Some time ago, I listened to a colleague in ministry give his testimony, and came away amazed that he had ended up a pastor—and in fact, amazed that he was even a Christian. He had come to Christ when he was six, but the church he attended was extremely legalistic, so much so that by the age of ten, they had him firmly convinced (and completely terrified) that he was going to Hell. He described his adolescence and early adulthood as a process of holding God as far away as he possibly could while still holding on enough to keep from going to Hell, which was his overriding concern; at one point as he was talking, he wondered if he might not have been better off “just going prodigal for a while,” though he knew he’d been too afraid to do so.In the midst of all this, though, God was at work on him, reaching out with his grace by his Spirit, slowly peeling away the layers of fear around his soul “like an onion” which that church had left there, calling him first back into the church, and then into the ministry; gradually, gradually, God has been setting him free from that fear, teaching him to trust—and teaching him to share that healing with others, to preach the good news of Jesus Christ so that people may live.I’ll never forget him looking at us and saying, almost pleading, “Preach grace, brothers. Preach grace.” I do, or at least that’s my intent and desire, and I think I can say that’s true for all the others there; but I don’t think I’ve ever been reminded so powerfully, or had it sink in quite so deeply, just how crucial that is. I’ll never forget it.
Category Archives: Church and ministry
Out of the past, in the present, toward the future
Joyce over at tallgrassworship has a post up that I’ve been meaning to comment on, asking the question, “How Can An Older Congregation Live Into Christ’s Future?” (In her case, she’s talking about one service in her congregation, rather than the congregation as a whole, but as she notes, it’s all the same issue in the end.) I appreciated her post, and especially this quote she pulled from Bishop Will Willimon’s blog:
No existing, older churches can be revitalized without risk, commitment, and a determination to be faithful to the mission of Christ no matter what.If your church is in decline and not growing, it is because your congregation has decided to die rather than to live (alas, there is no in between when it comes to churches). The majority of our churches are not growing, thus we have a huge challenge before us. Still, our major challenge is not to find good resources for helping a church grow and live into the future; our challenge is to have pastors and churches who want to do what is necessary to live into Christ’s future.
Bishop Willimon’s dead right in his analysis: revitalizing churches isn’t primarily about programs, skills, or doing this or that; at the core, it’s about the willingness of the congregation to choose life over comfort, “to be faithful to the mission of Christ no matter what,” even though the one we follow is the one who had no place to lay his head. That’s why Joyce is right to emphasize “a deeply felt and theologically sound spirituality, lived out in an outward focus, a welcoming and inviting atmosphere, flexibility, and willingness to embrace change for the purpose of reaching and assimilating newcomers” as the signs of a church that has chosen life, because those are marks of a church that’s primarily about its mission rather than about itself. (Incidentally, from this angle we can see that it isn’t only older churches that need revitalizing, nor only smaller churches; I’ve known a few large congregations with plenty of money and plenty of younger folks that weren’t in very good shape spiritually. It may be harder to get churches full of older folks to embrace change—but I’m not sure that’s necessarily so.)It’s interesting to me that Bishop Willimon describes this in terms of “living into Christ’s future,” because it seems to me that it requires us to take a different attitude toward time, past, present, and future, than we often do. First, I think, for a church to be revitalized, it must live out of its past—neither living in the past, as so many dying churches do, nor cutting itself off from its past, but rooting itself in the successes and lessons of the past in order to meet the challenges it faces. Second, in doing so it must live in the present—which is to say, in the present reality as it actually is, not as we wish it were. In order to be faithful to carry out the mission of Christ in our world, we have to understand where the needs are, and how to make our message heard clearly and faithfully. Third, it must live toward the future—not simply seeking to maintain itself, but working toward the goal Christ has set before it, reaching out to draw in new people and address new ministry needs. There must be roots; there must be an understanding of the environment; and there must be a clear sense of purpose.
Reflection on Amos 5 worship, for a thoughtful friend
“Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why would you have the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, and not light,
as if a man fled from a lion,
and a bear met him,
or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,
and a serpent bit him.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?
