Relevance

Blogs are more fun as a conversational tool. So, i've come to realize. My friend Kristin just posted about the Christian use of 'relevance' as a buzz word. Here are my thoughts on it.

I agree that relevance like so much of contemporary pop Christianity has become a cliche. Now Christians seek media attention for being relevant to the world. Here is what strikes me about the topic of relevance: it is contingent on 'Christian' being its own category. It seems to me that the discussion is sparked by the fact that for a while now we have had a separate category in all aspects of life for secular and Christian. There are Christian book stores, Christian music, Christian movies, Christian night clubs (i'm not kidding), Christian movies . . . on and on. The use of the word relevance has grown in importance I think mostly because all these categorizations of things as "Christian" were characteristic for a style of cheap, inauthentic, shallow substitutes for what the rest of our culture appreciated. Like I've said in multiple blogs before this, tacking "Christian" on as an adjective, is often characteristic of music, movies, etc that's only selling point is that they are supposedly Christian . . .whatever that means. Lacking any artistic value in of themselves that would be noticable to "worldly" culture, the category of being Christian has become socially irrelevant. ding!

Most of the talk in Christian circles about being relevant (including Relevant magazine) is generally referring to an attempt by Christianity to return to authenticity on some level, and therefore become relevant to our culture. I think a lot of it stems from missional ideas that have increasingly been implemented by churches to reach American culture that has for a long time now been drifting away from inauthentic pseudo-Christian facades, and apathetically adopted a secular/pagan mindset - quite unapologetically I might add.

I think in this context, it is quite true that relevance is very necessary for Christianity to survive, and much more so for it to gain back any of the ground that it has lost. But, I think the larger problem is not relevance. It seems to me as I have been saying, the larger problem is inauthenicity. There are countless Christians I see now who appear relevant. They listen to the right music. They know all the movies. They are fluent in the language and thought of the larger culture. They have every reason to be culturally acceptable, yet, it appears they aren't doing much more to reach the culture. They have related fully to American people, but in being relevant they have found that they have nothing relevant to say, or maybe that they never had anything to say in the first place . . . in short, their faith is not authentic, not real.

This is where I think I agree with what Kristin said. She talked about not being relevant to the world, but rather relevant to the Kingdom. I agree with this in that the Kingdom is a reality that one can live in or not live in. One can live as though God's power and presence exist in the world or not. If one believes that God is present and has the power to act, then that is a belief in a certain perception of reality. If one believes in such a reality then their actions should seek relevance to it. If we claim to believe in God's Kingdom but our actions deny him then we are irrelevant to the very Kingdom Reality we put faith in. Simply put, failing to live out what we claim faith in proves that we don't matter and are irrelevant in the context of how we say things really are. If our words and our actions don't match up then we are being inauthentic, which makes us irrelevant to our faith and our culture.

I think a frightening number of Christians are guilty of both irrelevance and inauthenticity. Not only do we live in opposition of the Reality we put our faith in, but we also fail miserably at 'feeling' what our culture feels. I believe it's good to be both, but absolutely necessary to be authentic if nothing else. Weird Christians are ok, so long as they are confident in the Reality of God and therefore have set roots in a source of true identity. I commonly meet Christians that I can admire for their genuineness even if they are clueless to the actual state of American culture. I told a friend the other day that I hated going to most of the churches in my town, but still did occasionally just because I liked being around people who love God, even if they are blissfully ignorant about anything going on in the world around them.

Genuineness is definitely the priority in my opinion, but I also believe that relevance is a very good thing. I think that the majority of our society, no matter how attracted to authentic relational faith, would never be able to fully deny the secular culture they come from. For this, I believe relevance to the world is not optional. Jesus lived a fully Jewish life so as to let his Kingdom-centered authenticity challenge what it meant to be Jewish. Had Jesus fully rejected Jewish social practices and culture he would never have found the opportunity to present authentic living as a tension to what was commonly understood as how to live a 'holy' life.

I think so much of our culture now is devoid of hope. We have been robbed of our dreams for a future by the jaded eyes of history that point to the immense failures of all religion and ideology. If one takes the time and keeps an open mind it is possible to listen to our culture and hear the pain of people who have lost hope. It is not the cry of ignorant pagans, we cannot revert to some preconceived notion of the glorious days of Christian mission to re-convert our society. They've heard the Christian message. It has been dismissed on grounds of gross irrelevance, and now as we make it relevant, we realize that we ourselves don't really want to live out the Kingdom Reality.

"It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried."

Only now we are forced to listen to a secular society that points out that it is Christians who have not attempted to follow Jesus. I think that before we as Christians speak we have no option but to seek out a true authenticity, the Western world has heard the gospel, and they will quickly let us know how well we are living it out. We should listen. Yet, beyond that, our culture is screaming out to be heard. Our music, our movies, the books we read are loaded with a great ocean of emotions that is waiting for Kingdom people to address with an honesty that bears the most persuesive testimony to the relevance of the Kingdom we claim.