A Church for the World By Mark Buchanan

We are inviting some of the speakers attending our Skill, Strategy and Story Event featuring Bill Hybels to contribute to the Leaders Village Discussion Zone. Today, pastor and author, Mark Buchanan speaks to us about church relevance:

Should the church be relevant to the world?

We’ve spilled a lot of ink over that question. We’ve exchanged many words, both exhortatory and accusatory, trying to resolve it. There are those who decry the church’s stodginess, its love of old wine skins, its adherence to outmoded cultural forms. They seek a church that nimbly adapts to the world’s music and dress and causes. And there are those who lament the church’s trendiness, its fetish for new wine skins, its pursuit of faddish cultural novelties. They seek a church gloriously indifferent to the world’s latest fashions.

We tote out Jesus’ warning to be in the world but not of it, but then have endless debates about which constitutes which. We have those who think the Kingdom’s come because we’ve preserved ancient songs and starchy vestments and Latin-strewn liturgies, and we have those who think it’s come because we smoke Cuban cigars and drink Belgium beer and treat Starbucks as sacred space. If I wear torn jeans to church, am I of the world or in it? If our church worships to Hip-Hop music, which preposition are we falling under, in or of? If our liturgy hasn’t changed since 1952, or 1633, or 1979, is that because we refuse to be of this world, or because we’re failing to be in it?

And now I will resolve the matter for all time.

It doesn’t matter. The Kingdom is not about any of this. The Kingdom of God is not about eating or drinking, or music styles, or how up-to-date or out-of-date we are.

The Kingdom of God is a republic of love. Not the syrupy or sensual thing the world calls love, but the 1 Corinthians 13 kind: fierce, wild, huge, feisty, pure. What makes the church both a mystery and magnet to the world is when we love this way. This love makes us relevant. Its absence makes us irrelevant, regardless of whatever else we’re doing.

Question: Is the love in your church such that people in the world and of the world would be willing to forsake all other loves just to know this love? Would they give up their addictions, their diversions, their compromises, their resentments, because the love you have is better and truer and deeper than anything they’ve ever found anywhere else?

Yes? Your church is relevant to the world.

No? It’s irrelevant.

Mark Buchanan is lead pastor at New Life Community Baptist Church in Duncan, BC. In addition to his eleven years as lead pastor, he is also a writer and conference speaker. His books include: Your God is Too Safe; Things Unseen; The Holy Wild; The Rest of God; and Hidden in Plain Sight. He is married and has three children.