Friday, April 22, 2011
Relevancy That Matters
Matt Anderson points out some alarming trends in younger Evangelicals:
"Relevancy" is a term of comparison - one must be relevant to something else. One cannot be relevant in a vacuum. Relevancy in the church must be to God's created order, not the to the concerns of this world in its current fallen state. By definition that means we will appear quite different from the prevailing culture.
Maybe it is time we took a good look at what we measure our relevancy against?
Young, college-educated evangelicals are far more open to gay marriage than our parents. We may be rosy about marriage, but we also don’t care much who enters it.A picture continues to emerge that the Evangelical movement can be summed up as "Go along to get along." In an effort to be "relevant" we adapt the cultural forms of the current day, but forget to filter out the cultural norms and mores. We seem to try and fade into the wood work. Forget "Standing up" for Jesus, we do not even "Stand out."
[...]
If the culture war is still going on among the college educated, then, it’s not evangelicals who are leading the way. A friend sent me a note reporting from Princeton’s Love and Fidelity Conference reporting that it was overrun with Catholics and Mormons, but had few evangelicals. I suspect that’s indicative both of evangelicalism’s lack of representation at Princeton and younger evangelical’s disinterest in the marriage debates.
"Relevancy" is a term of comparison - one must be relevant to something else. One cannot be relevant in a vacuum. Relevancy in the church must be to God's created order, not the to the concerns of this world in its current fallen state. By definition that means we will appear quite different from the prevailing culture.
Maybe it is time we took a good look at what we measure our relevancy against?
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