by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Contemporary Christians are fond of saying they “do not have a religion, but a relationship”. By this they primarily mean that real Christianity is not about human beings reaching up to God through ritual and effort, but rather about God reaching down to human beings in a relational way through his incarnation in Jesus Christ. There is, however a secondary meaning implicit in the statement. 21st Century Christians know that recent generations of Westerners have become somewhat anti-historical. Those born in the post-World War II era have been shaped by a society that has consciously or unconsciously thrown off hundreds of years of acculturated tradition in all areas of life. We are a people shaped by technological and cultural change unprecedented in human history. We are also greatly influenced by the “Throw-Away Culture” enabled by our similarly unprecedented mass affluence.
The result is a civilization addicted to the new and novel. This has tended to be accompanied by a rejection of things that come across as too tied to the perceived formality of the generations that existed prior to the present age. To them one of the most un-novel and formalized institutions of the older generations in question is the institutional Christian church.
When compared to other Christian faith traditions Evangelicals, by nature, tend to be innovators. Our spiritual ancestors, after all, include the Reformers of Western Europe and, in the case of U.S. Evangelicals, the founders of the numerous breakaway churches and religious movements that characterized the American nation’s early history. For this reason we, perhaps more than the members of any other present-day strand of world Christianity, tend to be sympathetic to the idea of “progressive innovation”, at least in regard to forms of worship.
Because of this sympathy Evangelicals today are in the forefront of the effort to make the church “relevant” to secular people who we feel cannot relate to the musical, liturgical and architectural modalities of other church traditions that pre-date the Modern and Post-Modern eras. Vast numbers of Evangelical churches have embraced everything from rock music to casual dress to cutting-edge technology in theatrically-inspired buildings in an attempt to come across as hip, contemporary and, perhaps most of all, comfortably “21st Century”. Millennia-old ritual is often out, MacDonald’s in the lobbies of Mega-Churches is in.
This brings us back to the expression I opened this piece with. “Relationship” is a far more contemporary sounding word than “religion” and that is one of the reasons contemporary Evangelicals like the “not a religion, but a relationship” catchphrase so much. To some degree we like it in just the same way we like our “non-churchy” churches. It is a statement about the evangelical impulse to meet people where they are in an attempt to bring them into our faith, in short to be culturally relevant.
So if you happen to be invited to one of our worship services and find yourself in what seems like a high-tech rock concert rather than St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with people dressed in T-shirts and jeans rather than suits, you will at least have some idea what the specific socio-cultural influences were that made it that way.
But I must confess my personal prayer is that the God we endeavor to introduce you to there will leave a far more lasting impression on your heart than the technology, music and casual dress does, because when it comes to matters of the Spirit the message still matters infinitely more than the medium.