Cool or Relevant -- The Church's Choice
by Paul Grant
Being invisible is liberating. Try it out sometime. I was on the bus to work the other day, stuck in the teenager section. They were being standard teenagers—engaging each other in flirtatious bravado, boiling with surplus hormonal energy.
They couldn’t see me. Their entire reality was the high school scene, so I didn’t exist for them. It was strange at first, to be a non-entity. But as I watched, I realized how glad I was not to be an adolescent any more.
I recently watched the pilot episode of Gossip Girl, a new appropriately-named TV show. I was struck by the tenuous quality of relationships in that prep-school scene: nothing lasts, love is only a tool for accessing power or satisfying lust, and loyalty is a crutch for the weak. Everyone is an outsider who suspects everyone else of being an insider.
By the time you're as old as I am (32) you've surely stumbled upon the outer limits of your cool. Even as I've experienced more of life than those kids on the bus, even as I've gained the substance to back the bluster I once fronted, whatever cool I had has slipped past me.
But here's a secret I've discovered: life is bigger and sweeter than whatever cool has to offer. I once thought cynicism was smart; now I know it's just a limp safety blanket. I once thought being cool meant being relevant; now I know that relevance touches the places of the soul where joy is found, and sorrow. Cool lives only for the moment and thus cannot possibly be relevant when it really counts.
Real Relevance
So what is relevance, anyway? What would make Jesus relevant for the 21st century? Ask a thirteen-year-old what a relevant Jesus would look like, and she’ll likely rattle off all range of qualifications, most of which will hinge on appearances.
But we’re adults. We need to give people the relevance they need, not the cool they want. Kids are vicious to each other because they are scared and insecure. What they think they want is a cool gospel; what they actually need is shalom, well-being and peace and security. They want to belong, and they think peer acceptance will give them security. The gospel offers nothing remotely akin to coolness, but it does offer shalom.
Many Christians obsess over the church’s relevance to society, as defined by the ability to quote the latest flash in the pan. But is it more important for the church to be present in pop culture—or in refugee camps and soup kitchens? Being a highly perishable commodity, cool is irrelevant to the lost and hurting. A gospel whose relevance is measured by its coolness is so impotent as to be meaningless to those who need it.
Luke 4 tells of Jesus’ visit to his hometown. He was the man of the moment, relevant in that sense of the word. But showing up on the Sabbath at the synagogue, he read from the prophet Isaiah, and applied the message to himself:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Here we have the measure of relevance we’re looking for. The gospel is for the poor, the captive, the blind and the oppressed. Jesus was sent to bring them good news, release, recovery of sight and freedom. These are the things Jesus himself felt were relevant. Importantly, he did not announce the restoration of Israel, or the end of Roman subjugation. He went straight for the lowest people in society, certainly an uncool and irrelevant bunch.
If the Church becomes the epicenter of cool, but it isn’t good news for the poor, it is an irrelevant gospel. If Christians dominate the pop-charts, but the blind remain blind, the gospel is meaningless.
More people in this world live in dire poverty than the global total number of cool people, or movers and shakers. More people are blind – in every sense of the term – than will ever be able to see American TV. And the sooner we Christians can get over our fears of pop-cultural irrelevance, and embrace the message Jesus announced that day in Nazareth, the sooner we will have the honor of being relevant to Jesus himself, in his mission to announce the coming of God’s reign.
Real Life
Here then is the crossroads we face: a cool moment, or a freeing, healthy life in Christ. We can't have both. The church's greatest power lies in its being the supernatural community created by none other than God Himself through His Spirit. God's love is the most deep-feeling, creative force in the universe, and the incredible truth is that this love lives in the church.
In its sharing of Christ's suffering, and in its practice of inclusive hospitality, the church displays cool's fundamental phoniness to the world. Love shatters cool, every time. But when we open our hearts for Christ's sake, we will live authentically: at the level of human suffering, as Ray Aldred said at Urbana 03, because that is where God's power is greatest. The sooner we understand the impossibility of the church's being simultaneously cool and relevance, the better.
When we open our hearts for Christ's sake, we will gain relevance. God calls us sons and daughters. He can protect us and make us whole. He can make us into a family. Christian love is vulnerability before God, which for all its uncoolness is the very substance of abundant life, love and worship.
Love, not cool, is a life worth living.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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