The Center for Cultural Leadership (CCL) and The Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC) are pleased to announce the formation of The Cultural Concord, the informal but visible partnership of our two organizations to leverage our individual ministries to greater impact for reclaiming Western culture for Jesus Christ.
Potential collaborative opportunities might include conferences, symposia, speaking, writing, and larger intellectual, theological, and other cultural projects.
To that end, Dr. Joseph Boot, founder and president of EICC, has joined CCL as Distinguished Fellow of Cultural Theology. P. Andrew Sandlin, CCL founder and president, is a Fellow of EICC.
A Shared Vision
The vision of EICC states (in part):
The task of gospel-centered cultural reclamation is an urgent necessity because the organs and institutions of modern culture have been thoroughly saturated by humanistic and pagan assumptions. These pretensions have steadily redefined intellectual, social, familial, sexual and ethical norms, unleashing real evil and enslaving Western society in a radical opposition to Christ and the freedom brought by the gospel. Concurrent with the decline of a biblical family pattern — from the school, academy and courthouse, to senates, parliaments and palaces — the Christian faith is being systematically expunged from public life and ignored or assaulted in our corridors of learning and power. If we love the gospel, our neighbor and freedom, Christians must take up the cultural task with faith and courage.
Similarly, the vision of CCL includes these words:
The Center for Cultural Leadership believes that culture should be Christian — not by political coercion, but by spiritual conversion. Salvation in Jesus Christ should transform all of life. Christian is what Western culture was for 1,000 years, and this is what it should be today. But we’re not looking to restore the Christian past, although we are grateful for all its benefits to us. Instead, we want Christian truth to reshape our present and future culture.
But if there’s to be Christian culture, Christians must lead it — as fathers, mothers, artists, musicians, college students, businessmen and -women, attorneys, pastors, educators, software writers, salesmen, technicians, politicians, physicians, clerks, and every other life calling.
Both CCL and EICC are “think tanks,” committed to the power of godly ideas, but not ivory-tower tanks.
Tanks, no matter how intellectually oriented, need to wage war. CCL and EICC are waging war — intellectual war.
Our orders in the war are to demolish the injurious ideas that are eroding Christian culture.
Stay tuned for more exciting information about The Cultural Concord.