It’s almost impossible to wade into these waters these days and come out unscathed, but here goes. I am in shock at what is happening in my country as I write this. Most of us have heard our parents or grandparents try to instill in us the truth that it is never right to do wrong in order to do right. Unless some new facts come to light, which seems unlikely, George Floyd was treated unjustly at the hands of one or more Minneapolis police officers. Laws have been established to deal with that kind of injustice; if the accused officer is found guilty, he deserves the full extent of the law thrown at him. Nevertheless, the damage and violence I have observed in recent days under the fight for “racial equality” is clearly a violation of the saying, “It’s never right to do wrong in order to do right.” Calls for defunding police forces or, worse yet, dismantling police forces around the country have the potential to do more damage than we could ever imagine. Looting and shooting are taking place under the demand for racial equality, and much of it is destroying the looters’ own neighborhoods. 

You might argue that I didn’t grow up black, so I could never understand. If you decide to email me your protest, be sure to courtesy copy another one of our staff members, Bro. Michael Scott. He’s black. He also spent his childhood in the ’hood and much of his adult life in prison. Be careful what you say; you may wake a sleeping giant. My frustration can’t hold a candle to his. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

You see, there are times when a sincere cause can lead to a catastrophic overreaction. The fix becomes more deadly than the original problem. Maybe it’s like a claim made about another recent crisis in America. President Donald Trump suggested the cure to coronavirus might be more deadly than the disease. I’m of the mindset he might have been right. Sometimes the so-called solution simply makes the problem worse.

What does any of this have to do with relevance? I’m convinced a similar mistake has been made in churches—particularly independent Baptist churches. As American culture has become less “Christianized,” a greater gap exists between the decaying culture and the biblical church. It’s alarming, really. The breakdown of the family, marriages, and child-rearing, along with the vileness of entertainment, the increase in addiction, the prevalence of pornography, the elevation of children’s rights (minus those of the unborn), the decay of male authority, and many more indicators signal that we have a serious problem. We were warned in Scripture that it was coming. 

Many pastors, youth leaders, and music directors began to diagnose the problem as the church having lost its relevance. Surely this cultural spiral couldn’t happen as long as the church remained relevant. Therefore, the church must have lost its relevance. The cry in the ecclesiastical streets was that the problem was irrelevance in church pulpits, youth ministries, and music programs. Since then, the battle has escalated to the point that there have been widespread looting and shooting at the traditional structures within the church, even to the extent of demanding a dismantling of the longest-standing elements that churches have practiced for almost 2,000 years.

The cure is turning out to be worse than the “problem.” The problem was mostly that the people were waxing worse and worse and becoming lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, yet most of them thought the “police”—the New Testament church—was the problem. Preaching was sanitized, music was modernized, and youth were idolized. The modernizing of music wasn’t in and of itself wrong, as much as the fact that the “pop”-ularizing of church music did what Neil Postman warned it would do in Amusing Ourselves to Death—it would demand that it be entertaining above all.

Herein lies the problem. Our Bible is a timeless Book. It is inherently and unavoidably relevant. It provides the absolute answers for every culture in every age. It cannot be made more relevant than it already is. The reason it has been preserved for 2,000 years is because the very same answers handed down in the first century are still the same answers for today. Here is the greatest tragedy of all: the Bible is no longer seen as objectively relevant. It needs help. The result is a subtle substitution, in which relevance is measured by how much culture is attached instead of how much Bible is explained.

How easily we are enticed to forget that the Bible represents a kingdom, not a culture. Saturating it with culture is unbecoming to such a Book containing such timeless truth. Because the Bible is timeless, it is always timely. When we lose sight of that, we gravitate from timeless and timely to trendy and trivial. Timothy was warned to watch out for itching ears. Today that is translated as ears itching for more culture than Bible. “Give us the Bible wrapped in a television series.” “Give us movie clips.” “Show us more YouTube.” “Relate to us men more by giving us popular male trends.” “Relate to us women more by giving us popular female trends.”

You see, there are only two ways the church can lose its relevance: stop preaching the Bible or stop making application in preaching. Don’t confuse relevance and application. The Bible is always relevant, but it isn’t always applied. The pastor who sits in his study and isn’t in touch with the everyday needs of the congregation can leave people thinking the Bible isn’t relevant, when actually it simply isn’t being applied. One of the greatest changes I made to my preaching several years ago was to keep a yellow Post-it note above my study surface listing the names of 10 church members from all walks of life: single, youth, elderly, mature Christian, lost guest, addict, etc. Before I preach a message, I go through that list of names to ensure I apply each biblically relevant truth to their daily lives.

Os Guinness rightly accused many preachers and churches of turning relevance into an idol in his book entitled Prophetic Untimeliness. It’s a fair charge. We need not be guilty though, if we possess an unshakeable confidence in the preexisting relevance of the Bible and, instead, carefully articulate biblical truth with practical application.