  Let me apologize for misleading you. The Lament of a Nation wasn't written by Hugh Grant but George Grant as a faithful reader noted. So with that lets begin to see what George might be saying to our context. Grant's lament is framed along a line which is familiar to a lot of Canadians. How is it that Canadian society can't be purely "Canadian" but must instead be a slightly different brand of Am erican Culture . You can get this from most Canadians when you ask them what it means to be a Canadian. And since today is Canada Day , it really becomes a poignant question. Most people you ask this question to might rally towards familiar symbols of Canadian cultural identity like say the Beaver or the Mountie but at the end of the day the refrain which comes again and again is that we are not American . Identity is something which at the very basic level is something which distinguishes something or someone from something else... ie makes us distinct from something else.
But once you move on from the fact that something is different you need reasons to substantiate the distinction. Canadians by and large stop at the " we're just different ". At the heart of this problem Grant contends that the reason why so many A merican values are embedded within Canadian Culture is because of the way Canada has embraced American products instead of going down the more costly route of developing it's own.
Grant remarks that the moment you take an element from another culture - whether the Model T ford or even the Television - along with the product you adopt and introduce into your culture a number of values which have led to the development of that product. I guess translating Grant's philosophical analysis into the church's context can be seen by the way in which some movements have in the past decided to completely shun elements of technology and certain societal practices. This has been done, I beleive Grant would say in order to preserve the integrity of the church and it's ability to be distinct from the world in which it operates and distance itself from those things which would compromise the church's message. From what I've seen first hand however, this practice which Grant says should have happened in the Case of Canadian Culture, and which has been adopted in the past by church movements seems to be a practice of preservation .
What I witnessed going on in East London has shown to me that the way forward for the chuch, if it's at all serious about it's future ministry, is to take redemption into the community. To wrestly with those elements of culture which might appear to undermine the values of the church and threaten it's distinctiveness - to separate the good from the bad - and then redeem those elements of our cultural DNA in order to communicate our message in ways that will be heard and understood.
If we integrate parts of what's around us redeem them and spit them back out at the world we should be able to reach the world in ways it'll understand. 