“I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.”—Amos 5:18-24 (ESV, alteration mine)Thus says the Lord:
“For three transgressions of Israel
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and turn aside the way of the afflicted;
a man and his father go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge,
and in the house of their God they drink
the wine of those who have been fined.”—Amos 2:6-8 (ESV)It can be tempting to take verses like Amos 5:21—“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies”—as if we can just lift them right out of Amos and apply them to the church today, or to parts of the church we don’t like. Certainly, we may feel, there are an awful lot of churches whose worship can’t possibly be pleasing to God—and this is the word of God, so it applies to us just as it did to Amos’ neighbors in Tekoa; it’s tempting to rise up in the prophet’s place and pronounce the damnation of God on all that we see is wrong in the church. It is, however, a temptation which must be resisted, for our own sakes; it must be resisted because it’s an abuse of the Scripture, and it’s abuse of the Scripture that opens the door to all the other abuses we see in the church. It must also be resisted because it leads us away from humility, and into the trap of spiritual pride.Amos 5 does indeed say something very important about worship, something which clearly applies to us today—but it doesn’t say that God hates all the worship offered him by the Western church, or that all the services and conferences and organizations and rallies are despicable to him. Some of them no doubt are; but this is not a blanket condemnation, except for those who are guilty of the sins of which Amos condemned his contemporaries. To understand why he denounces their worship so powerfully, we need to understand what he’s denouncing. We need to understand the real problem.First off, to be clear, the problem wasn’t that Israel wasn’t worshiping God, or that they weren’t doing so correctly. It’s not that they weren’t a religious people—by any standard, they were considerably more religious than we are. God doesn’t complain that they weren’t showing up to church. They were keeping up their duties, showing up to the temple on the great holy days, offering their sacrifices, playing their music, and so on; they knew the stuff they were supposed to be doing, and they were doing it—all the right words at all the right times, all the right sacrifices done all the right ways, all down pat.The problem wasn’t what they were doing—the problem was why. Their worship may have been directed to God, but it wasn’t about God, it was about them; specifically, it was about dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s necessary to get what they wanted from God, keeping up their end of the bargain so that God would have to keep up his. That’s why, just to make sure they had all their bases covered, they didn’t just worship the one true God, they worshiped a number of other gods, too—being quite sure, no doubt, to get all those forms just right as well. Of course, the Bible calls that idolatry, and makes it quite clear that God won’t stand for it; but his people just didn’t see the problem. After all, wasn’t it all about getting their needs met? If worshiping another god or two on the side helped them get their needs met, why should God mind?This attitude bore all kinds of bad fruit. God is just, and his law set high standards for how the rich and powerful were to treat the poor and vulnerable, and yet his people felt free to come to worship with the blood of injustice on their hands, as we see both in Amos 5 and in Amos 2 (and in fact in lots of places throughout the prophets). The people of Israel thought they could buy God’s favor by showing up at the temple at the scheduled time and going through the motions, then go back into the “real world” and do business however they pleased. They didn’t understand that real worship begins with surrender—with giving over to God our plans, our ideas, our desires, our fears, our dreams, our visions, our conceptions of justice, our expectations of mercy, our wants, even our needs, and saying, “This is what I would do, but your will be done”; they just wanted to show up on Saturday morning, go through the motions, and walk off with the assurance that God was happy with them for showing up and would, in consequence, give them whatever they might happen to ask for.And that, God says, is false worship, and I loathe it. “I hate, I despise your festivals; I take no delight in your church services. Take away your sacrifices—it makes me sick to look at them. Stop singing and put down your instruments—I can’t stand to listen to your noise.” All their worship was just an empty, cynical production; they were keeping up the shell of their religion, the ritual and the outward conformity, but without any reality at the center—and it made God madder than if they’d never bothered to show up at all. They shouldn’t have bothered, because they were essentially committing religious fraud, and God can’t and won’t tolerate that. Instead of all their show, what he wanted, and what he wants from us, is what he’s wanted all along: for his people to live lives of worship, for what we say in church on Sunday to be reflected at work on Monday.He declares this in one of the most powerful and striking verses in the Bible: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.” “Stream” doesn’t