From Change Your Church for Good: The Art of Sacred Cow Tipping (W Publishing Group, 2007) by Brad Powell: 

The Sunday morning service was killing us. We couldn’t reach new people because the service was irrelevant to everyone but insiders…If the primary services of the church aren’t relevant to outsiders, the church will not grow or reach people.

Is the church a place for outsiders or insiders? And how does one go from being an outsider to an insider? And what does relevance have to do with it?

Paul of Tarsus went to a city called Colosse to plant a church.  Paul describes the people he was sharing the gospel with as “aliens” and “hostile” toward the message (Colossians 1:21).  They found Paul’s preaching strange because it was strange, and intentionally designed to be strange!  You might say it was even irrelevant.  It made no sense to them. The church Paul was planting was totally foreign to their culture.

Yet it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believed (1 Corinthians 1:21). Through Paul’s faithful preaching of the gospel (Colossians 1:5,6), not his marketing or management skills, God worked. God created faith in the hearts of those who heard the word, and through this gift of faith God reconciled them to himself through the death of His Son (Colossians 1:21,22).  It was the word of truth, the gospel that was bringing forth fruit in the form of new believers (Colossians 1:5,6).  No attempts were made to make these aliens and strangers comfortable with the church.  Paul was simply faithful to preach the word. And God was faithful to honor his word by saving people who were initially distracted by the irrelevance of the message. Paul planted and watered; God gave the increase.

When faith produced new life, the outsider became an insider.  The outsider began a process of spiritual growth and development toward the goal. The goal was not their happiness. The goal of this new spiritual life was holiness and blamelessness (Colossians 1:22) that came about as a result of being grounded and settled in the faith, which was itself a result of being taught God’s word and admonished through God’s word by fellow believers (Colossians 3:16). The result of this exposure to God’s word was worship characterized by the singing of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs (Colossians 3:16), focusing the heart of the worshipper with thankfulness to God in recognition that this whole process of moving from an outsider to an insider from start to finish was God’s doing. Without God actively working to reconcile us to Himself, no amount of culturally relevant language would ever produce the necessary faith to believe. Relevance has nothing to do with God’s power to save. Nothing. God saved 3,000 people on the Day of Pentecost after they had heard a sermon spoken in a language totally foreign to them!  Is God hamstrung by the culture? By language?

Should the church in the Twenty-First Century endeavor to remove the distinctives that make it strange to the culture? Or should we allow the lost to enter fully into the experience of being aliens and hostile toward God and His church, allowing the Holy Spirit to work through the word to produce faith, generating spiritual life, and birthing these aliens and strangers into the life of the church?

Making lost people feel at home in church is a lot like helping a struggling butterfly out of its cocoon.  You aren’t doing it any favors.  The struggle for life is an important part of the process.  And the struggle the lost have with the strangeness of the church is very much a part of the process the Spirit of God uses to bring them to a point of genuine faith. Taking away that struggle invites not true conversion, but mere participation in a place where they’ve been made to feel at home.  Tom Bodet can leave the light on for them; the church has a higher calling.

Is the church’s character and calling shaped primarily by the word of God or by the prevailing culture?