Relevance and the Emerging Church

A few days ago Maggi Dawn referencing a few posts from for the time being made the point that we should regard attempts at relevancy with adequate suspicion. Geoff states:

I want to explore the significance of replacing the project of relevance with the project of identity. Let us not seek to be relevant but to express our identity as follows of Christ, as Christians within the particular cultures that we are in.

As I mentioned last week, I re-read Nouwen's excellent book In the Name of Jesus. In this book Nouwen looks at the temptation of Jesus Christ in the wilderness and the reinstatement of Peter by Christ following his denial as helps in shaping Christian leadership. Christ's first temptation was relevance. "Turn these stones into bread." Nouwen states:

Jesus' first temptation was to be relevant: to turn stones into bread. Oh, how often have I wished I could do that! Walking through the "young towns" on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, where children die from malnutrition and contaminated water, I would not have been able to reject the magical gift of making the dusty stone-covered streets into places where people could pick up any of the thousands of rocks and discover that they were croissants, coffee cakes, or fresh-baked buns, and where they could fill their cupped hands with stale water form the cisterns and joyfully realize that what they were drinking was delicious milk...

The leader of the future will be the one who dares to claim his irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows him or her to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success and to bring the light of Jesus there.

Clearly relevancy is an issue and even a temptation in ministry.

The solution for this, according to Nouwen is the discipline of contemplative prayer. Tomorrow I'll write about Nouwen's ideas concerning contemplative prayer.