Never has the church been more tempted to heed the siren call to a specious “relevance” than today. And why not? The Church finds itself increasingly shorn of influence in a world that is perhaps more confused in thinking and chaotic in action than at any other time in history.
Accused of being “irrelevant” and anxious to remedy a situation that threatens to lead to national and world disaster, the Church reacts by preaching and teaching what the world wants to hear—food for the hungry, population control, peace at any price, economic security, political realignments, an end to pollution, and a thousand and one other matters of man’s physical welfare.
The Gospel was never intended to please man; it is to save him. For the believer it requires humility, while for those who will not believe it is foolishness. We must face up to the reason that God’s Son came into the world. If his primary mission was to make the world a better place in which to live, then the Church should design its message and activities according to the humanistic concept. But that is not the Gospel.
If, on the other hand, Christ came into the world primarily to solve the sin problem with its resulting estrangement of man from God and man from man, if he came to enable those who repent and believe in him to become new creatures through regeneration, if he came to present men an alternative to perishing in their sins, then the most relevant thing the Church can possibly do is to preach Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, as man’s one hope for eternity and his assurance of inner peace right now.
That the Church is increasingly a humanistic society rather than a fellowship of the redeemed is a phenomenon all can see. I am speaking here chiefly of the church courts where politics are adopted and slogans prepared. Thank God there are tens of thousands of local pastors and congregations who are faithfully witnessing and living in the light of their God-ordained task. But let one raise a doctrinal issue in a church court, a question having to do with the basic content of the Christian faith, and he is immediately said to be out of order. He is “irrelevant” to the needs of today’s world and the business of the court.
No Christian, no church, can meet the needs of mankind by denying or playing down the simple facts of the Gospel—repentance, confession, and conversion. Those who put to one side Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, immediately lose their own relevance to a sinning and lost world.
To the Church, and to the Church alone, God has committed the message of salvation in Christ. Compared with all the drab, sordid, and unhappy news in this world, the Gospel is indeed the “Good News.” Chambers of commerce, social organizations, the local, state, and national governments—all such groups have their functions within the framework of an orderly social system. But only the Church has the message that deals with the eternal verities, those things that reach beyond the horizon into eternity. Unless individual Christians and the Church are faithful to their divine calling, “relevance” becomes a mockery.
Furthermore, the Church is not relevant when it apes the world and conforms to the world’s standards. To reject those moral and spiritual values that are clearly stated in the Scriptures—things having to do with sexual purity and interpersonal relationships—is to destroy not only the foundations for living but the hope of Christ’s redemptive work. Man does not break God’s commandments; they break him.
For the Church to seek relevance by giving top priority to social, economic, and political issues is as ridiculous as for a man trained in the intricacies of cardiac surgery to spend his time digging ditches. But church leaders have so directed most activities that today the difference between Christianity and humanism has vanished, as far as many people are concerned.
The problem lies in a failure to differentiate between the spiritual calling and message of the Gospel and the individual Christian’s responsibility in the social order of which he is a part. The Church is called to preach redemption through Christ and then man’s obligation to his fellow man. There is a divine sequence that requires regeneration as the foundation for Christian living and witness. Otherwise the difference between Christian and pagan vanishes.
From many a pulpit the call to repentance and faith is muted. Instead, men are exhorted to become involved in the latest humanistic endeavor, with no mention of their prior personal relationship to Jesus Christ. Little wonder that as a result, the Church has increasingly become irrelevant at the very point where its message is desperately needed. No blessing can be expected where the clear admonitions of the Gospel are compromised or denied. The Apostle Paul tells us to beware lest we hold a form of religion but deny its source of power—the redeeming blood of Christ.
Many good people are unwittingly crossing the line into a humanistic concept of life. Physical and environmental needs abound on every hand. Compassion demands that we do something about the plight of those who face the experiences of our contemporary world as sheep without a shepherd. The Church is in this world to minister to man’s spiritual needs while we Christians must show our compassion by concern for the material needs of those around us, all in the name of and for the glory of our Lord.
But in all of this we should remember that we have no right to claim for all mankind those blessings God has reserved for his own. Because these blessings are reserved for the Christian, our first obligation is to heed God’s priorities by putting him and his righteousness first in all things.
I know well that some resent the recurring emphasis of this article, and I have no desire for a self-imposed martyrdom. But some Christians today must be willing to draw the opposition’s fire by shouting from the housetops the danger that the Church is being diverted from its primary mission. On every hand we hear calls to “involvement” and “relevance,” but we see little evidence of the Spirit’s blessings on those activities that make the Church a part of the dying world order or compromise its message for the sake of the world’s acclaim.
This has nothing whatsover to do with methods. It may well be that what the Church needs most today is to throw away its programs while it puts Christ at the center of its message and objectives. The Church may well get out of stately buildings and into the streets and marketplaces with the message of God’s saving power through his Son. Times change, and with them methods not only can but should change. The trouble is that today the message is being changed or omitted, and that is fatal. Christ came into the world not to please the world but to redeem it, and that message must be central to the Church’s approach to the world.
L. NELSON BELL
