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영어

Recently, the culture of funeral worship is changing rapidly from burial to cremation and Christians also tend to prefer to use the type of cremation when they have a funeral service. So many churches are not easy to ignore the context when they preach to Christians at the cremation service. Culture has amazing power to change the environment so it is important that churches consider to reflect the period and handle the culture. In order to accomplish this, first of all, churches have to know various thoughts of the Christians and avoid to interpret the scripture literally. In other words, It is sure that the church has to have various resources such as ethical and culture understanding about the context debates. According to Billy Graham, he gives an answer the question which is that is cremation against to the Bible? he says, “Christians’ concern is to think the body disappear as they cremate the body”. At this point, it is important to have right perspective about it. A body is going to disappear whether it is cremated or buried. In addition, ancestors’ cemetery no longer exists. The cemeteries that ancestors buried already move to other places because the soil already decayed. Therefore, Christians have to accept that there is nothing wrong about revival with cremation worship. The resurrection of believers is related to the Resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, but this does not mean that the resurrection is same with the resurrection of Lazarus. Lazarus needed the tomb as he resurrected, but the believers of the time did not recognize Jesus Christ as he resurrected. Paul says, “And what you sow is not the body that is to be,” The body of resurrection does not mean to have same body as before, but mean uncorrupted body so Paul compared living in temporary house with living in eternal house. the body of Christians is like a tent, but the body that is resurrected is eternal house. the appearance is similar with the house, but the reality is totally different. Therefore, the cremation is not related with the resurrection. Then, what is the role of the church in funeral worship? There are two important roles which is to provide biblical and evangelical funeral sermon for Christians.