Have you ever heard a church leader say, ‘Beloved, let us aim to be as irrelevant as possible?’ Of course not. Everyone agrees that relevance is important. Like King David, we must “serve the purpose of God” in our “own generation” (Acts 13:36). Like the sons of Issachar, we want to “understand the times” (1 Chron. 12:32). Our hearts should break with compassion when we see many of the ways that our churches are failing to reach our world. Our ears should be wide open to learn all that we can about our culture(s), whether Western and postmodern or African and rural, or somewhere in between. Any church that shuts its eyes and ears to the white harvest all around is guilty of inexcusable irrelevancy. But strangely, relevance can elude those who pursue it hardest. Churches that chase after relevance end up having little lasting impact on society.

In his insightful book, Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance, Os Guinness notes: “After two hundred years of earnest dedication to reinventing the faith and the church and to being more relevant in the world, we are confronted by an embarrassing fact: Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant.” Likewise, in his book The Gagging of God, D.A. Carson writes, “Study after study has shown that pursuing relevance may achieve a certain instant ‘success’.” Yet he states that such apparent success “is frequently the advance warning” to bitter failure in the long run. A prime example would be the many mainline churches that sought greater social impact and respectability, but ended up being devoured by liberal theology and denying the gospel.

Here is the decisive question: how do we achieve relevance in our churches? I look at our changing world with compassion but also with confidence that God has clearly shown the way to stay relevant and reach every generation. In this blog post, I would like to first clear the debris of dangerous attempts at relevance so that we can rediscover the solid foundation for lasting relevance. As Paul wrote in Romans 12:2, each new era brings with it new temptations to “conform to the world” and new opportunities to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” so that we can know God’s will for us in our time.

Conforming to the World – Irrelevant relevancy

We must be careful of being naïve in the way we analyse cultural trends, as if the world’s values are neutral and harmless. We cannot simply say, ‘The world is changing so we must adapt’. Sadly, some today are rebuking the church for not keeping up with the world, instead of exposing the world’s hostility toward God and His truth. What a complete reversal of God’s strategy in Scripture! For both Israel and the church, God’s mandate has always been for us to reach the world by being holy, by living differently, not by trying to keep up with the world (e.g., Exod. 19:6; 1 Pet. 1:14; 2:12; Titus 2). We might be shocked to realise the evangelistic potency of a church where personal holiness is upheld, church discipline is practiced, and every member is known for purity.

We must strike the biblical balance: God calls us to passionately love a lost world, yet also to shun conformity to the world system whose views and values are driven by Satan and by a sinful, anti-God attitude (Jam. 4:4; 1 John 2:15-17; Rom. 8:5-8). Unbelieving human cultures are not ‘innocent until proven guilty’. God’s Word tells us to expect that every culture, in its own way, will be guilty of rejecting God’s authority (Rom. 1:18-32; Eph. 2:1-3; 4:17-19). It was true of pre-modern cultures and modern cultures; why should we expect postmoderns to be any different? Our societies are lost and must be reached. There is benefit to in-depth analysis that helps us understand the culture we are trying to impact. But what do we do with the resulting information and statistics? If we jump to a discussion of how the church must conform to the reality of this age, we will become a culture-driven church more than a Bible-driven church. The old adage in business, ‘The customer is always right,’ does not apply to ministry. We are on a slippery and deadly slope if our church becomes like a business, where the consumer (the audience) becomes sovereign instead of Christ and His Word. Should God’s people ask the world for instructions on how to run His church (cf. Isa. 8:19-20)?

When Christians engage the world, we are called to examine and expose all that opposes God and His Word (Eph. 5:11; Col. 2:8), rejecting what is evil and clinging to what is good (Rom. 12:9). Notice the crucial difference: one approach lets the latest statistics shape an entire ministry according to felt needs; the other approach let’s the statistics only deepen our compassion and sharpen our skill in illustrating and applying the authoritative Word of God. We must not naively think that every time we don’t get the numbers we want, we must change our methods. Tell that to Noah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. They saw little or no results, yet God called them to persevere and be faithful. True, some methods are needless obstacles to reaching unbelievers and must be discarded (1 Cor. 9). But a more careful look at Scripture will show that some methods are non-negotiable. Too often we underestimate how sufficiently and how specifically Scripture speaks to the so-called ‘neutral’ issues that seem negotiable, such as the way we do music, preaching, counselling, evangelism, and church growth (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

When a church starts conforming to the world, it is a subtle, gradual descent. It is rarely intentional; no conclusions are offered at first; only questions are raised, sometimes with a false appearance of humility. It’s a time-honoured tactic: “Did God really say? (Gen. 3:1).” “Can we be sure about what is right and wrong just based upon the Bible? How could we ever possess absolute truth, or a pure gospel, or a reliable hermeneutic for analysing the text of Scripture? Is there really a biblical view of issues such as church leadership structures or preaching methods; shouldn’t these be changing to fit with the times?”

If a church continues down a road of conforming to the culture, it will eventually drift far from Christ and His Word and fall into spiritual harlotry with the world. And ironically, a compromised church becomes an irrelevant church.

– Tim Cantrell, President and Professor of Systematic Theology, Shepherds’ Seminary