…is a fitting title for Ken Myers, the man behind the Mars Hill Audio Journal, which a sort of Christian version of NPR I guess. And a new interview of Myers by Walter Henegar is very interesting. Here’s how Henegar opens his piece, “The Well-Informed Generalist: Why We Should Listen to Ken Myers”—
What do eating habits, film noir, reptiles, human cloning, Facebook, economics, and poetry have to do with the Christian life? “Everything,” Ken Myers would argue, and does, thoughtfully and audibly, at least every other month. For Myers—the living library behind the Mars Hill Audio Journal—what the church needs today is not more specialists, whether in theology or philosophy or church growth, but more “well-informed generalists” who are interested in understanding all of culture in order to live more faithfully in God’s world…
I’m thankful for the specialists, but I agree with Henegar, the church could use a few more articulate generalists, like Ken Myers. The entire interview is very interesting and I commend it.
And if you’d like to hear from the well-informed generalist (for free) I recommend the recent audio interview by Mark Dever titled “Christians and Culture with Ken Myers.” If you’re unfamiliar with Myers this may be the best introduction to his story, his mission and convictions. There is a lot of gold in this interview and it’s here that Myers says, “a local church congregation is the basic unit of cultural resistance.” So true. Good stuff. Enjoy.
Tony Reinke 
I agree with Henegar as well. This is the dire need of the church right now, and the fact that we don’t have enough people like that is showing very clearly.
The Christian is not a homo religiosus but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus became man… It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman, a righteous man, or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one… This is what I mean by worldliness — taking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness…That is faith, and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian. ” -Dietrich Bonhoefffer
Chesterton seems to agree with the need for generalists:
You cannot evade the issue of God; whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him…. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. Zulus, gardening, butcher’s shops, lunatic asylums, housemaids and the French Revolution — all these things not only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something to do with Him if He really lives and reigns…Now if Christianity be…a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, the, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over. But if Christianity should happen to be true-then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything…Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. (Daily News, December 12, 1903)