Relevance and Prophetic Voice

OPENING:
I have always loved the Church. It’s the churches that I’ve never really liked.
· For years I remained cynical about the local church, even while serving as a pastor. Not until I moved to Kenya, East Africa, did I witness on the back side of the Kaisuit Desert what church life could mean when expressed in way that was not only relevant to the culture but prophetic in its impact.
· I am no longer cynical about the church, but my burden for her has grown even larger since our return to the United States five years ago.
· I would like to read a New Testament text, and then apply it more than exegete for our purposes in this message.

Acts 17:16-34

Allow me to make a few introductory comments about this very familiar experience of the Apostle Paul. By the apostolic era, the city of Athens in Greece was no longer a world superpower, but it did have a legacy from its glories of the past and maintained a reputation as a center for intellectual activity, philosophy, and piety. Full of idols, as Acts 17 records, Athens was described by ancient authors as a model of “speaking well of the gods.” So religious were the people of Athens, that in the city altars were erected to “unknown gods.” Besides being an indication of religiousness, Athen’s idolatry was a safety precaution. The thinking was that if the gods were not properly venerated they would strike the city. So, lest they inadvertently invoke the wrath of some god in ignorance of him or her, the city erected these altars to unknown gods.
The Athenians appeared to have thought that Paul was referring to two gods in his preaching. “’He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection” (v.18). The terms Jesus and anastasis (Greek for “resurrection”) were mistaken for the names of a god and his wife/cohort. Paul effectively uses the altar to the Unknown God to defend himself against their charges and to quickly turn his defense into an attack. Paul models for us the proper approach for any church in a changing culture: cultural relevance & a prophetic voice. Christ himself, working on an interpersonal level, started with the needs of the needs of his listeners, adopting their frame of reference for his prophetic and challenging statements to them. He dealt with Nicodemus in terms of his religious background, the Samaritan woman in terms of her racial background, Zacchaeus in terms of his vocational background, etc. Jesus was not being inconsistent—he was very consistent in his principle of cultural identification and prophetic speech. Paul provides perhaps the clearest example of cultural relevance and prophetic speech.

In this message, I intend to show how we can return to the glorious truth of this ancient text and prepare for future textures by reclaiming two things: cultural relevance & prophetic voice.

I. REGAINING CULTURAL RELEVANCE.
1. The Lost World
Many people summarize the problem of American churches today by simply saying that most churches are not growing. But it’s far worse than that. The real tragedy is not that churches are declining and closing their doors. It’s not that churches are dying but that churches have lost their reason to live.

Living within an all-Christian context, it becomes easy to divide according to theological distinctions. The difference between a Baptist and a Methodist actually used to matter to people. In many ways we seem to have too much time on our hands. Just look at how many kinds of Baptists there are—Southern, Northern, Conservative, American, Swedish, Cooperative, Free-Will, Regular, General, just to name a few.
· But while we were dividing among ourselves, we missed the growing divide that really mattered. We were losing the battle for the lives of people who were without Christ.
a. From within this context, the contemporary parachurch movement has emerged.
· The parachurch created a missiological rather than a theological environment. If you believed that the Bible held the solutions for man’s problems, knew that Jesus was the only hope for a lost and broken world, and were willing to do something about it, then you qualified to be on the team.
b. In many ways the emergence of the parachurch reflects the paralysis within the local church.
· When we stopped calling youth to the mission of Christ, Youth With A Mission emerged.
· When we ignored the opportunity to reach university students, Campus Crusade emerged.
· When we settled for church attendance and neglected discipleship, Navigators emerged.
· When we hesitated to call men to the role of spiritual leadership, Promise Keepers emerged.
>We’ve relinquished the kingdom to the parachurch. The tragedy is that it ever became necessary to circumvent the local church to do what Jesus claimed as his own mission (Luke 4:18-19).
c. Yet while the parachurch was rallying and mobilizing men and women whose hearts were longing to serve Christ, it was at the same time accelerating the spiritual anemia and decline of the church.
· The church became a fortress from the world rather than the hope of the world.
2. The Church Remains Its Own Worst Enemy.
a. This means that we have become disconnected from our present context.
· We tend to speak about the shift from a Christian worldview as if it were instigated and implemented by those who were outside of the church’s reach.
· The truth is that America’s best atheists are children of the church. It is rare to find a person who is a passionate enemy of the church who has never had contact with her.
· The diminishing influence of the American church on American society is not simply because fewer people are going to church, but fewer people are going to church because of the diminishing influence of Christ on the church itself.
b. We didn’t lose America; we gave her away!
· Along the way we lost the power to transform culture.
· The world changed and we didn’t. The world changed for the worse because we didn’t change at all. The world waits for church to once again become God’s agent of change.
· Even with the bombardment of materialism, rationalism, existentialism, and empiricism, our society continues an essentially spiritual quest. Today we are not moving towards a godless land but to a land with many gods. America may be the next great Hindu nation behind India.
*Here’s the biting indictment: this country is not rejecting spirituality but Christianity. People are rejecting Christ because of the church!
Once we were called Christians by an unbelieving world, and now we call ourselves Christians and the world calls us hypocrites. Isn’t it possible that it isn’t our nation that has become secular but the church? We have become neither relevant nor transcendent. We have become, in the worst of ways, religious.
illustration:
“We’re looking for a church that meets our needs.” It seems I’ve heard this a thousand times and I become nauseated each time. The phenomenon of church shoppers has profoundly shaped the contemporary church. The entire conversation today is not about cultural relevance but personal convenience.
· Our focal point has shifted from the world to ourselves. And in so doing we have lost our connection with a lost and broken world.
· Too many of our statements about the crisis in the American church center on the superficial arena of style and neglect to go to the core issue of self. At the core of so much of what we have become is self-centeredness. It is one thing to have a preference; it is another to demand that one’s preferences be honored above the needs of those without Christ.