really capture the point here; as one commentator put it, “A wadi in the Middle East is a narrow valley, often a deep channel, through which rapid torrents of water gush during the rainy season, but which may have only a trickle of water or be completely dry in the summer.” When it flows, it brings life and color to the land, which then returns to desert when it dries up. But where a real wadi would flow only sometimes, God calls for justice and righteousness to be like a wadi that never stops flowing, but pours out ceaselessly in a mighty, thunderous flood, bringing life to the nation.Now, in tying true worship to justice and righteousness, is Amos saying that the purpose of worship is to change our behavior? No; but true worship will, nonetheless. Worship brings us into the presence of God to focus on his character, on his beauty, and on all that he has done in creating this world and in saving us as his people—and the more time we spend looking at God, the more we will desire God, and thus desire his holiness. Worshiping God transforms us; spending time focusing our attention on God changes our priorities, our preferences, and our outlook on the world. It’s a gradual change, to be sure, not something that happens overnight, but no less real for all that; the proof of the pudding, so to speak, is whether our daily life, as individuals and as a community of believers, demonstrates and reflects the justice and righteousness of God. When that isn’t in evidence—as it wasn’t among Amos’ fellow Israelites—it’s a sign that however highly we might think of it, there’s something wrong with our worship.Unfortunately, we don’t look at our worship the same way God does. We don’t judge our worship by whether or not our lives are characterized by justice and righteousness, or whether they look like the picture Paul paints in Colossians 3; we don’t examine our hearts to see if we, like the Israelites, are guilty of idolatry, worshiping our false gods of money, pleasure, ambition, and self-fulfillment right alongside the one true God. Instead, we ask, did we have a meaningful worship experience?—Did we enjoy the music?—Did we get something out of it?—Did it move us?—as if whether we found it meaningful was all that mattered, as if this is all about us. When those are the only questions we ask—when our only concerns about our worship are for ourselves and our own opinions and desires—we’ve gone off the rails. Our worship is about God, and what matters first and foremost is whether he is pleased, whether we’ve been focused on praising him, giving him glory, doing him honor; if not, if our concern is more for ourselves and what we think and feel than for God, then we aren’t really worshiping him at all.The bottom line of our worship is this: God calls us to gather together as his people to praise his name, to honor him as our God, to hear him speak to us through his word, to confess our sins and affirm our faith, to lay our needs before him in prayer—and to go out again resolved and empowered to live out his justice and righteousness in a lost and broken world so loved by God. He calls us to take everything we have—yes, even our pain, even our struggles, even our anger, even our grief, just as much as our joy and our faith, our money and our talents—and give it to him, give it completely to him, as our offering. He calls us to give up trying to bless ourselves—let him take care of that!—and instead to bless his name with everything we have, with our words and with our lives, because he is worth it. He’s worth everything we have, and everything we are, and far, far more. If we understand worship in this way, if we seek to worship God in this way, it will change us, and it will change how we live; and so the proof of our worship, if you will, is in the fruit.When are we justified in applying Amos 5:21 to the worship of the church? When the life of the church looks like Amos 2.
On being Reformed and missional
At this year’s General Synod (our annual national decision-making assembly) of the Reformed Church in America, the delegates were blessed to hear three addresses from the Rev. Dr. Richard Mouw, currently serving as the president of Fuller Seminary. Those three addresses, with the discussion questions that followed each, have been combined into a single video. Taken as a whole, it’s a long one—almost an hour—and I wish they’d been posted separately, but they weren’t. Don’t let that stop you from watching Dr. Mouw’s messages, because there’s excellent material here. The first address, which focuses on the “Reformed” half of the equation, is about twenty minutes, while the second, which focuses on the “missional” half, runs another thirteen or so; the third, which brings the two together, takes up the rest of the video. They’re excellent, and if you’re interested in these matters, when you have the time to listen to them, I commend them to you.(Technical note: it’s my understanding that some versions of IE have had problems with this video; if you run into difficulties, you might try clicking the “Google Video” button in the lower-right corner, which will take you to the Google Video page for this clip.)
Update: I was pleased to find this post on the same subject on the blog Pursuing Truth (a blog I hadn’t tripped over before this); it’s not an interaction with Dr. Mouw’s addresses, but rather a separate consideration of being Reformed and missional (and an excellent one).
