02 Mar 2026: Faithful Presence in a Fractured World: Strategies for Faithful Cultural Engagement in Ministry
Faithful Presence in a Fractured World:
Strategies for Faithful Cultural Engagement in Ministry
Katie Frugé, PhD
Director of the Center for Cultural Engagement
and the Director of the Christian Life Commission for Texas Baptists
The Problem: A Church Divided Against Itself
Before we can speak meaningfully about the church’s engagement with culture, we must be willing to name what is actually happening within the church. The polarization fracturing American public life has not left the church untouched. It has, in many respects, taken root there.
Across the theological spectrum, Christians have begun to speak a version of the same dangerous sentence: “You cannot be a genuine follower of Christ and support or vote for this position.” The ideological lines have hardened. Pastors who might once have held tension with pastoral wisdom are increasingly expected to choose sides. The result is a peculiar and troubling schism not over historic Christological claims or the authority of Scripture, but over cultural and political allegiance.
What I observe is a fracture between two legitimate but severed impulses: the commitment to orthodoxy, right belief as the hallmark of faithful Christianity, and the commitment to orthopraxy, right practice as the measure of genuine discipleship. Both impulses are authentically Christian. The tragedy is not that either exists, but that each has become, in isolation, a weapon against the other. Until we are willing to name this fracture honestly, we cannot lead through it faithfully.
Our time together in Waco will begin here, with a clear-eyed account of the fracture and a serious examination of what Christ-like presence looks like for leaders who refuse to let it have the final word.
Leading the Church Into the Public Square
In my travels through the various seminaries and universities across Texas, I’ve encountered an untold number of students who carry the same unspoken question: Does my faith have something meaningful to say to the world I actually inhabit? I have spent my life, and my career, convinced that the answer is “yes.”
In my role as Director of the Christian Life Commission for Texas Baptists (serving more than 5,000 churches across the state), I reside at the intersection of theological conviction and public life. My task, day in and day out, is to equip ministry and church leaders to speak and act faithfully in a cultural moment that is, by any honest measure, extraordinarily complex.
That work is not conducted from a distance. I have spent years building relationships across the ideological spectrum; in legislative halls, community organizations, churches of vastly different theological temperaments, and among practitioners who are trying to lead their congregations through a cultural landscape that seems to be shifting beneath their feet. I have seen what it looks like when churches engage well, and I have seen what it costs when they disengage altogether.
In my experience and research, I have found that how we define the image of God is never merely an abstract theological question. It is always, eventually, a question about how we treat people. There is always room for differences in opinion on the what of cultural engagement, but more important is the how.
When Theology Becomes Personal
Professional credentials alone do not make a minister. What shapes the most effective leaders in cultural engagement, and what I believe shapes the most effective ministry formation, is the integration of theological conviction with lived experience. To learn to weep with those who weep presumes one has wept before. Bearing one another’s burdens recognizes the weight of the moment and responds with empathetic kindness. My story is a testimony to the transformational power that occurs when the personal and the theoretical merge to create true cultural transformation.
I am the mother of three children, each born through high-risk pregnancies, each navigating varying levels of special needs. I am a cancer survivor, with stomach cancer in 2016, followed by a double mastectomy in 2021. I have applied for food stamps. I have navigated a Medicaid system that is simultaneously deeply broken and essential to families who simply need medical care for their children.
I share this not to center my own narrative, but because these experiences are the crucible in which my theology was tested and refined. I sat as a young mother in a government office completing paperwork for public assistance while also writing doctoral work on the dignity of every human being made in God’s image. I have listened to Christians debate policy about a host of issues, ranging from food stamps and public housing, divorced from seeing precious fellow image bearers who view the same programs as God’s saving grace. The distance between what the church sometimes professes and what the church practices, particularly toward the most vulnerable, became for me not a theoretical concern but a pastoral emergency.
The Solution: Forming Leaders Who Will Not Withdraw
I have discovered in my years in cultural engagement that the most consistently Christian position available to the church is not always the most politically fashionable one. And that discovery has shaped everything I understand about the call to faithful public witness. This is not an intellectual exercise for me. It is a lived reality I carry into every conversation in the public arena of cultural engagement.
In a fractured culture, the response the church most needs is not better arguments or more sophisticated media strategies. It is servant leaders: men and women formed in the character of Christ, equipped with theological clarity, and willing to do the costly work of faithful public witness.
This is where the DMin educator occupies a position of singular importance. The practitioners in our programs are already in the field, already navigating congregational pressures, already confronting the demands of ministry in a polarized moment. What they carry back to their contexts from a DMin program matters enormously not only to them but to the communities and congregations they serve.
The temptation, in a moment of heightened cultural tension, is to train ministers toward disengagement, to frame public witness as a distraction from pastoral vocation, or as too politically fraught to navigate with integrity. I want to argue the contrary. The Book of James puts the challenge with characteristic directness: “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds” (James 2:18, NIV). Faith that does not engage the world is not, in the Jamesian framework, a more cautious or more orthodox faith. It is an incomplete one.
The question before us, as DMin educators, is whether our programs equip students with the theological clarity, relational posture, and practical courage required for genuine cultural engagement, or whether we inadvertently train a generation of ministers to manage the fracture rather than lead through it. Forming servant leaders for faithful public witness is not a peripheral concern of the DMin degree. It is central to its purpose.
The Why: Kingdom Ethics and the Imperative of the Common Good
Naming the problem and identifying the solution still leaves the most fundamental question unanswered: why does any of this matter? Why should the church engage a culture that is fractious, exhausting, and often resistant to her witness? The answer is grounded in the most basic declaration of the Christian theological tradition.
Nearly every Christian tradition affirms that all human beings are made in the image of God. It is one of the most universally shared convictions in the whole of Christian theology, and yet among the least carefully defined. My doctoral research has demonstrated that an undefined imago Dei is a dangerous one. Throughout Christian history, significant harm has been perpetrated precisely where the doctrine was allowed to become qualified; where human beings could be ranked as more or less fully image-bearing based on their rationality, capacity, or social position. When the image of God becomes something one can possess in greater or lesser degree, the theological permission structure for treating one’s neighbor as less than fully human is already in place.
Genesis 1 does not offer those gradations. The text makes a sweeping, unqualified declaration: male and female, the entirety of humanity, bears the image of God. No caveats. No hierarchy. The entire human spectrum falls within the scope of that declaration. This is the theological foundation on which a robust ethic of neighbor-love must be built, and it is the foundation that makes withdrawal from cultural engagement not merely imprudent, but theologically incoherent.
When Jesus announced the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven, he spoke in the present tense. The Kingdom has come. It is active, present, already breaking into the world. That announcement is an invitation to participate now in the work of a kingdom that is, if not yet fully, already at hand. An expert in the law once asked Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” It was a question that sounded like a request for clarification but functioned as a request for a limit or boundary on the obligation of love, rendering it manageable. Jesus refused to provide one. In Waco, we will sit with that refusal together and ask what it demands of the ministry contexts we inhabit.
The church is at her most faithful when she accepts that invitation: doing the difficult, necessary, sometimes costly work of engaging the culture not on the culture’s terms, but on the terms of the Kingdom.
An Invitation to Waco
I am deeply honored to serve as the keynote speaker for the 2026 ADME Annual Conference at Truett Theological Seminary. My hope for our time together is not uniformity of conviction on contested cultural questions. It is something more fundamental: that every participant leaves Waco with renewed confidence that engagement is worth the cost, that their students can be formed for this work, and that the church doing the slow, faithful, sometimes messy work of growing God’s Kingdom is still, in this fractured moment, the best news available to a watching world.
I look forward to the conversation.