Relevance

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a year or two, you know I very much appreciate Os Guinness’ books.  This one is no exception: Dining With the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity.  Though it is nearly 20 years old, it still speaks profoundly to the crisis in American Christianity – the crisis of culture shaping the church more than Scripture.  This section where Guinness speaks of relevance is outstanding.

“…Relevance is a question-begging concept when invoked by itself.  And when absolutized, relevance becomes lethal to truth.  Properly speaking, relevance assumes and requires the answer to such questions as: Relevance for what?  Relevant to whom?  If these questions are left unasked, a constant appeal to relevance becomes a way of riding roughshod over truth and corralling opinion coercively.  People are thinking or doing something simply ‘because it is relevant’ without knowing why.  But truth, in fact, gives relevance to ‘relevance,’ just as ‘relevance’ becomes irrelevance if it is not related to truth.  Without truth, relevance is meaningless and dangerous.”

“In addition, relevance has a false allure that masks both its built-in transience and its catch-22 demand.  Dean Inge captured the transience in his celebrated line, ‘He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower.’  But it was Simone Weil who highlighted the catch-22: ‘To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.’”

“…The pursuit of relevance thus becomes a prime source of superficiality, anxiety, and burn-out.  (‘Hell,’ it has been said, ‘will be full of newspapers with a fresh edition every thirty seconds, so that no one will ever feel caught up.’)  In its competitive – read ‘marketed’ – form, relevance becomes ‘trendier than thou’ and eventually becomes the fast road toward irrelevance.  Revealingly, when “Saturday Night Live’ becomes a church’s seeker-friendly ‘Sunday Morning Live’ and ‘The Best Show in Town,’ the typical church staff question after worship becomes, ‘How did it go?’” (p. 63-64).

I’m especially interested in the provocative questions Guinness asks: “Relevance for what?”  “Relevant to whom?”  When churches bend over backwards to be relevant, those questions must be asked and answered.  I’ve seen some churches – in the name of relevance – not only water down the truth of the Word, but also ignore entire segments of people (older people, singles, handicapped people, etc.).  Anyway, I recommend this book very much: Dining with The Devil by Os Guinness.  I honestly think every serious Christian should read through this (especially pastors, elders, and other church leaders). There are even a few study questions at the end of each chapter – and the chapters are quite brief and readable.  At the time of this post, you can get copies of this book (used) on Amazon for  under $6.00 shipped.

shane lems

The Busy, Extroverted, Moving Church

One way churches in the United States (and other Western cultures no doubt) mirror the consumer mindset is the emphasis on growth, speed, movement, newness, and the instant.  Today churches advertise using words like these: on the move, dynamic, exploding, vibrant, fresh, growing, alive, pulsating, energetic, and so on.  I appreciate how Adam McHugh criticizes this mindset in his book Introverts in the Church.

“Evangelicalism values the doer over the thinker.  The evangelical God has a big agenda.  It’s as if the moment we surrender our lives to Christ we are issued a flashing neon sign that says, ‘Go!’  There is a restless energy to evangelicalism that leads to a full schedule and a fast pace.  Some have said that, in Christian culture, busyness is next to godliness.  We are always in motion, constantly growing, ever expanding.”

“I’ll never forget the statements a senior pastor of a 300-member congregation uttered when I interviewed for an associate pastor position: ‘This is a really high-octane environment.  We’re looking for someone who is excitable and high energy.  You have to be totally sold out to work here.  We work full throttle.’  I double checked my surroundings to make certain I was at a church and hadn’t stumbled into an interview for the pit crew at the Indianapolis Speedway.  I was reminded of Eugene Peterson’s indictment of our brand of Christianity: ‘American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.’”

“The innovativeness of evangelicals has shaped the landscape of American religious life in ways that testify to this motion, growth, and expansion.  We invented the religious twentieth-century landmark: the megachurch – an expression of the church that introduced the paradox of people worshiping together in anonymity.  …At its worst, it has produced a superficial, consumerist mold of Christianity that has sold the gospel like a commodity.  Many evangelical megachurches, in their hope to create comfortable environments for seekers, have stripped their sanctuaries and worship services of any sense of mystery and the sacred. …At the center of most megachurches is a big personality: a dynamic, larger-than-life pastor who is able to hold everything together wtih his charisma” (p. 26-27).

What does this emphasis on an active, high-octane ministry mean for discipleship?  Doctrinal teaching?  Sanctification?  Patience?  Worship?  Prayer?  Meditation?   If we want to follow Scripture, we should not judge a church based on its number of programs, fast paced ministries, dynamic worship, or on the pastor’s energy level.  We should judge a church on its faithfulness to Scripture and mature, biblical doctrine.

Back to McHugh’s book Introverts in the Church.  I gave a brief review of it couple of years ago (HERE).  In short, though I wasn’t completely captivated by it, it is a good book to own when thinking about the topic of introverts in the church.

shane lems

A Small Church: Maybe Not So Bad After All!

Though this book was penned in 1980, it still speaks volumes to our present “church” situation.  William Willimon and Robert Wilson wrote it: Preaching and Worship in the Small Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980).  Here are a few helpful quotes/comments.

Some people “have a gnawing feeling that the small church is somehow second-rate and does not quite measure up to what it ought to be in today’s world.  Other persons…view the small church as an anachronism, kept alive by stubborn people who are holding on to an institution that should be allowed or even encouraged to die.  They see such churches as impediments to the development of the kind of congregation needed today.  In the meantime the small congregation continues to exist, doing what it and the Christian Church have always done, albeit imperfectly: winning adherents, nurturing them in the Christian way of life, gathering them each week for worship and preaching, and in many rural communities, finally burying them in the adjacent cemetery, confident that they have successfully run the race and received the reward of the faithful” (p. 14).

