I am daily trying to be, to read, to think, more globally-minded—and that is not just in the "flat-world" sense of Thomas Friedman. Over the last ten years, I have been immersed in the work of writers like Lamin Sanneh (Yale Divinity prof and West African in roots—Whose Religion is Christianity?) and Leslie Newbigin, and Philip Jenkins (The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in Global South). Are you reading them too--and do you think the artistic community you are engaging is aware of and fathoming this epoch-making shift to Asian, African, and South American portals for Christian epistemology, poetics, and personal artistry?

It's not just rehashing the age-old separatist issues the old 20th Century church wrestled with in North America (or the equally banal—to me—debate amongst Emerging/Emergent/Missional folks)--it's the greater awareness that "while we were sleeping," God has been quietly (and not so quietly) transforming culture "elsewhere." And if I am ever privileged to address a sefl-styled Christian transforming culture audience, that would be my theme: "Elsewhere: God's Insidious, Unscrupulous, Relentless Cultural Warfare That Continues Unabashed Without Our Permission and Without Our Pocketbooks."

Just as he used the Inklings, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, in the decadent and fading West, God is raising up edgy, powerful, dangerous witnesses in all of world culture and every language and symbol system that will transform what we in the West think is or what it is to talk "about" art, music, dance, etc. So instead of continuously wringing our hands about what can or should be done within our ferociously insular mindsets and self-boundaried precincts of painfully predictable art, cinema, music, why not see what God's doing "elsewhere" in Korea, Singapore, Tanzania, Ghana, Brazil, Mexico. Why do movies like Pan's Labyrinth, Old Boy, and City of God get made "Elsewhere" while we are still making Shrek the Third, and, forgive me, Prince Caspian?

God is Elsewhere. Shall we follow him, "outside the gate"?

Watch this video. And join the conversation.