There are a number of irresolvable conflicts with God’s Word
when planting the Church Relevant.
Because the Church Relevant is culturally driven, it invariably devolves
into a man-centered endeavor. No matter
how good the intentions of those who seek to find relevance in a culture may
be, appealing to the culture’s preferences, priorities, and practices in order
to attract people transforms the church into an expression of the culture
rather than establishing it as the presence of the body of Christ in the midst
of the culture. While it is always the
task of the Church to engage the culture, it is self-defeating for church
planters to strip the Church of her intrinsically counter-cultural message and
character in an attempt to become relevant to the culture. Advocates of planting the Church Relevant
will quickly object to this assertion by appealing to St. Paul’s statement, “I
have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save
some” (1 Corinthians 9:22), but in doing so they have already shown that they
have placed cultural accommodation over God’s Word.
1 Corinthians 9:22 is
quite possibly the most distorted texts in all of church planting
theology. Often cited as supportive of finding
common ground with the culture and shaping the Church to be more compatible
with the preferences, priorities, and practices of the culture, this text is
actually a summary of the evangelistic methodology of a church planter who boldly
confronted the cultures in which he labored.
The results of Paul’s becoming all things to all men were not welcoming
embraces and high praise from the cultures’ adherents, but imprisonment, severe
flogging, lashes from the Jews, stoning from the pagans, and danger from all
corners along with hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation and lack of shelter. If not before all these experiences, Paul
certainly knew from them that planting churches is not a matter of finding
peace with the culture but in being at war with it. In other words, Paul understood that he was
planting the Church Militant not the Church Relevant.
Like Paul, we too are called to plant the Church
Militant. This call is undergirded by
our Lord Himself who prepared the first church planters for their difficult
task by telling them plainly that the world hated them. “If you belonged to the world,” He told them,
“it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I
have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” ( John
15:19) The fact that this passage is
rarely if ever cited as a text for church planting belies our tendencies to
avoid the militancy of making disciples of all nations and the costs of doing
so to embrace the more palatable, safer, and less costly approach of cultural accommodation.
But choosing to plant the Church
Relevant rather than the Church Militant has proven to be both ineffective for
newly planted churches and crippling to established churches as our unilateral
disarmament has left us vulnerable to the attacks of the cultures of the world
that continue to hate us because they have first hated the One who has sent us
into the world. In church planting, as
well as in all other aspects of being the Church in the world, we must never
forget that we are and always will be at war.
The Church is at war, but in what kind of war are we
engaged? Failure to understand the kind
of warfare called for in this struggle is disastrous. This war is, of course, first and foremost
spiritual warfare (cf. Ephesians 6).
However, in order to be effective in this warfare, we must recognize the
kind of war fighting the battle calls for.
Of the various kinds of human warfare experienced in history, today’s
counterinsurgency operations provide the best picture of the battle in which
the Church Militant is engaged. Church
planters need to recognize that this is our reality and be equipped for
entering into the target culture as unwanted and despised liberators ever
mindful that the world, not its inhabitants, is our enemy. Failure to engage the culture in
counterinsurgency warfare by either employing ineffective tactics as the Church
Militant (e.g., building defensive fortresses, striving toward victory through
attrition, employing “scorched earth” techniques) or by seeking peace with a hostile
culture by becoming the Church Relevant will result in defeat.
Church planters and leaders, in order to be faithful to the
One who said that He “did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” (Matthew
10:34) we cannot lay down our weapons, capitulate to the culture, and become
the Church Relevant. In light of Christ’s
call to liberate those who are captive to the darkness of our fallen cultures,
we owe it to the world to be and to remain the Church Militant.
SDG,
@RevMAWood
