What We’re Looking For (III) RELEVANCY

This is a very important component of the faith and churches that people of this generation are looking for. Sadly, some churches have gone to such extremes ensuring that they are ‘relevant’ they actually place that as the essential element of who they are thus losing sharpness in the process.
Relevancy to me is something that needs to be taught into people and combined with teaching OUT of people some things. People have come to honour the forms by which church used to do things in past generations to a point where those forms can never be changed and are therefore so outdated and shockingly irrelevant that it turns people away from the truth that the church offers. This must be taught OUT of people.
Forms must change with the times and forms must connect with and impact the people that we need to reach or we are not fulfilling the mandate we were given by Christ.

What must be taught into people to enable relevancy is that all of life can be lived and enjoyed when done so to the glory of God. Good music is good music and must be celebrated; good wine is a fantastic gift to mankind and must be enjoyed biblically; rest and play originate in the heart of God so we as Christians should be doing it the best way. (Those are just examples to try make a point.)

Here are some words written by the ever prophetic Francis Schaeffer that speak to this entry

Not being able, as times change, to change under the Holy Spirit is ugly. The same applies to church polity and practice. In a rapidly changing age like ours, an age of total upheaval like ours, to make nonabsolutes absolutes guarantees both isolation and the death of the institutional, organized church.

We have an increasingly secularised culture to reach and to save people from that culture we must look at the form/packaging of everything that we do! Let’s pursue relevancy but remember that we do not have to give up any of our core values in the process.

Simon