I read this paragraph this morning and thought I’d share it with you.

“By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.”

Os Guinness in Prophetic Untimeliness

Perhaps I have misread or misunderstood church history, but it seems to me that the church did not grow because it crafted its message to be palatable to the surrounding culture.

The church grew, not because it emulated the surrounding culture, but because it faithfully presented the message of the cross to that culture. The Apostle Paul went so far as to say,

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

1 Corinthians 2:2

While I think there is nothing inherently wrong with wailing guitar solos and smoke machines as part of the worship experience, perhaps we should pump the brakes on the drive to make worship like a rock concert and the sermon like a motivational seminar.

Content has to be the first priority.

Is what happens on Sunday faithful to Scripture? Are we pushing ourselves to face the sin in our hearts while also proclaiming the grace of Jesus Christ which overcomes our sin? Is our “worship” experience actually causing us to be more holy or does it just make us feel better?

Is the cross at the center of our message or merely a backlit decoration on the wall?

Jesus Christ’s gospel (the “evangel” from which our movement gets its name) embeds in its command to “go and make disciples” the measurement of the movement’s health. By Christ’s own words, this is the simplest gauge we use to measure success or failure. Are we making disciples? Not just convincing converts, but making disciples?

Not just filling the seats in auditoriums, but training the souls of transformed individuals? Are we valuing the quality of our discipleship more than the quantity of our attendance? Jesus’ words and life reveal that evangel-followers can know whether they are succeeding or failing by this: whether new growing disciples are being made or not.

John Dickerson – The Great Evangelical Recession

I am encouraged by this affirmation of the importance of quality of the disciples over the quantity of them.

The problem is that it is much easier to assess quantity and more difficult to assess quality. But the difficulty does not relieve us of the responsibility to have this priority.

I started reading Saving Leonardo by Nancy Pearcey and ran across this paragraph in the first chapter:

“We often hear Christians speak about recovering the vitality of the early church. But which aspect of the early church are they thinking about? It’s a safe bet they are not thinking about the way the early church went on the offensive against the dominant intellectual systems of the age. Today’s churches pour their resources into rallies, friendship evangelism, and mercy missions that distribute food and medicine. And these are vital. Yet if they aspire to the dynamic impact of the early church, they must do as it did, learning to address, critique, adapt and overcome the dominant ideologies of our day.”

To engage our culture means that we need to teach people what Scripture says about our culture. We also need to teach people what Scripture says about how to engage our culture.

People flocked to Jesus. He obviously knew how to treat people with respect, even those who the religious leaders treated with contempt.

We are not called to ratchet up the rhetoric in the culture war. We need to see how Jesus used respectful dialog to point people in a different direction.

Jesus shows us that it is possible to be firm on ideas while being loving to those who hold different ones. But this takes work, hard work. Work that few of the churches I’ve attended seemed willing to undertake.

It is so much easier to avoid the discussion by not entering into it through cultural conformity.

Another method of shutting down discussion is to use condemnatory statements and harsh rhetoric. Instead of tearing down walls, this approach reinforces and raises them.

Scripture enjoins us to do neither.