To be relevant Christians must re-package the message by being creative, reimagining the message. For years, Christian churches and organizations resisted the temptation to make the message of Christ sound up to date. However, beginning in the middle of the 20th century that all began to change. At first, the message was not changed, it was how it was package for the world’s consumption or remaking the environment in which the Gospel was proclaimed. A new face or atmosphere was given to Christianity.
Culture in the United States shows definite signs of decay and decline. The cultural artifacts lack humanity-affirming values as they erase the lines of reality and its moral structure. Unfortunately, a growing number of Christians are contributing to the decay as they have fallen into the trap of trying to be relevant where being creative overrides the good, the true and the beautiful. The defense is they are just trying to connect with modern man to give him the Gospel—being relevant, I think is the term. Who is this modern man but the one who despises truth?
Christian books flood the market touting some new creative way to do church, use technology, promote evangelism, or calls to jump on the Woke bus, reimagining Christianity to join the social justice warrior’s vision.
Many of the new voices trade on “creativity” or “reimagining” the Christian message. Meanwhile, the Christian community is to accept all of this as being right with Christianity simply because nice Christians are saying it. After all, they are our leaders, and they are the elites so to speak. Of course, we all know that is a fallacy. This is not saying, however, there is no sincerity or real interest in reaching the world for Christ. However, sincerity is not the measure of what is right, Truth is. It is true Christians should find ways to make the Truth applicable to the audience at hand. However, that is not the same thing as re-packaging the Christian message to make it attractive to the world. The message of Christ is grounded in history, which is to say it is attached time and place, it is a part of history. It is a fixed message, and one must be very careful indeed when attempting to reach the world by a clever re-packaging of the message. It was the Enlightenment that consigned the past to irrelevance. It was the new that was to be embraced while the past was criticized as outdated, immature, and without relevance for the present. This is one of the objections by the moderns regarding the Christian message. Believing what the world says, there are those who say that the old way of speaking about the Christian message is not relevant to the modern man.
