“I didn’t go there in college,” he said, smiling a bit sheepishly. “It was the cool church.” These were the words of our guest in class yesterday, commenting on a church in town that was, and is some ways still is, a magnet for the city’s college students. I couldn’t help but smile back slightly, catching the humorous irony in his statement. Yet his words also expressed a tension that has recently been brought to the forefront of my mind.
The word “relevant” has been mentioned frequently during this course. And with good reason. A missional ecclesiology, as we have seen, implies a willingness to enter the culture and environment of those to whom we would witness, just as God the Son was incarnated on earth. In other words, it requires contextualization. “To be faithful to its calling, the church must be contextual, that is, it must be culturally relevant within a certain setting,” explains missional theologian Darrel Guder.
Discussions about the dangers of superimposing our own cultural particulars on others, under the deception that they are inherent to the gospel, have been in an important consideration as we wrestle with the meaning, and the how to, of contextualization. But what about the flip side? If one side of the spectrum is dangerous, and we have succumbed to it in the past, then the opposite extreme – that of capitulating to culture, of altering the gospel in order to appeal or to create a name for ourselves – is just as real and perilous. Do we sometimes compromise the gospel in order to be relevant, to make sense to the culture which surrounds us? I suppose this same question could also be asked in another way. At what point does the good and necessary desire to be relevant become superficial and distracting – a striving after that which is ‘cool’ for its own sake?
Lesslie Newbigin captures this tension saying, “In the attempt to be ‘relevant’ one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism, one may become irrelevant.” I would also argue that relevance can only extend so far before degenerating. It is true that the gospel is relevant. In any context and situation, Jesus always “relates to and has a direct bearing to the matter at hand,” according to the dictionary definition of the word. But the fact of his Lordship also challenges and transforms, creating an alternative way of being for those called into his Kingdom.
– Adrienne
Excellent comment Adrienne, and I love the way you captured that moment from chatting with the class 🙂
The balance between relevance/contextualization and irrelevance is an interesting one. I don’t remember where I heard this, but I remember hearing a dude tell me he’d rather be prophetic than relevant and it seems like the key to that is that there’s a sort of relevance that happens in living and acting prophetically that doesn’t come up if we’re just looking to be accepted.
Whether or not it’s come up in class, I know that there is a temptation to move beyond relevant to acceptance or being viewed as cool. And while there’s some rather remarkable things about following Christ, if our attempt is to show how cool we are, we end up like the kid in high school, constantly trying to be cool and never making it because they’re so worried about being accepted.
At Sacred Roots (our project in Portland), our other leader and I always tell people that what we do isn’t very cool and has a tendency to feel a bit clunky and disjointed. I think it’s important to embrace that tension early on.
Thanks for the thoughts. I am not sure we have used the word relevance very much though. Maybe some other words that mean the same. Racking my brain.