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How should Christians balance the Scripture and the world?

It's well known that Jesus called us to be in the world but not of the world. In history, only one person has done it perfectly—the Lord. Christians have been sometimes so much in it, that they're of it and wordly. Or they can be so much not of it that they're other-worldly.

What has changed is the modern world. The rise of the Modern World through the Industrial Revolution is so powerful, so pervasive, and so pressurizing that you can barely get away from it. The world is so powerful today that what's surprising is there's almost no world-denying branches of the Christian faith left. Evangelicalism used to be very attentive about worldliness, but no longer cares about it much today.

Paul became a Jew to the Jews, a Greek to the Greeks, a Gentile to the Gentiles, and so on. That's what we should do. Be a hippie to the hippies, a boomer to the boomers, and so on. We've got to start where people start. But the point is, we must never end there.

So many pastors and pundits today are saying, "We've got to re-invent the church and get it moving forward—a new kind of Christian for the new kind of age." But when you look at the Scriptures and Christian History, the church always goes forward by first going back. What we're after is not re-inventing the church, but reviving the church. And part of revival and reformation is always going back to God's standards.

In this craze to be relevant and in using words like "reinventing," we've got to ask, What are we really doing? When I first came to the faith, if the church was in bad shape, there would be prayer for revival. Today if the church is in bad shape, we talk about reinvention. But what the church needs is revival, not reinvention. It's not something we do by getting up-to-date, it's something the Lord does by bringing us back to the power of his truth and his spirit.

How has commercialization come out of our desire for fashionability?

The Contemporary Christian Music and the Christian Booksellers Association are multi-billion dollar industries incredibly contained by their success. Many of them are now driven by the market, not by mission. So instead of the church being salt and light, you've got Christians writing books to other Christians.

I walked through CBA last year with one of the heads of one of the leading publishing houses. He said, "You know, 95 percent of these books are all about me, my, and that sort of stuff." Narcissistic. Very little of it is serious Christian books engaging the culture.

I love C.S. Lewis's idea of resistance thinking. He said if you only adapt the gospel to what fits your times, you'll have a comfortable, convenient gospel. But it'll only be half the gospel. And it'll be irrelevant to the next generation.

Whereas, if you follow resistance thinking—or looking into the gospel for things that are difficult, obscure, or even repulsive as he says—then you're true to the whole gospel. And secondly, you're relevant to any generation.

Twenty years ago when I first started saying some of these things, many of [those seeking to be relevant] treated me like a Neanderthal. But now, so many members of the younger generation want history, liturgy, and richness again. They're going back to the early church fathers and the Scriptures. They want the Cross and worship. The people who cut out all that stuff in the name of relevance have suddenly found themselves washed up.

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47