Are You Relevant?

We used to go to a church that brags about being "culturally relevant."  Eight years.  Whew!  I am glad we are gone.  Eight years of topics such as "The Top Ten Reasons to Love Your Spouse" was enough.  I heard someone say, "I can get a list like that from Dr. Ruth!  Why do I want to hear that from my pastor?"  Well, I think there are obvious answers to that question.  Dr. Ruth and my pastor should have very different answers to that, for the most part, right? 

The reason I am glad to be free from a "culturally relevant" church is because looking back, I realize that I was a duck in the water at that church.  The messages were great in their own right, but what was I REALLY gaining?  Comparing what I've gained at our new church to what I gained at our old church, I can see a huge difference. 

The church we go to now is relevant to me, a Christian seeking to be closer to God, rather than my spouse, kids, friends at work.......I found that I was SO underinformed when we arrived at our new church.  I understood strategies to "be happy and get along" but could I have explained anything about dispensationalism? Soteriology? The differences between Calvinism and Arminianism? How Modernism and Post-Modernism have affected the church?  Grace?????  I could not have.  Basic Christian doctrine and ideas, and I couldn't really explain it to someone off the street to save my life - or theirs. ;-)

I just read a great article on this topic this afternoon.  The title is Preaching without Reaching: The Irrelevance of Relevant Preaching by David Mills.  Here are some excerpts and if you can, definitely go read the whole thing.  David Mills specifically writes about pastors who bend the rules of the language in order to skirt "church" words so they can "reach the unchurched."  In the article, he writes of a pastor-friend who thinks it's acceptable to trade out "perfectionism" for "legalism" and "permissiveness" for "licentiousness."

(The excerpt makes this a longish blog post, but hang it there, it's worth reading. :-)

“Perfectionism” is a very different thing from “legalism.” One is a psychological problem, the other a spiritual choice and theological error. The perfectionist will expect too much of himself and of others; the legalist will act as if God were not a gracious God but one whose favor could be won by obeying all the rules.

These are both problems, but they are not the same problem, though a man may be both a perfectionist and a legalist. The perfectionist should talk to a pastor or a therapist to learn to distinguish the pious pursuit of the good from the neurotic; the legalist should learn, or relearn, the doctrine and reality of grace.

In the same way, “permissiveness” is a very different thing from “licentiousness.” The first means relaxing the rules too much, the other means actions characterized by license and lawlessness, and usually in a lewd, lustful, and dissolute way. They are not even close to the same thing.

The depravity of the licentious is not at all expressed by calling them permissive. The licentious leer at young women in short skirts (or long skirts, for that matter); the permissive only permit people to do what they want, when they know they shouldn’t, with a genial smile and a forgiving wave of the hand.

Again, these are both problems, but they are not the same problem. The permissive man should enforce the rules he is given to enforce. The licentious man should repent of his sins and adopt such disciplines as will help him bring his appetites under control.

My friend’s substitutes are not synonyms. “Perfectionism” does not accurately translate “legalism” into the language of the day, nor does “permissiveness” translate “licentiousness.” The substitutes are not nearly close enough in meaning to replace the biblical and traditional terms.

The ideas are related but they are not the same. One cannot do the work of the other. You might as well, in a professional baseball game, send in Barry Manilow to replace Barry Bonds, because they are both rich, famous, talented men named Barry.

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Here Christians ought to learn something from the world, for in this matter the world shows great common sense. The world itself does not define “relevance” as the highest level of discourse the marginally interested will tolerate, at least in the matters it really cares about.

Every field, from thoracic surgery to architecture to real estate law to stamp collecting, has its own specialized vocabulary. Every field demands that new members learn the language if they are to work inside it. Their willingness to learn it is a test of their desire to belong. The man unwilling to learn what an architrave and a pediment are is a man who does not really want to be an architect—and those who need an architect (as the world needs Christians) will not want him to design their house.

And the world is right about this. Christian preachers cannot afford, in the hope of speaking in a way more likely to get and to keep laymen who are (supposedly) intimidated when they speak the Faith’s given and natural language, to act as if its necessary language can be translated very far, lest the laity continue to be ignorant of the truth, and many members remain unconverted or only partly converted. For one thing, ignorant people can’t answer the questions some of their curious neighbors will ask them.

This leaves unsolved the problem of the “irrelevance” of the necessary Christian language. There is much more to be said about this, both about the ways in which the insider language can be conveyed and about the fact that we have a compelling story to tell, so that much preaching will need only to declare the facts.

But I think the first answer to the problem is not to simplify and replace the language and therefore distort the message, but inside the Church to explain, and outside the Church to live, so that those who think Christianity irrelevant will so desperately want to be part of our community that they will happily learn to speak in a new tongue.