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Whether though creating trendy worship services, writing books about how Christ can be seen in current movies, or mirroring hot bands playing on MTV, Christians often try to make their faith more culturally relevant. But Os Guinness says that this desire to be fashionable is exactly why Christians are now becoming marginalized. In a lecture for the C.S. Lewis Institute in 2002, he said that the only thing that is always relevant is the Gospel.

Guinness has written or edited more than 20 books, including The American Hour, The Call, Time for Truth, and Long Journey Home. He's Senior Fellow and vice chairman of the board at the Trinity Forum. His C.S. Lewis Institute lecture has now become his most recent book, Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Baker Books).

What exactly is the problem that you defined in your 2002 lecture?

Evangelicalism has never chased relevance more determinedly than it does now. And yet, we've never been more irrelevant. That could be purely accidental, and other factors are behind it, but I would argue that we've pursued the wrong type of relevance. We've fallen captive to modern views of time, progress, timeliness, and relevance. They're leading us down a garden path.

There's nothing wrong with relevance. The gospel, of course, is relevant. But modern views of relevance are dangerously distorted and they'll lead us into trouble. The Bible meets every person's needs. It's never out of date, never old fashioned, and it's always relevant. So I'm not attacking true relevance.

Instead, the problem is this modern idea of relevance. I've argued in other books that the church is being shaped by the modern world. In this book I'm not looking at modernity as a whole, but the modern view of time. In many ways, the clock has shaped the modern world as much as any other machine.

How has our attention to time changed civilization?

If you look back when clocks came into the West, there was a subtle change. For example, the idea of being civilized for the Greeks was a spatial idea. If you were inside, you were civilized. If you were outside, beyond the pale, you were barbarian. It was a matter of being beyond.

To be civilized in our world though is a matter of time. The uncivilized are Neanderthals. Change is what matters. Progress is what matters. The latest is greatest and the newer is truer. We think that the whole of history and everything in the world leads up to you and me. We have to keep up with every emerging trend in order to be savvy today.

How do you see this adversely affecting the church?

Worship is for the Lord and his people. It isn't primarily for seekers, although we suddenly take them into account. Too many seeker-sensitive services have gutted the heart of worship. I was in a mega-church in California and in the two Sundays I was there, there was hardly a reference to scripture. There were far more references to George Barna and George Gallup than to either the Bible or God.

Once culture becomes authority, you're always shifting in terms of the latest trends and the winds of fashion. The scripture is no longer authorative. You can see it in the Episcopal Church now in the way they've elected an openly gay bishop. It's the winds of culture that are decisive, not the scriptures. And a good bit of evangelicalism is drifting down the same road.

The second problem I've seen is with continuity. If you're always changing the faith, eventually you have some new, trendy faith. It's no longer the faith of our fathers and mothers. There's a real break in continuity. This brings with it a loss of identity. Eventually people are believing things that have little decisive Christian content. What are they really believing? It's just the world's beliefs dressed up.

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47