Our Swiss-cheese Bibles
Scot McKnight has a piece up on the Leadership section of CT’s website about (and linking to) the hermeneutics quiz devised by BuildingChurchLeaders.com. I don’t actually find the quiz all that interesting, though I think they did a good job putting it together—the quiz informed me that I’m conservative, but moderately so, which wasn’t exactly news to me—but I thought Dr. McKnight’s comments were.
For some reason of late, I have become fascinated with the portions of the Bible we don’t tend to read, passages like the story of Jephthah. Or how God was on the verge of killing Moses for not circumcising his son, and his wife stepped in, did what needed to be done, and tossed the foreskin at Moses’ feet, and God let him alone. I’m curious why one of my friends dismisses the Friday-evening-to-Saturday-evening Sabbath observance as “not for us today” but insists that capital punishment can’t be dismissed because it’s in the Old Testament.I have become fascinated with what goes on in our heads and our minds and our traditions (and the latter is far more significant than many of us recognize) in making decisions like this.What decisions? Which passages not to read as normative. The passages we tend not to read at all.If we’re all subject to selective perception, at least to some degree, it’s important to recognize what we tend to miss or gloss over, especially if we’re church leaders.
He goes on to credit the quiz with helping us do this, which I don’t really think it does, to any significant degree; but I certainly agree that this is something we need to address, because it leads to us missing and misunderstanding what God wants to say to us. It gives us a truncated gospel—one which, funnily enough, usually tends to be truncated neatly to fit our comfort zones.There are, I think, several reasons for this. In churches that use the lectionary, a lot of this is done for you, as the folks who put the lectionary readings together did a nice job of trimming around all the troublesome spots. We do it ourselves, because dealing with those spots takes work—we can’t just toss out the pat answers we’ve all learned, we have to wrestle with the text and put thought and effort into it. What’s more, dealing with those sorts of passages carries an emotional cost, as we come face to face with the fact that we don’t worship a nice, comfortable god who wants us to live nice, comfortable lives. In some cases, as Jared Wilson points out, the Scriptures tell us things we just flat-out don’t want to hear; it’s no shock that we tend to avoid those passages if at all possible.And so we end up with Swiss-cheese Bibles, with great voids in them, and we take our nice neat slices with their nice neat holes in them, and we end up with a much less messy and much less discomfiting faith as a consequence; but then, it seems to me, we end up with a faith much less able to deal with the messy and discomfiting parts of life—they go sailing right through the holes. We need to make the effort to fill in the holes, to consider what parts of the Bible we’re avoiding, and why, and take them head-on; we need to open ourselves up to listen to, and proclaim, the whole counsel of God.
Song of the Week
As I said last week, I’m on a bit of a Steve Taylor kick. For this one, I’ll let Taylor’s own words (in the booklet for the boxed set Now the Truth Can Be Told) explain my reason for posting it:
Ah, to have the Bible’s sense of balance.My goal with “A Principled Man” was to write a song that inspired me to live a principled life. The seed came from a “tree motif” in the Book of Psalms: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water . . .” (Psalms 1:1-3)But lest principles become an end unto themselves, we have in Ezekiel the dark side of the tree metaphor: “Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says: Because it towered on high, lifting its top above the thick foliage, and because it was proud of its height . . . I cast it aside.” (Ezekiel 31:10-11)This song still inspires me. May it continue to do so for all the right reasons.
A Principled Man
Under a flag they swore a bond;
Caught under fire they ran.
Are you the one standing your ground?
Are you a principled man?Followers fall, blinded by kings,
Lost in the lie of the land.
Are you the one sworn to be true?
Are you a principled man?Now . . . begin—come alongside it,
Seize the wind—come along, ride it.
One day it will be you believing
There is a principled man.Who goes there? Do you belong, lad?
You know there is a new dawn, and
One day to say, “Stick with me, baby,
I am a principled man.”Many’s the man grounded by greed,
Leaning on power and land;
Show me the one lost in the stars—
Show me a principled man.ChorusBleeding and hushed, hung between thieves,
There the foundation began,
Are you the one taking your cross?
