People talk a lot about making the gospel culturally relevant as if it is a contemporary irrelevance. As if Jesus has passed his sell-by date. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That’s why churches are now growing again in the UK - ahead of the population - in spite of an insidious anti-faith agenda from today’s cultural elite.
Meanwhile, our call as the people of God is not to cultural relevance but to cultural presence. We are wired as change agents; designed to be outsiders on the inside.
Again and again in the Old Testament the Israelites got this wrong. Syncretistic assimilation in one generation, pietistic exclusivity in the next. Our task is to be undeniably different yet defiantly present in ordinary streets and offices, in recording studios and research labs, from classrooms to the corridors of power. ‘You are the Light of the World!’ Jesus cries, “Now shine!’ Compel the culture’s attention with a better, more beautiful way of life.
Does the political right criticise our championing of the poor, our hospitality towards refugees? Hallelujah!
Does the political left despise our commitment to family and the sanctity of life? Praise the Lord!
“The days are coming, I suspect, when we will be hated for what we stand for but loved for what we do. ”
Are our sexual ethics openly mocked by the media? Is our belief in God pilloried by the academy? Are our brothers and sisters being persecuted by the Powers in China and Iran, slaughtered for their confession of faith in Nigeria and the Middle East? Kyrie Eleison.
Yes, we are with you. Yes, we like you. But no, we are not like you.
The days are coming, I suspect, when we will be hated for what we stand for but loved for what we do. It has always been so. And if we recant at such a time; if we bow down to the State and trade authority for power, if we marry the spirit of this present age we will be widowed in the next (Inge). As old-man Moses once said to God (as he eyed the Promised Land) ‘If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here… What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” (Exodus 33)
It’s time to carry God’s presence into an alien land. To celebrate our own strangeness within the culture, to herald the margins and rage against the relentless beige of modern life.
The hope of the world today is still the same, uncool, unchanging gospel of this punk rock messiah who walked amongst us, as one of us and showed us another way to be.