In its early months as a commercial television station back in 1946, WBKB engineers broadcast warnings that Chicago was being invaded and asked viewers to call the station, just to see if anyone was watching. The phone never rang.

Santa Fe diesel locomotive (pulling the Super Chief and El Capitan) accident at L.A.'s Union Station in 1948. Image - Fletcher Swan.

After a celebrated debut at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, by 1897, it appeared likely that motion pictures soon would be run out of business by a newer visual technology called the X-ray machine. Many patrons wondered why they should bother to watch a moving image when, for the same price, they could stick a limb in the X-ray machine and see all the way through their bodies.

Such is the brutal infancy of cultural forms. As they push open their eyes and try to take in an overwhelming world, they struggle with the fact that, as they seek to have a meaningful presence, they still are struggling to understand exactly what it is they are. They may think they know what they are, but the larger world usually has many other ideas.

Forms that survive, and perhaps even flourish, do so because they eventually find a fit between the larger world and the purpose they end up serving. Forms evolve in response to this dialectic and sometimes the larger world changes in ways that help them along. WBKB got a big boost in viewership from the return of soldiers from World War II and especially from the 1947 World Series, which Americans watched on television screens seen through department store windows, then went out and bought sets of their own.

Motion pictures benefited from improvements in technology, but especially from the work of men such as Edwin Porter, D.W. Griffith and Thomas Harper Ince who helped shift films away from their documentary instinct (which appears to have held only limited commercial appeal at the time) to storytelling, which led to the emergence of that Sodomesque place, Hollywood.

Finding a balance between standardization: offering one’s audience a consistent experience, and novelty: finding ways to keep the experience feeling perpetually new, is also a key consideration. That balance is usually maintained to the degree that a form can retain constancy of purpose and expression while also perpetually innovating or even reinventing itself, as TV and film have done so well over the years.

As gospelandculture.org launches, we see around us the Betamaxes, the eight-track tape players, and especially the dried bones of can’t fail Christian endeavors to change, improve upon or take back aspects of contemporary culture that appeared unacceptable to their would-be conquerors.

So what is it that we are trying to do? When I talk about The Gospel & Culture Project, I often repeat a parable once told by a former NAACP leader. He described two men wading into a river trying to save babies who were floating downstream. Both men tried valiantly to save every infant, although they were overwhelmed by the volume of newborns floating down. Finally one man climbed up on the bank and began walking. The other man became furious at the prospect that he was being abandoned and angrily asked the other man where he was going. The other replied, “I’m going upstream to see if I can stop whoever is putting all these babies in the water.”

To the degree that God gives us grace, we are going upstream.

We applaud the many Christian groups and individuals who are engaged in making the world better through hands-on involvement. We aspire to do the same thing. However, we also aspire to examine root, foundational, systemic, structural causes for why things are the way they are. Armed with a deep, intricate understanding, we hope to work for lasting change so as to make the world more truly reflect Christ’s character.

One might ask if this is another kind of power grab, an effort to impose ideology on a world that just wants to be left alone. Our goal is to honor Christ by working to make the world more just, more lovely, more honorable and more holy. Besides, see how much luck you have in finding people who really love the world just as it is. The current economic and social condition of our world certainly argues to the contrary.

We believe that if Christians are going to have a meaningful effect on our cultures, then we first need to be changed from seeing the world as “out there” to seeing ourselves, and our faith as fully constituent of it. We also believe that Christians need to be encouraged and perhaps even exhorted in how to relate our beliefs to the larger world. This is a prime task of gospelandculture.org.

On this site, you will find some of the best writing by Christians seeking to understand the world through the lens of the gospel. We hope to feature a breadth of perspectives and an innumerable number of subjects in the years to come. We want gospelandculture.org to be an online community where users can discuss key questions in a way that leads to shared growth, and perhaps even solutions. Authors on this site set the table for such discussions through sharing their specialized knowledge of the areas they write about. Articles on the site are a kind of textual equivalent to the Forays we offer in the University City area of Philadelphia several times a year.

So how do we avoid going off the rails and ending up on the Betamax pile?

First, we hope to be a prophetic outpost. By that we mean that we hope to work the borders, the seams between faith and the larger world. As such, we hope never to assume a specific ideological orientation or take on a few issues upon which we fixate. We hope instead to become a flexible medium through which Christians can engage each other and the world in specific, focused ways. Our comments sections are intended just for this purpose.

We aspire to be flexible as we gradually realize what our essence and purpose are. We hope that you will help us figure that out through your participatory ownership of the site.

In that light, you have certainly noticed that this site looks different from most. Our background will feature a wide range of scenes, images and textures. These convey our commitment that this site exist as a perpetual foray, an effort to take on everything out there, especially what we do not already know well.

This site also aspires to be the center of a global conversation as perspectives from different cultures help users consider what aspects of our lives may be socially constructed rather than given.

You probably also noticed the site’s strong visual orientation. We hope to move more in this direction in the future as we incorporate video and live interactivity through webcast programming available at specific times or anytime via podcast. We also hope to feature video and other types of artistic expression as an aspect of the site.

I would say you are getting in on the ground floor, but I don’t know that we have a floor yet. The joy of starting something brand new is that we don’t have pre-existing structures to determine what we will be. That is also the struggle as we see how the site will develop without many precedents to look to. We thank you in advance for your involvement in shaping what this site will be. Get onboard.

Chris Simmons is Executive Director of The Gospel & Culture Project.