It’s a strange and wonderful thing the way that you can so often read about an idea in one place, and then mysteriously have it pop up in a wide variety of other different situations. The dominant pattern in a number of different places that I’ve been reading, watching and hearing has been the concept of considering the culture of the Western World ™ in the framework of an “empire”. It’s the central idea behind “Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture
The inherent beauty in the metaphor of considering “the world” as being an empire comes from the dramatic polarisation that the imagery of an empire represents. Empire likely invokes thoughts of the Roman Empire, a cruel, brutal, and devastatingly powerful machine that nevertheless promised wonderful things to those willing to adhere to its demands. The Roman Empire, like the empire of the western world, promises big things.
And this is an empire that we’ve bought into whole-heartedly. We work all week to pay for our unsustainable lifestyle. We trust in economic growth to be the solution to all our nations problems, and we firmly believe that the shiny new Mac will make us happy. We depend on the empire for our security, for our feeling of self-worth, and to tell us what is right and wrong.
So this, dear readers, is an attempt to consider some of the promises of the empire, and to look at the response that Christ demands. Rather than have this sitting on my (shiny, new, still-being-tested Mac) computer as a draft, I’ll post it as a bit of a series, and get the bits out there to you as individual posts. If the whole concept of “empire” doesn’t make much sense at first, stick in there and hopefully it will eventually become clear. Or better still, leave me a long abusive comment and then I’ll know for sure 
. It’s a little bit of a different format, but that’s partly because this will eventually (I hope) become the basis for a sermon-y type of talk.