Hi

Hi I like your article on Thinking about Pop Culture and in particular your rebuttal on Kong Hee, City Harvest Church article entitled: "The Power Of Pop Culture". Unfortunately, I am not able to read your whole/complete article on my screen. Can you email to me your complete article or let me know where I can find your article. Thanks.

I have been debating some proponents of the prosperity “gospel” on a local forum and got to know about this particular piece on popular culture written by Kong Hee, the senior pastor at City Harvest Church (a mega church in Singapore) in the church’s quarterly newsletter Harvest Times.To say that I am saddened and very much worried by what I read in the article would be an understatement, so I’m going to do a rebuttal of the article in response, in the hope that the same young people who have read and taken the advice within to heart will look at the article again, this time with the Bible as the final authority and not the words of a man.Text referenced from the article will be in italics and in blockquotes. The Power of Pop Culture Kong Hee, Harvest Time, Issue 35 (Sep – Dec 2008)Culture is not a “secular” concept; it has its beginning in the Scripture. In Genesis 2:15, when God told Adam to take care of the Garden of Eden, the word He used was cultura or “culture.” In its simplest sense, “culture” means taking the raw materials or resources that God has given to man and creatively nurturing them to their fullest potential. These resources may come in the form of talents, gifts and abilities. And even if they are outside the scope of direct church work, we should seek to develop them fully for the glory of God, with the confidence that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17).I must be reading the wrong Bible, because in my copy, Genesis 2:15 says God put man in the garden to dress it and keep it (KJV), or as the ESV translates it more accurately, to work it and keep it. Nowhere has the Hebrew word ‛âbad (Strong’s Concordance) been translated to mean “culture”.Mistranslating a word in the Bible to match one’s theology and agenda is a dangerous path! Sure, to culture can also m...