Monday, December 04, 2006
On Relevancy - Or The Lack Thereof
One of my PC(USA) ring fellows A Classical Presbyterian has been asking all the right questions lately. Summing his question he says:
This sent me thinking on the boom-and-bust cycle of our faith, something happening in incresingly shortening cycles. The relevancy-to-decline cycle took the Roman Church 1500 years of so. For Protestantism it is looking like about 500 years. For Evangelcalism a couple of hundred, what's next? That is indicative of how right this thesis is, as culture moves so much more rapidly than before so does this cycle.
I must confess to confusion; however. My faith drew me initially and draws me now because of its permanance, its very untimeliness, that it is an anchor when all about me is in constant motion. So much has changed in my lifetime, but so has so little.
Many years ago I wandered the streets of the ancient agora in Athens, Greece. I passed a 5000 year old "fast food" joint, then the gym. I passed a bakery where people stopped to by bread for the day. Despite the amazing antiquity, I was floored by how little life had really changed. You still basically went to work, went shiopping for your daily needs, maybe stopped off for a brew or a work-out. Oh technology has changed everything, and almost nothing - in the end its just a better way to do the same old things.
I think there is a message for us in there somewhere - if the business of life has changed so little over these 5000 years - can the needs of mankind for the God of eternity have changed much? I don't think so. The change of the ages is so superficial - and yet we chase it as if it were the most important think in the world.
I think we do so so that we can consider ourselves at only the most superficial of levels. By chasing the relevant, we avoid seeing the sin in ourselves. And yet the solution to that sin lies at our fingertips.
How tragic.
Related Tags: relevancy, timeliness, eternity, sin, church, cycle
I suppose what I'm getting at is the sense that Os Guiness may well be right in the thesis of his book, Prophetic Untimeliness--namely that the more culturally relevant a church seeks to become, the less relevant it actually is.Later in the post he pretty well answers himself:
So then, I believe that Guiness is right in his thesis--whether we totally sell out to a pre-1960's cultural model or the postmodern consumerist Mega-Church model, the result is the same! For the result of our buying into a human outlook and culture so deeply that we cease to have a word from somewhere else still gets us to the same place: Cultural irrelevancy and decline.Interesting language, but right on. I would state it more directly - Christ is the only relevancy, all other concerns are irrelevant.
This sent me thinking on the boom-and-bust cycle of our faith, something happening in incresingly shortening cycles. The relevancy-to-decline cycle took the Roman Church 1500 years of so. For Protestantism it is looking like about 500 years. For Evangelcalism a couple of hundred, what's next? That is indicative of how right this thesis is, as culture moves so much more rapidly than before so does this cycle.
I must confess to confusion; however. My faith drew me initially and draws me now because of its permanance, its very untimeliness, that it is an anchor when all about me is in constant motion. So much has changed in my lifetime, but so has so little.
Many years ago I wandered the streets of the ancient agora in Athens, Greece. I passed a 5000 year old "fast food" joint, then the gym. I passed a bakery where people stopped to by bread for the day. Despite the amazing antiquity, I was floored by how little life had really changed. You still basically went to work, went shiopping for your daily needs, maybe stopped off for a brew or a work-out. Oh technology has changed everything, and almost nothing - in the end its just a better way to do the same old things.
I think there is a message for us in there somewhere - if the business of life has changed so little over these 5000 years - can the needs of mankind for the God of eternity have changed much? I don't think so. The change of the ages is so superficial - and yet we chase it as if it were the most important think in the world.
I think we do so so that we can consider ourselves at only the most superficial of levels. By chasing the relevant, we avoid seeing the sin in ourselves. And yet the solution to that sin lies at our fingertips.
How tragic.
Related Tags: relevancy, timeliness, eternity, sin, church, cycle
