I left Black Rock City, Nevada, on September 8, just about 3 weeks ago. Each time I have gone to Burning Man over the past 3 years, it has been a challenge to adjust back to normal life after experiencing 9 days of sensory overload out in the desert. (If you don’t know, Black Rock City is the official name of the city that is constructed at the event called Burning Man.) The first year I went to Burning Man, I did not go with a critical eye, but just with a desire to see and understand. One of the first rules of missions is that in order to reach people with the love of Christ, you must understand the heart and culture of the people. This means you must understand their desires, hopes, dreams, motivations, and their view of the world. So let me take you back to when we moved to the Philippines 20 years ago to work with indigenous people there. At that time, we did the same thing. We were moving into an indigenous ethnic group in one of the remote parts of the Philippines that did not have a Christian base. A lot of times people are surprised to hear that in the Philippines there are still people that have not been exposed to Christianity, because in the cities there are churches everywhere, and have been there for more than a century. While that is certainly true, in rural areas 20 years ago, there were still a substantial number of remote indigenous areas that had little to no exposure to Christianity (and there are still some areas even today that fall into that description). So when we moved into the tribal area, we were faced with people who at times were violent, had an extremely high rate of child mortality, and had widespread sexual abuse through institutionalized child marriage, which from their perspective was not immoral at all. In their culture, child-brides had always been something they had practiced. In evaluating the culture, we had to discern what was good about their culture and what was not, and look to strategize for their future development what would be healthy for them in the long run and what would not be. We did not speak out against things early during our culture studies unless we saw some kind of imminent danger. Instead, we kept in mind that those practices which would harm them in the long run and which did not line up with God’s established order of right and wrong would be addressed at the proper time – after they became followers of Christ. We also recognized that not everyone was going to become a follower of Christ, so we did not make any future plans to impose Christian morality on the entire community. We knew that at some point in the future there would come a time when it would be appropriate to teach believers how they were to behave as part of church instruction. However, we did not intend to dictate rules of behavior to non-believers, except (again) in the sense of protecting people from danger. The goal of the Christian life is walking in a relationship with our loving heavenly Father. The goal is not to establish any particular order of outward behavior. In missions, systematic instruction on good and bad behavior is really only warranted once there are believers and a church is born. And it should always be taught in the context of growing in a relationship with a loving heavenly Father. There is one thing we kept in mind through this process of culture investigation in the tribal area. In order to be fully objective, we chose not to make a judgment call on any one aspect of their culture until we fully understood it. This method of evaluating their culture was not formally codified or discussed on our team; it was simply something we recognized as the right way to do things. So keeping those missional principles in mind, when we first went to Burning Man in August of 2024, we resolved not to stand in judgment on the culture, but to evaluate everything objectively. Granted, we knew that we would find some things objectionable (e.g. the orgy dome, excess nudity, drug abuse, etc.). However, after studying the culture of the event, and watching the people that participate in it, we came to the conclusion that like any other culture made up of human beings, there are good things and bad things in it. To that end, when Christianity is discouraged at the foundational level, it may (and usually does) allow more objectionable behavior to come to the surface and become more visible in the community. There is no denying this, but it is not the only thing that we saw. We saw both positive things as well as objectionable things. Now I’m going to pause here and highlight something that I have become acutely aware of over the past few years, and I hope that this will be well received. I hear people talking and see social media comments talking about Burning Man as a manifestation of Satan’s kingdom, “a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah”, “the devil’s territory,” or something like that. The problem with characterizing it in such terms is two-fold. First, in order to be consistent, you would have to use the same terminology to characterize just about any public university in the USA, any mall that has a Victoria’s Secret store, any restaurant that serves alcohol, any professional football or basketball game, any city hosting a New Year’s Eve party, or just about any public gathering that is not a Christian event. The difference is that in most of those other places, the sinful side is just kept a little more hidden. At Burning Man it is out in the open. The second problem looking at things this way follows from the first. As Christians, none of us actually live that way and completely isolate ourselves from what might be “the devil’s territory.” How many of us went to a university as a Christian? How many of us send our kids there? Do you completely avoid going to malls or restaurants? Have you never watched a professional sports event or college sports event? Do you go to New Year’s Eve parties where there might be unbelievers doing things that unbelievers do? Do you dance at a festival or at a friend’s wedding? Is it even wrong to dance? How do you measure what is acceptable music and what isn’t for a Christian to dance to? Then also, is the only acceptable reason for going to Burning Man in order to witness to people there? Again, let’s take that to the other areas we live. Do you only go to university or send your kids there in order to share the gospel with others? Is that the only justifiable reason for attending a sporting event? How about restaurants – is the only justifiable reason for going to a restaurant that serves alcohol in order to share the gospel with a waitress or someone at the table next to you? Is the only reason for dancing in order to be a dancing witness to other people at the party? We can get so caught up in the minutiae of trying to determine what we should and shouldn’t do it can get ridiculous. That doesn’t mean we justify sin. So how do we handle this? I believe the answer is that we are called to follow the discernment of the Holy Spirit that lives inside of each of us. That is what we try and do at Burning Man. I don’t go to the orgy dome or take psychedelic drugs at Burning Man. I don’t walk around with no clothes. Nobody in our camp does any of those things. There are a lot of things you can learn at Burning Man by just going around, observing, and listening to people talk. I will share more of those here in a minute. Are we there to share the gospel? Yes, absolutely. Are we also there to learn and understand the culture? Yes, that is the other reason we are there, and it requires LISTENING. Do we try and walk with humility at the event when we converse with people and hear them tell us what they believe? I don’t see how it can be effectively done any other way. Are we trying to shut down the culture? No, that is not our goal. The same sin that exists in our communities back home is just manifestly out in the open at Burning Man. Yes, that is problematic, because openness to sin encourages more people to participate in it. When this becomes a cultural value, like at Burning Man, it has the potential to spread very rapidly, like wildfire. But ironically, it doesn’t. It just doesn’t spread nearly as quickly as you might imagine. Why? The Burning Man culture would tell you that is because it is really hard for people to get past their social conditioning, the social conditioning that tells them something is sinful. They don’t believe that sin really exists. In fact, I was once in a lecture at Burning Man where one of the thought leaders loudly proclaimed “there is no sin” to thunderous rejoicing. This is where the Burning Man culture is wrong and has completely missed the mark. So what is it that restrains sin from rapidly spreading like wildfire at Burning Man? I mean, sin does spread, probably more than in our communities back home, but just not as much as you might imagine, and not as much as it is portrayed in social media. Here is the truth about sin. Sin is real, it really does separate us from God, and people everywhere inherently know this, no matter what they are told for 9 days on the Playa. This foundational understanding embedded in the human heart is the first element that restrains sin from spreading like wildfire, even at Burning Man. The second element is our Christian presence – that we are there. I don’t mean only us at our camp, but there are other Christian camps there as well. Our presence, with the Holy Spirit living inside of us, has the effect of reminding people that maybe the doctrine that they are being fed for 9 days of sensory overload on the Playa might not be right. We don’t have to speak any words to anyone for this effect to take place. It just happens. I have seen this in action. I was once sitting in a group of people and we were all having a conversation. I was a newcomer to the group, so I received the query of questions. When it became evident tha