Willimon and Wilson lament the fact that the capitalistic notion that “bigger is better” has made its way into the church’s thinking.  “If the figures are going up, the congregation and its pastor are presumed to be succeeding.  If they are remaining the same or decreasing, something is obviously wrong” (p. 30).  Pastors of small churches are less important than pastor’s of big churches; a pastor has not “arrived” until he’s the senior pastor of a huge church.

They praise the small local church that has simply (i.e. w/o parades, programs, politics and pet issues) preached the word and administered the sacraments.  “Congregational worship is a reliable barometer of the life of the small church.  Here the church family will celebrate its victories, lament its defeats, act out its deepest needs” (p. 45).

“To the pastor who is serving or who may serve a church of small membership, we have a final word.  If you measure the success of your ministry by the size of the crowd, the prestige of the church you serve, or the praise of denominational authorities, you are in deep trouble in the small church.”

“But if you sense that you are called of God – if you know that your ultimate authority and final validation of your ministry come from the faithful service and celebration of the Word and its confrontation by God’s people, your servant hood will continue to be blessed.  You will have the joy of knowing that you are faithfully proclaiming the Word, and that you are an instrument of God’s grace for the people who worship in a church of small membership” (p.123).

This is advice for myself, a pastor of a small church!  The blessings of a pastoring small church quite possibly outweigh the blessings of pastoring a larger church.  May the capitalism be knocked out of my church thinking.

For an earlier post from this book, see “Willmon on the Busy Church.”

shane lems

sunnyside, wa

#1 Selling Beer, Rock Concerts, and Your Neighborhood McMegachurch

Now that I’m done with this book, I’m convinced that all Reformed pastors should at least skim through it – especially church planters in suburbia! As I mentioned in the earlier two posts on this book, Twitchell, who does not claim to be a Christian (he’s an “apatheist” in his own words) went to loads of mega churches and a lot of “wanna be” mega churches and wrote of his experiences and conclusions. Here are a few more snippets.

“…As I write this in 2006, there’s a new church reaching mega status in this country every few days. Why did they appear so suddenly? For a number of reasons…. Herd mentality is at the heart of fashion, rock concerts, teenage smoking, war, best-selling books, and numerous other endeavors that spread like the flu…. Consumers move in trickles, then droves.”

“Growth itself is a powerful selling tool. As any student of Branding 101 knows, being able to say you are the fastest growing has pulling power. It implies leadership. Leading is not a measure of quality, however, but consumption. Take beer, for example. There’s the leading light beer, the leading imported beer, the leading Mexican beer, the leading German beer, the leading microbrewed beer, and so on. Where taste is hard to measure, the invocation of leadership often substitutes for the real thing, even if leadership is in an unimportant category.”

“As I learned, megas depend on disrupting traffic flow. There is no better advertisement in mallcondo culture than an attraction so powerful that car traffic jams up before it. Very often the church even makes a display out of hiring local police, complete with flashing blue warning lights, to direct the flow, as well as having parking attendants wear headsets like air traffic controllers. To an audience that grew up on rock concerts, nothing is more powerful than a little jostling at the gate.”

If you don’t purchase this book, you should at least check it out (ILL?) from your local library. I didn’t post any of Twitchell’s comments on the first and second great awakenings; I’m afraid too many of our readers would have been quite offended at his penetrating critique of Whitefield and the like.

The above quotes taken from James B. Twitchell, Shopping for God (Simon and Schuster, 2006), 212, 230.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Marketing God in the Megachurch

Last week, I noted that I’m reading James Twitchell’s Shopping for God(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).  Twitchell describes himself as a “cold Christian,” or better yet, an “apatheist” (p.33).  As a review, this book is Twitchell’s comparison of megachurches to marketing strategies.  He calls megachurch pastors “pastorpreneurs” of ”McChurch.”  Here are a few more snippets.

“…A case could be made that the most important influence on modern megachurch delivery is the rock concert.  Successful churches have one thing in common: They are entertaining.  Fun!  And in an entertainment economy, the most successful product is the one with predictable sensation delivery.  Religion has become, since the dour 1966 Time magazine cover asked, “Is God Dead?” nothing if not entertaining.  Not only is God alive, He rocks” (p. 46).

“…Until recently, Protestants could always claim that, OK, they had lots of Bibles, but that was only because the Word was so important.  Times have changed.  American low-church Protestants, who once railed against the shallow materialism of their no-longer-kissing cousins from Rome, are now shopping at the indulgence and relic markets.  They are the ones who are now selling the pig’s knuckles.  Where they once enjoyed invoking the story of Christ throwing the money changers out of the temple, today the megachurches clearly welcome the merchants into their temples.  The souvenir store is front and center, right next to the sanctuary, selling all kinds of logoed stuff.  If you are a doubting Thomas, check out any of their websites” (p 64).

“The mantra ‘I’m into spirituality, not religion’ often means, I want the feelings without the overhead.  While much of spirituality is pure nonsense – marketing, packaging, psychobabble – it is more practical and personal, more about stress reduction than salvation, more therapeutic than theological.  It’s about feeling good, not necessarily about being good.  It’s as much about the body as the soul.  It’s health masquerading as belief, the Church of Dr. Phil, the Chapel of Oprah” (p. 139).

You should read what he has to say about 19th century Revivals!  Maybe next time…

shane lems

sunnyside wa