Do you ever check out social media, or maybe you’re engaged in a conversation with someone and you just know the person is just making stuff up that fits their agenda? Or, maybe you know they don’t really believe what they are saying, they just want to look good or cool. Ever see a post from those who don’t have the life experience, knowledge, or training to comment on something, but they seem to think they know all about a situation…or motives, etc.?
In this over-sensitive, politically-correct world, I sure have, and maybe I’ve even been guilty myself at times.
Sometimes I just sit back and say “we need to stop it.”
Dear brother or sister in the Lord, my peers in the ministry, just stop it. It’s about time we stopped trying to “cool up” Christianity, or make people happy, or make the rest of the world think that we are hip, or relevant. I’ve been involved in Christian ministry of some sort for over 20 years and here’s what I’ve learned. God doesn’t need a PR team. In fact, the more I study about Jesus’ life and the apostle’s lives, the more I think they could’ve really used a PR team. But, guess what, that’s NOT the power of the gospel. The power of the gospel is that it is TRUTH. The gospel, by itself, is an offense. Notice the biblical language, it is not “offensive,” it’s just an offense all by itself. Why? Because truth confronts, it forces decisions, it is exclusionary by it’s very nature. Truth says, without even saying it, that it is right, it alone is right. In our over-sensitive society, that is offensive…and we don’t like anything offensive.
So, we try to package it, we try to cool it up, we try make it more palatable…sometimes we are so busy doing that, we actually surpass the common people of the world that we are supposed to reach. We, the modern church, almost start to elevate our hi- coolness-relevance above the everyday person, the teacher, the plumber, the accountant, the carpenter.
Listen, I get it, we need to be normal people (not weird) so that we can reach normal everyday people with the gospel. But, let’s be careful to not try so hard that we actually become irrelevant and unchallenging. Truth is our relevance, fellow Christ-follower.
