrase, “A counterculture for the common good.” We create alternate communities that not only pray for the wider world, but also serve that wider world in acts of mercy and justice. Take The Salvation Army--an evangelical approximation of monastic counterculture and discipline, complete with distinctive clothing. In the mid-1880s the Salvation Army took on the audacious goal to end unemployment in Britain. They didn’t succeed, but their experiment led to thousands of urban ministries today.