The Idol of Cultural Relevance

Christmas is coming.

A time when the church sings antiquated, strange, culturally irrelevant, nonsensical, even weird songs:

Jesus is born as a baby who never cries but nevertheless sheds tears. He arrives in a hot Middle-Eastern nation that has bleak wintery weather. It’s a time when bells should be swungen and songs should be sungen and we are encouraged to be free from sin’s alloy. With verilys and deos and wherewiths and cherubim and…well you get the picture.

It’s weird.

It’s culturally irrelevant language.

But it’s OK to sing it, because it’s Christmas, and people like singing the old carols at Christmas.

But just as we convince ourselves that our contemporary worship songs would never fall into the same ‘culturally irrelevant’ trap we go to this years summer conferences and we all start singing about the Lion of Judah and laying down bodies in Joseph’s tomb until our voices are hoarse. (Lyrics from ‘Lion and the Lamb’ — Leeland Mooring, Brenton Brown, Brian Johnson’ and ‘O Praise the name’ — Hillsong).

Lets face it. Some of these contemporary song lyrics are even more weird than the carols.

I mean, even the most un-churched of people can get the general gist of what swungen bells and sungen songs are.

But the Lion of Judah? What even is that?

However, I want to say that I love singing carols in all their glorious cultural irrelevance. And I love singing some of these new songs from the summer. (Although to be honest, most of my summer was spent on a sofa watching a live stream of lots of other people singing these songs.)

You see, although there is much talk in worship circles these days about the need for our worship to be ‘culturally relevant’, to be honest I am not convinced.

Firstly, because in the multi-cultural, multi-generational contexts that we increasingly find ourselves in, the question has to be asked — which culture are we trying to be relevant to?

But more than that I am not convinced because I don’t think cultural relevance is a high enough bar for the Church.

One worship leader said recently that a good worship song these days is one that could be sung in a secular venue with totally un-churched people without them realising that they were singing a worship song.

That doesn’t sound like a worship song to me.

It’s just a song isn’t it?

It may be a good song, full of truth and light and good morals. And that’s good. But it doesn’t make it a worship song does it?

And anyway, what the popularity of songs like ‘The Lion and the Lamb’ has proved is that the church maybe doesn’t need more culturally relevant songs. It just needs more good songs.

You know, it is now pretty easy for many churches to produce music and put on light shows that compare favourably with any secular band. Even more so for large summer conferences. But we have to be honest. Everything about a secular concert is designed and created to give an experience to a consumer and to focus attention on the stage and the performer.

We all throw our hands up in the air and lament at the consumerism in our churches today. And yet in the highest profile events, in the highest profile churches, in the highest profile ministry that worship is, we are in danger of perpetuating the very consumerism that we are trying to avoid.

As Dwight L Moody said that “The boat belongs in the water of the world. But, if the water gets in the boat, it sinks.”

You see for me the danger is that as the Church, and specifically as the church at worship, success in cultural relevance is being achieved via the sacrifice of distinctiveness. Our desire for cultural relevance is in danger of becoming just politics: pleasing the masses and losing our true self. We have forgotten that in terms of cultural relevance, we need to be salt, not sponges.

Different.

Holy.

Of course, I want people from outside our church world to connect with what we do in church, including what we sing. Accessibility is so important. But if we can’t aim beyond cultural relevance in our worship then cultural relevance has become an idol.

Maybe we should start to see the some of the distinctive ‘non-culturally relevant’ elements of our worship not so much as a threat to worship, but as an invitation to worship.

So one question I am asking right now is this: Has our worship culture now actually become too safe?

Have we stopped imagining what worship can be, can look like, can do, can bring about, can release, without the support of high-end production?

Have we brought into the big sound, big light show as a model that ‘works’ but lost the art of simple, beautiful, dangerous worship that is full of Jesus, sustained by the wildness of the Holy Spirit and the raw energy of imperfect voices, and because of that, is worship that causes the world to catch it’s breath in a way that cultural relevance just can’t?

And have those of us who would describe ourselves as Charismatics somehow illustrated physically in our worship gatherings through our stage centricity, something that may have actually happened spiritually in our churches, where worship has become too focussed on a few people at the front rather than shared by the people in the room — something that would be a mark of Charismatics in the past?

So maybe what we need at this point more than ever in our churches worship-wise is bravery. Bravery to break the mould, crush the idol of cultural relevance, and reimagine what worship can become again.

After all, lets be inspired that at Christmas our churches are fuller than at any other time of year. The cultural irrelevance of carols doesn’t seem to be putting people off.