One question we find ourselves asking a lot these days is how the church can be relevant to comtemporary culture. This is a very important question, but I sometimes think the answers we come up with are not very good answers. If you look at the things churches do in the quest to be relevant, it seems we take “being relevant to culture” to mean “being similar to culture.” Thus a church that does comtemporary music, where the sermon is peppered with references to pop culture, and where it is OK to wear jeans on Sunday morning is said to be more relevant than a liturgical church, or one where everyone wears suits or sings hymns. The problem is that this kind of relevance has to do with the presentation of our message only. It is not that these ways of being “relevant” are bad; in fact, changing the form or worship or proclamation can be very helpful for communicating the gospel. But good communication is not what relevance means.
The dictionary defines the word relevant as “being connected or pertaining to the matter at hand.” Pertinence – that is what I fear we are missing. To be relevant to the world is to be important to the world, to have something to say that is worth saying. Silliness is never relevant, even when it is relatable. It is, in other words, about the content of our message, and that is why I get bothered when a meaningful word like relevance is hijacked to talk about mere details. It seems to me that a young, energetic church who thinks they are doing the work of Christ because they raise their hands during worship and a stodgy old church who thinks they are doing the work of Christ because they only read the King James are both, in their own way, equally irrelevant.
If we want to know what relevance looks like, we should read the gospels. Jesus was always relevant, and not just because he communicated well. He did that, too, couching his teachings in stories about picking grapes, herding sheep, and stewarding oil; situations his audience would have been well familiar with. But he was relevant because he met people in the midst of their pain and addressed the situation that was in front of him. When people were sick, he healed them. When people were hungry, he fed them. When people were lost, he taught them. When people were staggering under a burden of guilt and rejection, he welcomed them, announcing to all the world that their sins were forgiven. He was glad to live his life among the wounded and despised, binding up the brokenhearted and freeing the prisoners. He was relevant because he ministered to the problems that real people had. And he was relevant because he had something to say that was worth saying. That something was, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” That is still the message which is worth saying.
If we want to know what irrelevance looks like, we can look the times when the church gets away from the business of announcing that message, the times we get away from the central call to be Christ to a hurting world. Look for the times we become inappropriately obsessed with our pet theological projects or with the minutiae of administration. I can give two examples of this. One is the experience one of my professors had when trying to schedule a chapel service centered on the topic of abuse. After repeated snubs and several semesters of watching the chapel schedule fill up with speakers who spoke on complex theological topics, she was finally told that abuse was not an appropriate topic for a seminary. Now I do not wish to be harsh towards an institution I love and which was of infinite benefit in preparing me for the ministry, but let me be frank – if abuse is not an appropirate topic for seminary, then seminary is not an appropriate training ground for future ministers. Nothing is more the business of the church than the pain of real people. It is attitudes like this, not old music or ministers in robes, that threaten to make the church truly irrelevant. My other example is a positive one. The former pastor of the church where I was ordained once traced a major turning point in her pastorate to a meeting where she and the deacons spent an hour discussing whether people should be charged $4.50 or $5.00 for Wednesday night supper. On the way home, she was struck by an overwhelming sense that 50 cents was absolutely not What It Was All About. She resolved to focus on more important things, and remembers that as a time when God really began to do things in the church. You might say she resolved to be relevant.
I think I should point out that I am not talking about morphing Christianity into the shape of the latest moral cause when I talk about relevance in this way. There is a linguistic trick we play on ourselves whenever we talk about “making” the gospel relevant – as if the gospel were something we made up, rather than a timeless unalterable truth about God’s loving response to the world’s brokenness. It is not about changing the gospel but about getting back to it by letting go of the frivoloties and irrelevancies that, all too often, we have made up. The fact that we don’t need to change the gospel to make it apply to the pain of real people is why it is called Good News.
At my church, we have a lot of kids from the surrounding neighborhood showing up on Sunday nights. It is a rough neighborhood, filled with crime, drugs, poverty, violence, with so many problems and hurts and bad influences. There are noble souls struggling mightily and making it, and some who are not making it, and some who are not very noble. It is not an easy place to grow up, I am sure. I am convinced that in this place, it matters whether or not the kingdom of heaven has come near. I am convinced that what these kids need is Christ. They need Christ in every sense. They need Christ himself – his salvation, his presence in their lives, his healing an guidance and love. They need to know God loves them. They need the habits of mind and heart that will lead to happiness later in life. They also need a church that is Christ’s Body, a church that will not turn away from what is going on across the street or next door. So we’re giving relevance our best shot. They show up hungry, so we feed them. They show up, I often suspect, simply needing an adult who will make the time to kick a soccer ball with them and tell them they made a good shot, so we do that. They show up lost, so we try to teach them. We try to explain that they are precious, that God loves them, that there are good things to be found in following him. We try to show what that following is. So far, we’re pretty bad at all this. The best I can say for our kids ministry is that they do, in fact, show up at church every week. Once they get there, it is barely controlled chaos (more than normal with kids, I mean), and I’m not sure we’re impacting them. But we try, and the more we try, the more proud I become to be pastor of a relevant church. If you walked in on Sunday morning and saw our tiny congregation of senior citizens singing the old hymns and reciting the old responsive readings out of the hymnal, you would know that we are one of the least hip churches in Waco. But when I see an old lady who never had children of her own, and barely knows how to talk to them, get down on her aching old knees and try her darndest to draw pictures with a quiet little boy a different color then her, in hopes that that he will know he is welcomed and loved … at that moment I see relevance in action.
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