Culture

I had a conversation with a pastor recently talking about the role of the church in culture and society. The point he was making was that if the culture that the church is in is not a biblical culture then part of the church's responsibility is to counteract and change the culture. Mind you that this conversation was had in the context of using elements of culture like T.V shows, movies and video clips from the internet and other things in a message to help illustrate or make a point. His perspective was that in using clips and video's from the media we are endorsing the t.v. show or movie and supporting the depravity of the culture.
I was thinking about this conversation recently and wondering how does a church go about changing culture, for that matter, how does any organization or initiative go about changing culture? For hundreds of years the church was the center of culture. Some how the culture drifted away from the church and the church rather than try to reinvent culture, or impact it somehow, decided to simply become critical of culture, and for the much of the 20th century was content to criticize culture. Since the seventies and eighties the church has done a lot of copying culture (just take a look at Christian t-shirts and hats and even some music) but the church has not quite stepped back into the role of creating culture. In the last five to ten years there has been conversations about creating culture.
So for better or worse the culture is what it is. The church has not played a part in creating it, we left that to MTV, MySpace, Facebook and Abercrombie, therefore the church has three options, criticize it, copy it, or assimilate it and use the current culture to speak to the people who live in it. The only other option is to create its own culture in the hopes that there will be some component of that culture that would appeal to those outside of it, which would in turn draw them in and begin transformation of the culture.
I really don't know which way is best. It just seems to me that the church at large does not have the best track record with creating culture or being the center of culture. We would rather sit back and warn people of the evils of culture, and what happens to your faith if you get too close to it, rather than rather than hold it in our hands and see it as a tool for relevance and life application.
Just a meandering thought...