3. A comfortable Substitute.
a. In the process of moving from contact and connectedness to convenience, we have moved even farther away from the center into comfort.
· Somewhere along the way we have forsaken the truth of the gospel and traded it for a comfortable substitute. We shifted from a church “on mission” and settled for being a church that supported missions.
· Perhaps you’ve heard the statement that the center of God’s will is the safest place on the face of the earth. The truth of the matter is that the center of God’s will is not a safe place but the most dangerous place in the world! To live outside of God’s will puts us in danger; to live in his will makes us dangerous.
b. How could we ever think the Christian faith would be safe when its central metaphor is an instrument of death?
· It is not a coincidence that baptism is a water grave depicting death and resurrection. It is significant that the ongoing ordinance of the Lord’s Supper is a reminder of sacrifice.
· How did we ever develop a safe theology from such a dangerous faith?

I have attempted to assess some of the fundamental causes for the decline of the church. Have you noticed that none of them deal with the outside environment? Certainly, cultural shifts are significant and need to be addressed. Yet, in the words of Erwin McManus, "The rapid and dramatic changes in culture are making for rough sailing but they are not sinking the boat. The problem is not with the seas but with the leak in the boat. The only storm that can sink a church is the one that rages within." In the end the crisis is always spiritual, not cultural. Radical changes outside the church demand an even more radical sacrifice within the church. Laying aside our traditions and cultural preferences are a reasonable expectation for a church committed to cultural relevance and a prophetic voice.

II. SPEAKING WITH A PROPHETIC VOICE.
The church is God’s agent for redeeming the earth to himself and filling the earth with his glory. Matthew tells us that the kingdom of God is forcefully advancing and forceful men take hold of it. Jesus reminds us that the church will crash against the very gates of hell. Paul describes us through the imagery of soldiers of light, dispelling the kingdom of darkness.

For 2000 years the church has been called by God to encounter culture through his transforming power. I am convinced that many of the global trends that have brought fear, concern, and even paralysis to the contemporary church are the very act of God. Several global movements are having sweeping and dramatic impacts on the culture in which we serve. The church is positioned to be either antagonistic, ineffective, or transformational in the emerging global scenario. While there are many current books that describe the significant part of this phenomenon as postmodernism, I would like to approach these issues from the perspective of globalization. For if postmodernism is the best description of what is happening on the Western front, globalization is the panoramic view of this historic paradigm shift. My perspective as we look at these is that the very movement that’s create friction for the contemporary church are the same ones from which we can generate traction. Friction is what hinders, slows us down. Traction is what gets is out of our ruts and enables us to launch a movement.

