A friend of mine is reading John Drane’s book, After McDonaldization: Mission, Ministry, and Christian Discipleship in an Age of Uncertainty. In the process of reading the book he read a quote from the book and posed a question to all of us to ponder. He said, In the chapter on ministry he [Drane], makes the comment, '… our calling is not to be relevant, but to be incarnational.' What does that mean to you?" In my response to him I felt inspired to write a short blog post because I think the question is so relevant to all of us in the church today. Actually topic was an underlying thread of thought in my dissertation, because much of my own career in ministry had been a journey down the slippery slope of relevance that led to unfruitful ends.
Relevant and incarnational ministry look alike from the outside observer, but the two are wholly different. Relevance begins with culture and sets the culture as the standard and asks questions like, How do we speak to society? How do we minister in our social context? The goal is adapting the message to the culture in a way that we hope speaks to the culture.
In contrast, nothing was more relevant than the incarnation, yet it was not accommodating, instead it was transformational. Much like the difference in Romans 12.2 between transformation and conforming to this age. Conforming and transforming also look a great deal alike. Within American christendom there is a great deal of conforming to church norms and church culture. Most church goers accommodate the teachings of the church while being within the walls of the church, but there is very little transformation. In fact, most church people have learned to accommodate all the surroundings. So its the church on Sunday and then they accommodate the spirit of the age on Monday, without giving any thought to being consistent, let alone transformational.
In the same line of thought, relevance leads to conforming, and incarnational ministry leads to transformation. Incarnational ministry begins with the assumption that the good news is good news in any age, regardless of current social trappings. So from starting point of incarnational ministry, it is not that I set out to write cool, relevant songs for worship. Instead, I write music from the vantage point of one who has been transformed, yet still lives in this present age. Both approaches result in modern worship songs, but the message is not the same, at all.
Likewise, in preaching from the text, the incarnational word brings everything to the table that is needed to transform lives and speak a relevant message. When I preach God's Word it is I, the messenger, that will either put it into my current context, or teach it as irrelevant history. It is I who will relate and translate out of my being a contemporary with my listener. These two approaches may sound similar, and these two may look very much the same from the outside, but they are wholly different.
Those who seek to be relevant feel that we must make the message relevant, and assume the message is archaic. Those who seek to be incarnational assume that the message is relevant already, and preach a message to their contemporaries, as one among them in need of the gospel, and not as one teaching about the past. Those degrees of difference lead to destinations that are worlds apart.
I must note at this point that some will attach themselves to the idea of being incarnational, simply to hide behind their unwillingness to change, their complete irrelevance to their surroundings, and then argue that their worn-out, tired presentations, are in fact grounded in the transformational word, and thus relevant to all who will listen. I heard this excuse from many of my professors in Bible college who had developed a war chest of old sermons and had stopped growing as disciples of Jesus thirty-years prior to my conversion. That kind of ministry is not incarnational or relevant.
On the other hand, ministry that is truly incarnational will be relevant, while those who strive to be relevant will be neither incarnational nor truly relevant.
