The evangelical church in the last generation has been marked by its preoccupation with being relevant. An entire movement has been built around making Jesus and church seem relevant to outsiders. We have seen fad after fad come with intensity and go with a whisper only to become illustrations of silliness and obsolescence. The church-growth movement of yesterday and now the attractional church exists to overcome people’s perceptions that we are irrelevant.

One of the troubling, but nonetheless fascinating realizations of the moral revolution has been the number of professing Christians who deviate from traditional and clear biblical teaching on sexuality and gender. It seems like we steadily see new groups, leaders, and people come out of their theological closets to declare their support for such things as same-sex marriage. Myself, I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback via this blog, social media, and even in person of people who try to persuade me away from being such a theological dinosaur.

OUR THIRST FOR RESPECTABILITY AND RELEVANCE

In thinking about this quite a bit over the last several months it occurs to me how gripped Americans, particularly religious Americans are by honor and acceptance. I live in Omaha, Nebraska. The slogan for the state is “Nebraska Nice”. Did you catch that? We are nice here. I grew up in Massachusetts. I am not going to say that people in New England are mean, but they are, in the words of Megamind “less nice”. We didn’t exactly take pride in our niceness. If someone complained about people being rude we would generally think you were a bit too sensitive. But here, if you say that Nebraskans are not nice it is like you said something about their mom. It is one of the worst things you can say to a native Nebraskan. It seems to me that one of the worst things you can say to American Christian, whether in academia, church leadership, the pew, or on the street, is to say that they either not relevant or not respectable. We seem to clamor for it with alarming intensity.

I believe it is this clamoring for relevance and respect that is and will draw people to embrace these progressive (and errant) views of sexuality, gender and marriage.

Wait, you say, “It is not a desire to be relevant or respectable but compassion and love.” I disagree. In biblical understanding love is always tied to God’s character because he himself is love. Love reflects God because God is love (1 Jn. 4:8). In particular, love is expressed by holiness, it is not contradicted by it. Therefore, to be loving and compassionate our words and actions must be governed by truth, by the Scriptures (Eph. 4:15).

Further, if it is not all about respectability, why do so many go to the “I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history” card? Respectability is absolutely the issue here. Sadly, this standard of being seen as respectable is the governor of so much of how people think and react.

ARE EVANGELICALS IMMUNE?

Evangelicals could read this and say, “Yeah, those liberals (theologically), they’ve been gone for a while anyway; no surprise. We’re Bible-believing evangelicals. This won’t happen to us.”

Hold on.

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