Should We Change Church to be Relevant? Part 3

            What should the primary pursuit of the church be?  Should we give highest priority to conforming ourselves to God’s commands or should we give highest priority to being relevant for the sake of outreach?  Two objections immediately spring to mind.

            First, we rightly object that the two things are not mutually exclusive.  We can pursue both.  We should pursue both.  But…which is most important?  I think the question is a good mental exercise for us as we work through the question “How should the church change to reach the lost?”  What should we be putting our effort into?  Our pastoral teams and young enthused Christians might spend quite a bit of time pondering how we might be better as a church in reaching the lost.  I would not fault them for this.  However, how much time do they spend, do we spend, on deeply thinking on how God has instructed a church to function?  It is a fair question.  Which should consume more of our time?  Should either of these be neglected?

            The second objection that comes to mind is: how is this any different than my last post?  I hope I’ve already given a good indication of the answer.  The second post in this series was simply about what wins when obedience and relevance conflict?  I hope we agreed that obedience must win.  What I am asking now is what should we be diligently striving to discover, relevance or revelation?

            Let me show you the heart of the problem.  Today many would say that there really isn’t much said in scripture about how we are to “do church.”  Of course there are some instructions, but just not much.  We are left with a breathtaking degree of freedom in how we are to organize things.  In contrast, the Christians of a century ago and further back believed that scripture contained very clear instructions on how we were to handle every aspect of our lives including church.  They were very confident that scripture gave a detailed map of “doing church.”  Now here is my point.  Somebody is wrong.  I do not mean to suggestion that we should take for granted that past Christians are right in this instance.  Perhaps modern Christians are right.  Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between.  But what I desire to ask of you is can you truly say that you have so searched God’s word, that you are so saturated with the entirety of it both old testament and new, that you can confidently say that it is they who are mistaken?

            Let this question sink in.  The truth is for most of us, probably all of us in this generation, there are swaths of scripture we have not diligently studied.  Television and modern entertainment have stolen far too much of our time such that we could never boast the familiarity with God’s word which generations past have accomplished in certain times of places.  Shouldn’t we cringe when our ministers in their 20’s boldly assure us something in direct contradiction to some of the most eminent saints of those past generations?  Have they even read the convictions of past generations on why church is done a particular way?  Do they know what scripture they based these convictions on?  Somebody is wrong.

            Now, here is my question.  What does the church most desperately need?  Is the most pressing concern of the church to seek relevance?  Or is the most pressing concern of the church to seek revelation?  Do we do well in this moment of history to spend the greater part of our effort to be diligently seeking how to attract the world?  Or should the greater part of our effort be seeking the scriptures daily to see what God says about doing church?  How we answer this question will drive how we proceed.  And it ought to be well thought over before a man begins restructuring our churches.  Is our great need relevance or revelation?