Relevance: worthy ideal or contemporary idol?

by John Clark, instructor of theology at Moody Bible Institute

      If our Christian witness is to be credible and compelling, we must adapt to our cultural context but never adopt our cultural context. 

      We ought not to look for common ground upon which to identify with our culture, for our identity is found elsewhere. Rather, we ought to look for strategic points of contact with our culture, points at which the Gospel might address the specific issues and predicaments of our day so as to critique, challenge and, by the mercy and might of the Spirit, overturn the unbelief and error of our non-Christian contemporaries. When Christians do not adapt to their culture in such a way, they fail to communicate. When Christians adopt their culture, they obscure or even forfeit the substance of the Gospel. 

      As a case in point, consider the contemporary church’s prevailing preoccupation with so-called relevance. To be sure, relevance, rightly understood, is a good thing. So is our desire to be timely and pertinent. Then what is the problem? Listen carefully to current Christian sermonizing and song writing. Look closely at current Christian literature or at the current state of the church in general. The problem is that we, like our non-Christian contemporaries, tend to associate “relevance” with the cutting edge and the latest trend. That is, we tend to adopt contemporary culture’s misguided understanding of relevance, and thus we uncritically pursue an unworthy ideal. Worse still, we tend to believe that this so-called relevance will grant us legitimacy with our non-Christian culture, and thus we faithlessly forge a contemporary idol.

      Yet relevance, rightly understood, bears little to no resemblance to contemporary culture’s concept of it. According to the Latin term relevāns, relevance describes something which relieves, something which lifts or lightens a burden. What are the burdens of our day that need to be lifted or lightened? Ironically, one such burden is our misguided understanding of relevance, which saddles us, under the guise of significance, to the tyranny of the transient, the trendy and the trivial. Most importantly, however, we need to be relieved of fear, shame, alienation and meaninglessness—those pervading byproducts of sin which incessantly lap at our lives. 

      Therefore, that which is most relevant to our contemporary culture is that which has eternal significance: namely, the Gospel, for the Gospel acquaints us with and conforms us to the living Lord—Jesus Christ—who confronts and overturns the idols of this and every age.