Rico highlights culture contrast

Rico Tice has highlighted the dramatic contrast between Christian culture and its contemporary secular equivalents at Christianity Explored Ministry’s (CEM) annual supporters’ evening, entitled ‘Love, Live, Tell’.

The well known evangelist is spending much of his time training Christians in evangelism.

The Christian thinking we are all familiar with, said Tice, revolves around four key events: creation, the fall, redemption and consummation.

But modern culture, embracing Romans 1: 21-23, exchanges that worldview for a self-centred alternative that adopts – but perverts - that outline form. So, having rejected the divine creator, I am now my creator; life is not a gift, it is a given; I move from faith to therapy; I create my own reality; I am my own creation.

The fall is then recast, such that anyone who tells me I am sinful is an oppressor and I am the victim. The fall is therefore someone else’s fault. As far as redemption is concerned, how does our culture cope having turned its back on God? The answer is it is converted to a cause, radical environmentalism being a good example: Tice said he has been called wicked for driving a car. That cause then becomes my redemption, as I campaign unrelentingly on that issue. The consequences are brutal for all of us.

Finally consummation – anyone who opposes me is a heathen and must be destroyed. So all who believe that marriage can only be between a man and a woman must be wiped out – only then will I feel safe within it. This means I must be unrelenting until those enemies are gone. Then, concluded Tice, I may live out my own identity without any opposition, so I can be whoever I want to be.

Sharing the gospel in jail

Love, Live, Tell also featured a presentation about The Prisoners Journey (TPJ), an evangelistic course especially for those in jail, devised by CEM and Prison Fellowship International, that celebrates its 10^th anniversary this year. Jails in dozens of countries around the world offer the course. Over the past decade, 1.6m prisoners have been invited on TPJ courses and over 800,000 have accepted those offers. Many turned to Christ as a direct result and 70% have gone on to follow up courses of some description. Bible League International supplied over 1m Bibles to cope with demand from those doing TPJ and specially-commissioned research from Baylor University, Texas, found that the course increases prisoners’ motivation and reduces aggressive indicators, so much so that many prisons where TPJ is offered have seen dramatic reductions in overall levels of violence.