The following categories were originally suggested by Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic Church in Los Angeles, California:
1. Radical Migration.
· In the past the world has been stationary. It was extraordinary for a person to ever leave home, meet foreign peoples, and settle elsewhere. Jesus never traveled more than a hundred miles from his hometown during his adult life.
· This was the real world of the past—the world from which the American church was formed. Churches were landmarks of stability and continuity. All over America, next to churches lie cemeteries with the same dozen last names on the tombstones. If you lived in a community for 20 years but weren’t born there, you were still an outsider.
· What has become known as the phenomenon of transitional communities is simply the local expression of radical migration. That means neighborhoods are constantly changing. So we find white churches in black neighborhoods, black congregations in Latino communities, and Latino congregations in Asian communities.
· But what creates friction for the church can also be traction. The nations are at our front door—we have an opportunity to love our neighbors as ourselves, and the practical application of reconciliation is right across the street.
> Racial reconciliation may be the largest issue facing churches in Harrison County. Doubtful that God will ever bless us until we become broken enough about this sin to do something about it.

2. Urbanization.
· Ralph Winter has proposed that the last great frontier for the gospel is the cities. It is impossible to talk about the future without mentioning cities. While human history began in a garden, it ends in the city. This is a planet of great cities.
· This phenomenon creates great friction for the contemporary church (and especially Southern Southern Baptists). The majority of our churches have been informed and formed by rural ethos. Even the suburban church is in many ways the natural development of the county-seat church, maintaining its focus on rural values.
· It is ironic that the word pagan finds its roots in a word meaning “country dweller.” Christians today tend to view the urban dweller as the true pagan.
· Here’s how it can create positive traction. Many times in the rural or suburban community, the real issues of human poverty are camouflaged and overlooked. That’s not possible in an urban world. Everything is accentuated in the city (e.g. Ahmedabad—Holiday Inn looking down on slum dwellers on the banks of the Sabarmati River).
· Instead of contracting urbanitis and fleeing the urban challenge, we need to gain urban eyes and see how God is bringing the nations of the world to the cities.
· Urbanization affects towns the size of Marshall in perhaps even more significantly than large cities such as Houston, simply because of the greater conflict between nostalgia and reality>the way we wish it still was will never be that way again.
3. Demographic Shifts.
· As recent as the 1970’s, middle-class families constituted only one-third of the population of our cities. That percentage would today be more like one-fourth if not less. Why is it then that most of our churches are focused exclusively on the middle-class.
· Not sure about the accuracy of my assessment? Try this: What do you think of when you think of the church and its ministries? The vast majority of answers will fall within a narrow range including preaching, Sunday School, choir, age-graded programs. Don’t anticipate answers such as street people, ex-convicts, prisoners, drug addicts, homosexuals, impoverished, apartment dwellers, unemployed, unchurched high school kids, members of the cults, etc. Ministries that do not fit neatly into the middle-class primarily anglo nuclear family have simply been ignored.
· As a result of our middle-class focus, we have become ministry-poor. As long as we keep thinking that ministry is church work, we’ll never change. That’s because church work happens inside a church building. Therefore, the church person needs a Sunday School class to teach, a choir to sing in, a committee to serve on. He/she is too ministry-impaired to see beyond these typical activities. I do not mean that these things are wrong, just that they are insufficient to reach a lost, dying and decaying community.
4. Technological Revolution.
· What is the appropriate relationship between the church and its technological world?
· Is the church just a big “how to”? Does the church find her legitimacy in simply knowing how to do things better? Does the church sell out to culture when she beings to utilize the inventions of contemporary society? Does the church lose authenticity when she picks up innovation?
· Many in the church reject technology and at the same time depend on it. Even the most culturally conservative churches have no problem turning the lights on, using the microphone to preach against technology, or enjoying running water and indoor plumbing. Ironically, we tend to accept technologies that bring us comfort and convenience, while rejecting technologies that can produce creativity and innovation.
· Actually, the best use of technology takes the focus off technology. It accentuates humanity in the same way that spotlights should—not getting people to look at the light but helping people to see the speaker more clearly.
5. A Multicultural, Pluralistic World.
· The gospel, as presented in our time, has been crafted in a way that would only win Christians to Christ. We often preach to convert sinners who already believe in the God of the Bible. Our most basic presentations of the good news of Christ have been filled with assumptions—denying the essence of what communication is. Evangelism for the most part has been focused on people who already accept our worldview.
· What we began to describe as a New Age movement was the first wave of multicultural influence. For the first time we had access to multiple systems of belief. It was easier to be certain you were right when you had never heard of an opposing position. Everything begins to change when the nations become your neighbors.
· Apart from critical thought, religious pluralism produces “Christian universalism.”

CLOSING:

While the church was never intended to accommodate culture, much of the friction we’ve been experiencing is due to the fact that we’ve forsaken cultural relevance, and in so doing lost the right to speak with a prophetic voice.