Biblically True; Culturally Relevant

On the last Sunday in January, I preached a message entitled Starting From Scratch, and I asked the question, "What would it look like if you were starting a church, and you knew nothing about how to 'do church' except what the Bible says about it?" It's a question we need to consider, given that most of us have grown up with an "Americanized" version of Christianity. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does sometimes beg the question, "What do we do because it's biblical and what do we do because it's 'the way we've always done it?'"

One week earlier, on January 23rd, the message was entitled Where Opportunities Abound, and we talked about the church at Philadelphia and how Jesus opened some amazing doors for ministry there. One of the things I said in that sermon was that we have to realize that the way God calls us to do ministry in 2011 may not look exactly like it did twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago. The message is the same yesterday, today, and forever, but the means that we use to get that message out can and does evolve from time to time.

I look at how the world has changed just in the past 18 years since I've been in vocational ministry. The teenagers I worked with as a youth pastor in 1993 were growing up in a very different world than this current generation of students. When I was starting out, if you had asked me what the World Wide Web was, I would have said it was probably a new movie about the son of Spider Man who goes rogue and tries to dominate the planet. And Facebook? That was just another name the kids were using to describe their high school yearbook. My computer skills back then consisted of doing word processing on a 1984 Commodore 64 using a 1541 floppy disc drive.

Having said all of that, here's the question: How do we reconcile those two thoughts from those two sermons? How do we seek to do church the way the Bible prescribes, and still manage to be culturally engaged in 2011? Some people may think that those two things are mutually exclusive, but I'm here to tell you that they most definitely are not! Using new technologies to reach people, engaging the culture, and meeting people where they're at are all good things that can be done in a way that stays true to the biblical mandate. Notice how The Message paraphrases the words of Paul found in 1 Corinthians 9:20-22:

Even though I am free of the demands and expectations of everyone, I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people: religious, nonreligious, meticulous moralists, loose-living immoralists, the defeated, the demoralized—whoever. I didn't take on their way of life. I kept my bearings in Christ—but I entered their world and tried to experience things from their point of view. I've become just about every sort of servant there is in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life. I did all this because of the Message. I didn't just want to talk about it; I wanted to be in on it!

If Paul was able to go to different places in the first century and engage the culture while still remaining true to his biblical principles, there's no reason why we can't go and do likewise right here in the twenty-first century!