Faithful and Relevant

The challenge for the church, today as always, is to be both faithful to Jesus Christ and relevant to the world. At times we lose our focus on Jesus Christ and allow other forces and interests to dominate our life. But at other times, we become so enamored with approaches, strategies, and programs which worked well in the past that we fail to recognize that they are no longer relevant.

A powerful visual metaphor for this second error is the Choluteca Bridge in Honduras. It is a modern, well-constructed bridge that effectively linked communities on opposite sides of the river. It was such a good bridge that it was one of the few in the nation to survive the horrific floods when Hurricane Mitch hit in November 1998. There’s just one problem: the river shifted its path during the flood and no longer flows under the bridge. So there it is: a well-designed, excellent structure that has become irrelevant. It no longer serves a purpose, with no road on either end of it and no river underneath it.

In the same way, the church always runs the risk of doing a great job that is no longer necessary because the currents of society have shifted underneath us. As PC(USA) World Mission director Hunter Farrell put it, we risk being “uniquely situated to do what no one’s asking us to do.”

This seems to be the case for Old Union Church. We live in a world and a community that has changed from what it was a generation, or even a decade, ago. We may be exemplary in our faithfulness to Christ and his gospel as we do so. But if we do wonderful things that no one cares about, we are irrelevant. Our faithfulness does no good for us, for others, or our Lord.

In order to be both faithful and relevant, we must work on two tasks at the same time.
FIRST: what does it mean for us to be faithful? What is our calling as a congregation? In the past several years, we’ve gone through two discernment processes to answer that question. The first was a time of strategic planning before undertaking the building project, in order to determine the purpose for our church. The result is the statement of purpose that graces our church letterhead and the banner in our lobby:
Our purpose, together, is to
a. praise the Lord,
b. grow in faith,
c. spread God’s word through the community, and
d. reach out to those in need.
The second took place during 2010, when the session sought to identify our church’s “core value:” the factors that define our congregation, that make us who we are, and that define our church’s reason for existing.
A: SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH: Old Union is a place for prayer, learning, worship, growing in faith, and making personal commitments to God.
B: OUTREACH: Old Union exists to provide care and support, both within and beyond the congregation. We value service, sharing faith, and engaging in mission.
C: RELATIONSHIPS: Old Union has a sense of family and embodies the values of a small country church. It is a place of welcome, compassion, caring, support, and forgiveness.
We believe that the statement of purpose and the core values are what God calls us to do, and whom he calls us to be. We are faithful to him when we act according to these principles.

SECOND: how can we be relevant? Do we live out our purpose and express our core values in a way that makes sense and makes a difference for the people in our church and in our community? To answer this question, we must be students of our culture and community. We cannot afford to turn our noses up to trends and innovations we don’t like, simply because they are strange and unfamiliar. If we do, then eventually we become strange and unfamiliar to those around us. The challenge is that it is natural for us to associate with people like ourselves, and to do things the way we’ve always done it. We don’t even notice that other people are doing things differently from us. So to be relevant, we need to look beyond our own sense of “what’s happening.” One helpful tool that we have is Mission Insite, a rich resource of demographic information about our community (the presbytery has paid for our subscription to this service). Go to missioninsite.com and log in with the username “olduion” and the password “jamesglover” to do some research about our community. I suspect we’ll be very surprised by some of the things we discover. Our community is probably not what we think it is, and our neighbors are probably not whom we think that they are.

Once we are able to determine what it means to be faithful and what it means to be relevant, we can use that as a litmus test for everything that we’re doing, and how we’re doing it. Is it faithful to God’s call for us? Is it relevant to our community? If not, we need to get rid of it. Our church has many beloved programs, practices, traditions, and customs. But we cannot allow them to become idols: to be so important and valuable to us that we resist losing them even if they interfere with God’s call.

Shattering idols is painful. By definition, an idol is something that we value, that is very important to us. It hurts to say goodbye to things we like. And when someone challenges us to get rid of them, we may be tempted to lash out in anger against them. Think, for example, of how people hated and attacked the Old Testament prophets when they called for them to abandon their idols. Being faithful to God’s call means we confront our pain and discomfort.

At the same time, we do not get rid of treasured traditions simply to surf the latest wave of trendiness. Doing so would be to make an idol of something else: the quest to be cutting-edge. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s better. Our question is not “what’s the latest fad to hit churches?” but “what can we do to be faithful to God’s call in our current situation?” The answer may be to continue doing some things that we’ve done for generations. But it may mean doing things differently. Everything is on the table, and must pass muster. In each case, we must ask: is this an effective way to achieve our purpose and to live out our values?