Are you a principled man?Words and music: Steve Taylor
© 1987 Soylent Tunes
From the album I Predict 1990, by Steve Taylor
Song of the Week
My post last Wednesday set me off on a Steve Taylor kick; this song of his seems an appropriate bit of reflection for a Sunday morning. (I do wish he’d just written “want to,” though . . .)
I Just Wanna KnowLife’s too short for small talk,
So don’t be talking trivia now;
Excess baggage fills this plane—
There’s more than we should ever allow.
There’s engines stalling and good men falling,
But I ain’t crawling away.I just wanna know—am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to You.
I just wanna stay angry at the evil;
I just wanna be hungry for the true.Folks play “follow the leader”—
But who’s the leader gonna obey?
Will his head get big when the toes get tapping?
I just wanna know, are they catching what I say?
I’m a little too young to introspect,
And I surely haven’t paid all my dues,
But there’s bear traps lying in those woods—
Most of ’em already been used.ChorusSearch me, Father, and know my heart,
Try me and know my mind,
And if there be any wicked way in me,
Pull me to the rock that is higher than I.ChorusWords and music: Steve Taylor
© 1985 Birdwing Music/C. A. Music
From the album On the Fritz, by Steve Taylor
It’s a wonderful thing
being married to somebody smarter than me. I’ve said this many times, and will no doubt say it many more. At the moment, I’m saying it again because my wonderful wife has just put words to something very important, something we both feel very strongly, and done so better than I’ve yet managed to do. I’ve been talking through some of this with our elders, and preaching about it some, about what it means to be that kind of church, and how we get there; I’ve talked about how we become a church of square holes (and triangular, and star-shaped, and rhomboid, and . . .) so that people feel it’s OK to be a square peg, and I’ve been encouraged to find people listening, and open. But there’s no question, we can’t get there on our own; to do that, we need a response from others outside ourselves. We need to find ways to earn people’s trust (which means, of course, continuing to grow ourselves to be worthy of that trust), so that we can all be the Church of the Exploded Comfort Zone together.Anyway, go read Sara’s post; she really has said it better than I can.“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain . . .”—Psalm 127:1a
Bridging the culture gap
Calvin Miller has an excellent piece up on the Christianity Today website called “Rethinking Suburban Evangelism,” which is of broader application than the title suggests. Though focused on “the push-button Zion of those who have made it and therefore have it made . . . the new Eden with little need for God: Paradise Found, where churches ulcerate themselves trying to sell self-denial to the pampered,” when he asks, “Can the urgency of the Cross ever be made real to those who cocoon in front of an entertainment center and insist on defining hell as dandelions and heaven as the proper side of town?” he’s raising a question that applies far beyond the bounds of suburbia—and his conclusion speaks to every ministry setting: “We become the most like Christ when our motivation is distilled love.”
Thoughts on the idolatry of relevance
Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously;
never have Christians been more irrelevant.—Os Guinness
It’s an important belief of those who believe in and make use of contemporary worship forms that the church must be aware of the world in its public worship; from this belief, they argue that worship must be “contemporary” and “relevant.” Unfortunately, these two words misfocus our discussions of worship. If we aim to be contemporary, we end by elevating the new above all else merely because it’s new; our interaction with the world around us grows shallow and unanchored, for we can offer little more than a Jesus-colored version of the existing culture. While this may well make people comfortable with us, it doesn’t give them any sense of the difference between worshiping in the presence of God and being one of the folks in the culture at large. Similarly, if our goal is to be relevant in our worship (which includes the sermon), then we will focus on what people want to hear and feel and meeting those desires rather than on reaching to their central need, which is for God.
This is not to say that the church shouldn’t be aware of the world, or try to understand the world, as if somehow striving to be irrelevant would be better; clearly, that isn’t the case. Rather, the problem is the assumption that “relevance” means being relevant to the world on its own terms, and that if our worship is to connect with the world, it must do so on the world’s terms. This is essentially an assumption that in the relationship between the church and the world, the world is the senior partner, and that we must defer to the culture around us as the arbiter of what works and why. This tends to produce a plastic, results-oriented view of worship, in which worship is to be judged by numbers and approval ratings—by outward signs, rather than by inward realities—and thus in which we understand our worship primarily in technical terms, as a human act which is primarily designed to meet measurable goals.
