Nothing feels quite so irrelevant as those who earnestly pursue relevance.
It’s like parents attempting to speak the slang of their teenagers. It’s your Algebra teacher using awkward hashtag jokes on the chalkboard. It’s elevator muzak in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s your grandmother rapping.
Today’s relevance-seekers orchestrate a faint echo of yesterday’s zeitgeist. Church worship today has oft become a tightly scripted 72-minute exercise in déjà vu. This results in the infuriating catch-22 of attendees thinking your church is “stuck in the past” even when you are trying so very hard to update everything and “be relevant.”
Perhaps the lost seek the place of the cross in order to hear prophetic truth new to their ears, not a regurgitation of the cultural truths they already know. Perhaps sinners darken your church doors in order to meet a community of victorious saints, not yet another community of stuck sinners.
Perhaps Church should be the most irrelevant place in the world—and therefore somehow become the most relevant, accidentally. Or shall I say: providentially. The only true relevance may be sacred irrelevance.
