The Temptation to be Relevant

Lenten Reflections

Ivan Kramskov Christ in the Desert

In this season of Lent. Forty days of prayer and repentance, a season of sustained focus on our sinfulness and the sufficiency of Christ. After Jesus’ baptism and before his public ministry, he was led into the wilderness, where he fasted and prayed. During which Jesus was tempted by the Devil in three particular ways.

Henri Nouwen, a Christian Author and priest, wrote In the Name of Jesus. A short book that addresses the three temptations of Jesus and relates them to the temptations of Christian ministers. The first turning of stones into bread is the temptation to be relevant.

He begins by recounting a move from the prestigious halls of Harvard to a home in Toronto for mentally handicapped people. Henri says:

”These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self — the self that can do things, show things, build things —and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.

I am telling you all this because I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and stand in this world with nothing but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus chose to reveal God’s love.

It is here that the need for a new Christian leadership becomes clear. The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there.”

Six weeks after I graduated from Bible College, I packed my white Dodge Neon with my few earthly possessions. My sister and I drove across the United States. I pulled into New York, and four months after graduation, I was a pastor. Four years of Bible College gave me knowledge of Scripture, but I was about to find out that I was unprepared for the actual work of pastoring, particularly pastoring children and their families.

I looked for help figuring out what it looked like to lead well. There was no internet, so I found myself looking at conferences, magazines, and leadership books. Each of these sources pointed to the same truth that success was tied to relevance. The more relevant you are, the more people will come. Lights and fog promised style points. It was an overreaction to the perceived stodgy traditions of the past. Ross Douthat in Bad Religion explains how relevance became our drug of choice.

Christianity’s problem, the leaders of the Mainline decided somewhere in the tumult of the 1960s, was that it turned too many people off; it was too rigid in its moral teachings, too exclusive in its truth claims, too remote from the problems of this world, this life, this moment on the earth. Only a more inclusive faith, they assumed, could succeed where orthodoxy was failing and sustain a version of Christianity amid the various forces undercutting the older dogmas and traditions.

Ross Douthat

The thinking here is that by holding to orthodoxy, we, through our rigidity, push the very people away we are trying to reach. Yet what we fail to realize is that we cut the rope to the life preserver we are throwing them, only to doom them to float in a sea of relativism until they die of exposure. The moment we lose our orthodox moorings to be inclusive and relevant, we have lost more than a few college kids to foolishness. We have lost our faith altogether.

In the desert, the Devil tempted Jesus to satisfy his immediate desires by his own power. Relevance. Immediate satisfaction of immediate needs.

True relevance is not hipness or style points. Relevance is knowing whose you are. It’s knowing what the people you are called to lead need most, not necessarily what successful people say they need most. What people need is an anchor for their souls. Henri offers the antidote to relevance in the form of contemplative prayer.

Contemplative prayer in a culture of relevance is a waste of time.

Through the discipline of contemplative prayer, Christian leaders have to learn to listen again and again to the voice of love and to find there is wisdom and courage to address whatever issue presents itself to them.

Relevance demands results, at any cost. Contemplative prayer requires presence. To wait on God, to listen as the beloved of God for the voice of God, puts every relevant pressure and pursuit in its proper place.

Contemplative prayer keeps us home, rooted and safe, even when we are on the road, moving from place to place, and often surrounded by sounds of violence and war.

I love this thought from Nouwen. Contemplative prayer keeps us home. It connects us to our true home and grounds us in something that will always outlast the shifting sand of whatever happens to be popular and relevant at the moment.

Christian leadership must become a place where the immediate is outweighed by transcendence. The practical by presence. Relevance lies to us saying, “I am what I have.” Contemplative prayer reminds us that before we could ever love, we are loved.

Pastors, I beg of you, do not compromise the tenets of our faith. Point your people to Jesus. If we don’t help our people see Jesus as beautiful, they will simply find him useful. A god that is useful is not a God at all. He is a patsy and a genie in a bottle. Give them Jesus, only Jesus, at all costs.