EDITORIAL
Good News or Dead End?
Genuine Seekers & Holy Irrelevance
A friend whose life has been spent as a staff member in an Evangelical parachurch organization has over the last few years become increasingly distressed at the changes in that ministry as well as in the movement at large. Recently he sent a letter to a number of his correspondents indicating as much, saying that in these environs there had been too much emphasis on being relevant, and that relevance was no good apart from holiness, to which Evangelicals must return, whatever the cost in attrition might turn out to be. He invited us to respond.
Surely he is right about the importance of holiness, but it seems to me there is something ironically un-evangelical about juxtaposing it with relevance in the cause of the gospel. There is little that is evidently relevant about holiness in the Court of the Gentiles. One might as well try to interest babies in beefsteak. Only before the Holy Place does its relevance become apparent: while every believer is holy, the conscious practice of holiness is advanced Christianity.
Mainstream Evangelicals are post-fundamentalists, which means they—the intelligentsia most intensely—have always been concerned about what people in the higher cultural echelons think of them; specifically, they are anxious to be recognized as both Nice and Smart, that is, as Not-Fundamentalist. Much of this concern is hidden behind a life that is apologetic in a broad and only partially legitimate sense, by making its religion inoffensive, reasonable, and attractive to non-Christians. Its all-too-typical exemplar wants to be a good Christian and a good worldling at the same time, who ends up breaking his Christianity (mostly, in our day, with the egalitarian hammer) against the Rock that declares that a man cannot serve two
masters.
Mark the Paths Clearly
My own response to my friend's question about what Evangelicalism must do in its attempt not only to reach out to the unchurched, but also to fortify itself, is that it should seize upon the message of the ancient Didache—which is perfectly understandable to the genuine seeker as a sign that he may have come to the right place, and is taken directly from the Lord's teaching—as its own: "There are two ways: one of life and one of death, and the difference between the two ways is
great."
Evangelicals have been busy for many years now trying to relate these ways without due emphasis on their radical duality, on the teaching that one of the ways leads to death, and that the difference between them is great. In doing this, they have been far less seeker-friendly than they like to imagine, clouding over the landmark by which the true seeker can recognize the fork, who is Christ himself, in his road to death. The true Church is in the business of being evangelical by marking the paths clearly, drawing people off one and putting them on the other.
The task of those charged with the ministry of the gospel is not to seek favor or patronage by concerning themselves overmuch with what may bother anyone; rather, they must gain and exhibit a firm footing on the main road—preaching and teaching authoritatively instead of apologetically, with the Scriptures as they speak through and are confirmed in the whole Christian Tradition, and, placing all distractions to the side, tell the man who has undergone the hidden metamorphosis necessary to convert him to an actual seeker what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, and where lie the ways of life and of
death.
This applies not only to Evangelicals, but to every grinning, cross-gartered, and yellow-stockinged church seduced into thinking that relevance comes from adopting rather than correcting the grammar of the world.
—S. M. Hutchens
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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