Being Culturally Relevant

Love him or hate him, Mark Driscoll is reaching people for Christ.  Although many think he is too harsh with is language and controversial preaching.  I say, “No he’s right on track.”  I myself listen to his podcast quite regularly.  He is speaking out on topics that most pastors do not want to talk about whether out of fear of making people mad, losing members, or they are just plane cowards.

Pastors find themselves in a very strange place now days in the church world.  In that nobody wants to hear about God getting angry at the sin in their lives.  Rather what ten things can we do in our lives to have “our best life now.” What pastors have to realize (and I am one of them) is that preaching the gospel is not easy or pretty at times.  We are supposed to tell the congregation what the consequences of sin are.  We are to tell the people what God likes and dislikes in their lives and most importantly it is to be Christ centered.  Since when did preaching the gospel ever become about succeeding in life, making everyone like you, gaining wealth, and so on?

I think what stumps most evangelicals concerning Mark Driscoll and others like him is we find it hard to believe that someone can be relevant in today’s culture and at the same time be biblically conservative.  I think why this stumps so many is because we ourselves want to be just like that: being relevant to the ever changing world to reach them, while still holding on to our conservative biblical truths.

Instead of letting these two topics stump us we need to be asking ourselves, is there anything here that I can learn from?  I don’t think Mark Driscoll is being culturally relevant just to be cool, but rather he is trying to answer the tuff questions that the cultural is asking – that other pastors don’t want to touch.  Like sex & sexuality, alcohol, what it means to be a real godly man or godly woman and so on.

A lot of what Mark Driscoll is preaching is nothing new. Just a few generations before us we see men preaching hard against sin.  Sadly, many pastor have gotten scared to look at someone in the eyes and tell them what they are doing is wrong and that it will send them to hell.  They would rather tell their people what God could do for them.  Over the next month, see how many times your pastor preaches a salvation message, it just might shock you.  Shouldn’t we hear the salvation message preached every time a sermon is delivered, I say yes we should! For what other reason do we do church if it is not to bring in other lost people into God’s flock and to constantly remind the righteous what Christ did for us on the cross.

Sadly many churches need to wake up and listen to a culture that is crying out in search of truth. We need to realize that many of our programs and fuzzy warm sermons are not answering the questions that the culture is asking.  The church would be better off if it could just let go of some of it’s “sacred cows” and get back to giving biblical truths to tough questions.

Next the church needs to move outside of its comfort zone if it has any hope in reaching today’s culture.   We have become to “churchy” for our own sake.  We have hidden in the four walls of the church for so long that we have disconnected from culture so much that we forgotten to go out and actually be the church.  So we have become an elitist club that gets embarrassed when the culture asks us questions dealing with sex and the like.

This may or may not come as a shock to many of you, but the Bible has plenty to say on hard topics like sex.  It also answers the hardest question of them all, what must a person do to be saved.  So question to the church is, it willing to do what it takes to answer the culture in a way that is culturally relevant but also biblically conservative?