This would be well enough, if worship were in fact a human act about human realities, for then the details of our worship would be negotiable with the various voices of our culture. This view of worship rests on the assumption that worship is something which we initiate for our own purposes, which may include but are not limited to the desire to please God, and thus is something which we have both right and reason to manipulate as we please in order to achieve our own purposes.
The problem is, this assumption is false.
Worship isn’t something we initiate, it’s something to which God calls us out from our own purposes and activities, and which exists wholly apart from them; in the words of the Baptist pastor the Rev. Dr. Bruce Milne, “worship doesn’t begin with us at all, it begins with God.” Properly speaking, it also ends with God, and is about him at every point in between. That’s why, in the classical Christian understanding, worship always begins with Scripture, “because God takes the initiative and we respond.”
As already noted, this doesn’t mean that the church should conduct its worship in ignorance of the world, or without taking the world and its conditions into account; rather, it’s the reason why we need to be aware of the world, and the proper frame for that awareness. As the Catholic priest Fr. M. Francis Mannion, president of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, put it in a remarkable article in First Things, “The Church is—or should be—never more intensely aware of the city than when at worship. In liturgy, the Church is opened out to the world, and the world in all its dimensions is drawn into the act of worship.” Indeed, Fr. Mannion goes further, arguing that “The task of the liturgy is to symbolize and sacramentalize the liturgy of the heavenly city in the midst of the earthly city. . . . The public worship of the Christian community gathers up the liturgy of the human city, [and] gives expression to the religious yearnings of the human city.”
This is a viewpoint rooted in the ancient image of the two cities, the city of God and the city of this world, and the idea that the church is called to unite the two, bringing the heavenly city to earth and lifting the earthly city up to heaven. It’s on the basis of this understanding that the late Yale professor Fr. Aidan Kavanagh wrote, “What the liturgical assembly of Christian orthodoxy does is the world. Where the liturgical assembly does this is the public forum of the world’s radical business . . . When the liturgical assembly does this is the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age.” This is an astonishing vision for the worship of the church; rather than casting the task of the worship planner and worship leader as tinkering up a version of Christian truth which those outside the church will find familiar and comfortable so that they can come in and be at ease, this sees that task as something far greater and far more challenging.
The church is to be aware of the world in its worship, not to seek to match its style or to attempt to be relevant to the world on its own terms, but in order to offer its true relevance: to show and tell the world those things with which it is not comfortable, because it has forgotten them. Rather than being a public echo of the world’s familiar business, we’re called to be “the public forum of the world’s radical business,” the place where the world is called back to the root of every matter, the source of every existence, to confront the God who made it; our worship, insofar as it meets needs, should be meeting needs which the culture does not see. Insofar as it’s about us at all, which is only secondarily, it should be building us up as the people of God to go out to serve him in the human city as agents of the city of God, and not for any other purpose.
The reason for this is that just as our worship is not primarily of or about ourselves, neither is it primarily of or about our present time; rather, in our worship we act by faith as theological time-travelers, bringing the eschatological future of Jesus’ return into the present age. In our worship, we stand before God in “the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age,” participating in that moment in faith even as we continue to live in creation’s unfinished seventh day; our worship is the point at which that future and our present collide, in which the heavenly city is enacted in the midst of the earthly city.
To be “relevant” as the world understands relevance is to collapse that, to seek to worship only in the present time; it is thus to fail to worship in the sure and certain hope of the world’s rebirth, the time when Christ will return and the Alpha and Omega will make all things new at last. That’s why “relevant” churches tend to be all about this-worldly concerns like your paycheck, your sex life, and your golf game, seeking to help you do better what you’re already doing—they’ve lost the vision for anything greater, because they’re only worshiping in this world.
The church is called to be active in this world, yes, but in a very real sense, we’re called to worship in the next. As someone has said, we’re supposed to worship with bifocal vision, seeing both the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ—simultaneously. It’s only if we seek to do this that we’ll have the vision we need to have as the worshiping people of God; and at the same time, it’s only if we seek to do this, rather than to give the world a vision which it’s already prepared to accept, that we’ll be able to show it what it really needs to see.