It seems to me that leaders can go in two different wrong directions with their church building in a society like ours—they can think too trendy or they can think too permanent.

Most of us have probably driven by a church with green windows and roof that looked like it was from The Brady Bunch. These churches built trendy in the 1970s and now they’re regretting that. A photo slideshow of “The Ugliest Churches in the World” finds most of them went for a modern look that’s not so modern anymore.

But, even more than the aesthetic appeal of a church building, I think many churches are going to wish they had not built gigantic multi-thousand seat auditoriums, and many others will regret the quaint columns and brick building on the edge of town.

For example, before planting my current church, I served as an interim pastor for a church in Nashville with a 3,000-seat auditorium. Meeting with the staff before I left, we all agreed that if the church were started today, we would not build in the same way. However, the same can be true for several of the churches I’ve served through a church revitalization process. The building is no longer a help and they wish they had done it differently.

There are enough grim tidings from around the world that the news from Rotherham, a faded English industrial town where about 1,400 girls, mostly white and working class, were raped by gangs of Pakistani men while the local authorities basically shrugged and did nothing, is already slipping out of American headlines.

But we should remain with Rotherham for a moment, and give its story a suitable place of dishonor in the waking nightmare that is late summer 2014.

We should do so not just for the sake of the victims, though for their sake attention should be paid: to the girls gang-raped or doused with gasoline; to the girls assaulted in bus stations and alleyways; to the girl, not yet 14, who brought bags of soiled clothes as evidence to the police and earned nothing for her trouble save for a check for 140 pounds — recompense for the garments, which the cops somehow managed to misplace.

But bearing witness is insufficient; lessons must be learned as well. This is more than just a horror story. It’s a case study in how exploitation can flourish in different cultural contexts, and how insufficient any set of pieties can be to its restraint.

Interpreted crudely, what happened in Rotherham looks like an ideological mirror image of Roman Catholicism’s sex abuse scandal. The Catholic crisis seemed to vindicate a progressive critique of traditionalism: Here were the wages of blind faith and sexual repression; here was a case study in how a culture of hierarchy and obedience gave criminals free rein.

The best kept secret in the Christian life is that everything we do matters to God. Some Christians have the idea that pastors and missionaries are doing “kingdom work,” but the rest of us are not. In this post, I’d like to show how every dimension of human life and culture—work and leisure, art and science, politics and economics, sports and competition, homemaking and education—is ripe with potential to honor God the King. In order to make this point, we must first recognize four biblical truths and learn to ask three practical questions.

The first biblical truth is that there is a great struggle between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness, Christ and Satan, and between truth and error (Col 1:13). This great struggle manifests itself in different ways in human history. In our current situation in the United States, one way this struggle manifests itself is in our society’s increasing rejection of Christian morality. Because of our beliefs on matters of life and death, and on human sexuality, we as Christians are often viewed as morally inferior and even morally reprehensible. There are many other examples; if we had the time and space to do so in this blog, we could demonstrate ways in which the arts and sciences, politics and economics, sports and competition, education and scholarship, and homemaking are corrupted and misdirected by the kingdom of darkness.

The second biblical truth is that God created the cultural realms we just mentioned, and has good intentions for those realms. It is God who ordered the world in such a manner that humans would create art and undertake scientific research. It is he who made us capable of politics, economics, homemaking, sports, and education. God’s desire is for us to undertake activities in these realms in a way that glorifies him (1 Cor 10:31). And yet, these realms have been hijacked by the kingdom of darkness. They have been corrupted and misdirected toward wrong ends.