I hope there is a hell for terrible ideas. If there is, the overwhelming push for “cultural relevance” in church-world deserves to go there. Let me break this intellectual disaster down for everybody.
“cultural relevance” in church-world is traditionally defined as the mentality which says that in order to “do church” the best in our current culture, we should have electric guitars, tattoos, witty humor, multicolored lights, sermons about sex, really big LCD screens, trendy clothes, sleek Power-Point backgrounds, lattes, and so on and so forth. Presumably these things make church appealing to the outside world, and therefore we should have them/do them.
The main problem with the culturally relevant approach to church is that it places unnecessary emphasis on making the church like the world in order to win people to Christ. The overarching idea is that if we can get people to come inside the church at whatever cost (literally or figuratively), then we will be able to effectively win them to Christ. FALSE. This is “backwards evangelism.” The things that are often associated with culturally relevant churches will never win someone into a relationship with God in and of themselves. At best they represent subjective cultural preferences or superfluous tools; at worst they are devices of trickery designed to get people into church for all the wrong reasons. Deception was not one of Jesus’ methods when he walked the earth, therefore it shouldn’t be one of ours. Moreover, who wants fake Christians sitting in the lay-z-boy seats of our auditoriums worshiping the pleasure they are receiving from both the awesome jam powers of the lead guitarist and their perfectly brewed lattes more than God? So instead of worrying about whether or not our churches are perfectly implementing these potentially deceptive and transient tools (after all, most of them won’t be cool in twenty years anyways), we need to worry about the substantial constants: things like Jesus, the gospel, God’s love for us, and relationships.
Good, strong relationships are the medium through which the gospel is most effectively shared and received. For example, I volunteer for an organization called Snowboarders and Skiers for Christ (SFC). The guys at SFC have the following saying: “shred ability equals credibility.” What this means is that we need to earn the right to share the gospel with people. We need to be out on the slopes “shredding” with them, while engaging them on a fundamentally personal level, so that we can build a relationship strong enough that will actually allow us to effectively share the gospel with them. Getting people to walk into your church because it feels hip, and then sharing the gospel with them, is going to be infinitely less effective. Those people are walking into your church because it feels like the comfortable, cool, hip, and entertainment oriented world they already love, not because they are truly interested in Jesus. Ultimately, true believers of Christ are not going to care what their church experience is like so long as it effectively enables them to worship God, learn, and fellowship with other believers to the best of their abilities.
To sum up, in so far as our obsession with cultural relevance promotes backwards evangelism and detracts from the primacy of relationships, it is misguided and ultimately detrimental to the health of the church. The more time we spend worrying about superfluous things, the less we worry about what really matters. Thus, ironically, the push for cultural relevance is actually quite irrelevant.
