By Bert Waggoner, National Director Vineyard USA, Senior Pastor, Sugar Land TX
The church is called to culturally relevant mission. Mission is the objective; cultural relevancy is the process. The purpose of the church is not to be cool, cute, popular, or any other adjective that would indicate we are “in.” When the church makes cultural relevance its priority rather than a way of doing mission, it becomes syncretistic and thus, sells her soul on the altar of cultural relevance. This syncretistic harlotry makes the church what she most fears – irrelevant, because the church is relevant only as she is on mission as salt and light in a spoiling and dark world.
So when The Vineyard places “Culturally Relevant Mission” as one of our core values, the primary term is mission. This is what we are called to. This is what we exist for. Missions is primary; cultural relevancy is secondary.
This is not a new distinctive for the church or missions. The Nicene Creed identifies four “marks” of the church. “Marks” are the things that are essential to the church. You cannot have the church without them. The marks are: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. I won’t go through each of these marks although eachis very important to our understanding of the church. The one that I will highlight is “apostolic.” An apostle is a person sent by God. An apostolic church is a church that is sent out into the world with the good news of the Kingdom of God. Thus, the true church is a people on mission – sent ones. That is what “apostolic” meansand that is what the church must be.
The church does not just have a mission, it exists only in mission. Some would even say it is mission. As one noted theologian said, “Mission is to the church as fire is to burning.” You can be a group of people - a large group of people whoworship, fellowship, and even share the Word and spiritual experiences and yet not be a church in the New Testament sense. The creative word that creates a church is, “Go.” “Go into all the world.” (Matthew 28:19) The church exists as a sent people – a people on mission.
What is this mission? The mission of the church is to join with God in what He is doing in the world. God is a missionary God who is seeking a people who will worship Him in Spirit and in truth (John 4:23). That is the ultimate purpose – a people worshipping the Triune God. This mission involves the transformation of individuallives, building a community of faith (the body of Christ), bringing justice and freedom to the oppressed, initiating a new creation, and ultimately restoring all things to wholeness and life or as the apostle Paul says, “reconciling all things in heaven and earth to himself” (Colossians 1:20).
The church is designed to be God’s agent to accomplish His mission in the world. The church is the one entity in the world that does not exist for its members. It exists for those on the outside.
This leads me to the “culturally relevant” aspect of our Core Vineyard Value. To be culturally relevant is simply to follow the model for mission that is provided for us by our Lord Jesus Christ. How does God accomplish his mission? Through incarnation! God becomes a man, a Jew in Israel, two thousand years ago. Jesus as the revelation of God was relevant by virtue of the fact that though He was God He was as the Creed says, “very man of very man.” God in the flesh thrust into a specific culture at a specific time. That is God’s method in his mission. He comes towhere we are in our humanity, in our culture and in our individual lives. He comes to us and embodies his message in terms by which we have learned to understand the world.
This is what we mean by “culturally relevant mission.” The church must be incarnational in its mission. She must understand the culture and the people in thatculture. She must use the symbols of meaning in the culture she is in to communicate the message of the gospel without losing the prophetic role of speaking intothe culture. She must not, in her attempt to be culturally relevant, allow the desire for relevancy to supplant either the priority of her mission, nor the privilege of her message. But she must also understand that to cease to be relevant is to cease to be missional.
Our call to cultural relevance does not address the issue of whether culture is good or bad. That is another question. Richard Niebuhr wrote a book in 1951 entitled Christ and Culture. Niebuhr identified five options: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture. Though I would agree with the last option, this option is not a necessary prerequisite for calling the church to culturally relevant mission. Regardless of how we conceive of the relationship between Christ (or the church) andculture, we must do as our Lord did in His mission. We must live in and understand our culture and frame the Gospel message in sensitivity to that culture so that the message can be understood and thus, be relevant to those in our culture.
Cultural relevancy does not necessarily mean that our message will be received with joy. No one in human history was more culturally relevant than Jesus, but it was this relevancy that got Him crucified. Modern culture has no problem with us as longas our message is anemic and fits their little scheme of things. They will even invite us to be their chaplains to give nice little anemic prayers at their events as long as we relent to do it without doing so in the name of Jesus. They even cheer us on when our message is psycho babble and our only message is self help.The problem they have with us is when we clearly say that the only way to the good life is through the cross and that the cross is the power of human transformation. So don’t think that popularity in the world necessarily equates with biblical success, or that when you are culturally relevant you will necessarily be loved by all.
On the other hand, only those who are culturally relevant will see people coming to know Jesus Christ. The New Testament church was relevant and saw five thousand people added to the church in one day. Peter stood at Pentecost and gave a relevant message to first century Jews in Jerusalem. “This is that,” he saidin reference to the promise of Joel’s prophecy and what was happening in Jerusalem on Pentecost. He brought the hope of the Jews into direct contact with the Gospel and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Could there have been a more culturally relevantmessage? So, if you want to be effective in your message, you must be culturally relevant with your message.
This call to cultural relevance is not new. It has long been a matter of central concern to missionaries. What we are saying by making cultural relevance in mission a core value of the Vineyard is that the church is a missionary people and that all of the followers of Jesus Christ must become missionaries wherever God hasplaced us and in whatever we do.
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