When I started at Regent College, I got really really frustrated that I was living in a bubble that had nothing to do with what most of my friends and family cared about. I was studying the answers to questions that no one asked - or would ask. There seemed to be an idolatry of facts - things that people liked that they knew but had little earthly relevance. There was also an underlying critical spirit there that - while clothed in Christian generosity - was still a moral superiority complex. I made a decision that second year that I would no longer attend their compulsary small groups and hang around endlessly in the atrium as the other students did - but I would find a strong group of unchurched/"I don't know if they're churched" people and invest heavily there. I don't think the church - as a whole - is much different from my experience of Regent College those early years.
In the church, we tend to stay away from reality. We are afraid of saying that we don't know. We're afraid of the Bible not answering a question. Afraid that people will become polluted if we allow them to think for themselves or engage the world in any significant way. Truthfully, I think that we're afraid that admitting we don't know or the Bible doesn't say makes us unsure about our own faith because our experience of God has been too small and we're scared we may find that the one we've been following all this time has been wrong after all.
So instead, we've created an aquarium called church. And we swim around like little fish getting our food handed to us and happily swimming with all the other little fish in the castles and other structures that are in our fish tank. We try to lure others to come play in our aquarium. But real life - and the place that God has asked us to go - is the open ocean. And the aquarium just doesn't prepare us for the ocean. When we go out there, many of us lose our way because we're just unprepared.
All's this is to say that I think the answer to relevance in the church is so much deeper than showing movies and using an electric guitar in worship. It is allowing - even pushing - people to engage in world issues and the world's ideas in a meaningful way. When we do this, we tend to do it in the Sunday School way - let's study the world so we can see how bad it is. The truth is there's a lot out there that's good and we can actually learn from and I think we need to help people to make their own good decisions. There aren't two earths (one for Christians and one for non-Christians). There's just one and the church's role is to teach people how to live Christlike (not church like but Christlike). Bottom line: We need to equip people - not protect them. That's the Holy Spirit's job.
