For a number of years we have organised a Summer School in Aberdeen. "We" being the Centre for Ministry Studies which sits within the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Since retiring from full time ministry I have been an Honorary Lecturer in the School, with my main responsibilities supporting the work of the Centre, though that will broaden into a research role once we are through the current restrictions.
Walking through the campus in the early morning the crown of King's College was shrouded in mist and framed in the green leaves of summer. The history of King's College dates back to 1495, work on the Chapel beginning in the year 1500. The Crown Tower was damaged in a storm in the 17th Century and the original crown replaced as now seen in the photo.
This was taken on a cold summer morning, and is one of many I took of our activities and gatherings during that week. Two of the keywords of the week were faithfulness and relevance. We were exploring the uncomfortable tensions between ministry and mission, the need for conversation between church and world, examining the relationships between message and medium, and finding there were as many perspectives as participants!
Relevance and faithfulness don't have to be mutually excluding; but neither do they easily accommodate to each other. The desire to be relevant is for many an attempt to be faithful to the Gospel; but if relevance becomes the primary driver, then how far does accommodation to cultural norms, expectations and values go?
Equally, faithfulness to the Gospel ought to keep the church alert to its cultural, historical and social context. Unless the church remains critically aware of when it is becoming so set in its way that the church and the Gospel have become irrelevant, incomprehensible and remote, then it loses the right to be heard, and anyway, the audience will have stopped listening.
When the church is treated with indifference blue lights should flash and the klaxons of the Spirit should be heard. But, faithfulness to the Gospel is not served by dancing to the tune of the zeitgeist, or losing confidence in the realities of God's Kingdom, of Christ crucified and risen, and of the Holy Spirit the source and energy of God's new creation and purposes of reconciliation.
All of that, and much more, we argued about, prayed about, disagreed and discussed further; and all within reach of the shadow of the chapel, its crown, and its cross. In the tension between relevance and faithfulness the cross stands as a stumbling block. No surprise there. "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." (I Cor. 1.18)
Perhaps one of the key problems with a concern for relevance is our reluctance to live the scandal of the cross. Faithfulness to the Gospel is a call to embody the self-giving love of God in ways that are imaginative, costly and deeply disruptive of the settled norms, cultural values and social arrangements of our times. It may be that relevance is not about accommodation. or compromise, or cultural alignment. Instead of seeking to be more attractive, less different, we are called to a determined faithfulness to challenge greed with generous living, to answer competitive structures of advancement by compassionate accompaniment of those left behind, to live a cruciform life in a world that crucified Jesus.
The power and wisdom of God as displayed in the cross cannot be repackaged to make it seem less foolish, or to disguise its weakness. That would be an apology for an apologetic. There is a deep irony when, in the chase for relevance, the church seeks to increase the marketability of its message, which is essentially a scandalous story that is hard to hear. The church is at its most relevant when it is faithful to the Gospel of reconciliation, and embodies the teaching of Jesus in a community rooted in values and practices of the Kingdom of God. The Beatitudes as lived and practised in the community would make the church a community of contradiction, a moral and spiritual resistance to the counter claims of a competitive and acquisitive consumer culture.
For the church, the first priority of relevance is that the life of the followers of Jesus is congruent with the Gospel. The evaluating criterion of relevance is not what the surrounding world thinks of the church, but how well the church engages with, cares for, gives itself in service to, this world of which it is part, into which it is sent as agents of peace and conduits of love, a world for which Christ died, making peace by the blood of his cross.
The Scottish puritan Samuel Rutherford was exiled to Aberdeen. From there he wrote some of his letters of spiritual direction, letters that are now classics of Scottish devotion to Christ. With King's college crown and cross in mind, here is one of his sentences:
"Those who can take that crabbed tree handsomely on their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship." (Rutherford's Letters, Epistle 5, to Lady Kenmure, Nov 22, 1636.)
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