Relevance is pretty big word. It’s a bigger idea. At times it seems beyond our limited ability to fully comprehend and express and yet it continues to be the holy grail of churches as they develop growth systems and strategies. Seriously I have read it a thousand times;

Make religion seem relevant.
Address the felt needs of your given target audience.
Connect with their experience of life.

It’s kind of like wanting to put your church on extreme makeover. A bit of liposuction here, straighten out that crooked nose there, fix those nasty teeth and of course get those breasts knocked up a couple cup sizes. If we could just make church sexier it would be just like the show where the ugly duckling woman is finally revealed to her waiting boyfriend or husband. He can hardly recognize her. She is beautiful. Whatever struggles they had in their marriage or relationship disappear into the ether melted away by the newfound lust he feels for his newly breathtaking woman.

All of this in the effort of bigger, better, church communities. A larger slice of the religious economy. It would seem at times the glorification of the lowest common denominator is the highest ideal we could possibly reach for. Of course this is all just as offensive and shallow as it is to imagine a boob job can fix a broken relationship.

Now with that said, I can admit that I too want to be relevant. I don’t want to be considered outdated, insignificant or unimportant. I want to feel a sense of validation in my job, in my words, in my relationships. I want to be considered a helpful voice in journeys of those around me. Basically I want my value as an individual to be realized.

And yet as I sit here in a coffee shop preparing my thoughts for another weekend, ideas rolling through my head, I am at a bit of a loss to define an idea that could capture anything beyond my own imagination with a sense of relevance. I mean, what is relevant? What is relevant to me? To you? Are those things even remotely connected to each other? As I imagine the task of writing or speaking to an audience beyond my own imagination relevance seems like a heavy burden. Is it even a reasonable task to ask of someone?

The problem is, of course, that relevance is subjective. It has to be- by definition. The Dictionary defines relevance as, “pertaining to the matter at hand.” The problem with that is that the fact of the mater pertains to the hands that are involved in the matter. Now you can try to say that ten times fast but the fact remains that we are all involved in different matters, different lives, and different situations with different decisions and choices and struggles to make our way through. We all have different interests and biases that we bring to the table. So as we bring any one matter to the focus of the collective audience we all have a different evaluation of its perceived relevance to our lives.

What is there that could possible pertain to all of the myriad of matters in the hands that are holding this book? Could I possible tell a story that would touch us all with sentimental feelings, or a joke that would make everyone laugh? I may not be up to the task of relevance but the truth is, that type of relevance would take more than a great writer, it would take a great audience and though I have a great deal of appreciation for your commitment to read this far into this post, I don’t think you’re up to the task.

Take something as common as a simple pastime. I know a lot of people that golf. Now if you are a golfer you know that golfing is all about consistency and accuracy. You step onto the course focused. You know your best score, your target score, and your handicap. You know the tools in your bag. Maybe you have scouted the course or made mental notes from an earlier round. Personally, when I golf, I want to get through the course as fast as possible, get a few balls in the holes along the way and finish the day with at least one of the balls I started with. In fact my favorite part of golfing is the golf cart. Truth is, my ideal golf course exists, we just call it a go-kart track. The relevance of golfing is not lost on me, though some may disagree. I simply edit out the parts I don’t like.

So when we come to a topic like spirituality you can see the breadth of where relevance resides in our culture, the mosaic of religious traditions that emphasize different aspects of the spiritual journey, the ways that we edited out the parts that don’t resonate with our particular experience of life. Whether that is the reinvention of the Buddhist tradition minus the supernatural, or the politicizing of Islam into a nationalistic identity, or even the continued divide and divide and divide again nature of the protestant wing of Christianity, we are continually made aware of our desire to shape religious experience to fit within the presuppositions and biases that determine relevance for us as individuals. Spirituality especially in modern western culture seems as times little more than a buffet table of options for the religious consumer. So much of what flies today as an attempt to become relevant is little more than a quick edit job. Cutting off the fat so speak. The parts of faith/belief/spirituality that we don’t feel comfortable with.

But what if we were to explore spirituality unedited? What if we determined to journey into spirituality and take it as it comes, not discarding those things that might not fit at first glance? Is there a place that we could recognize our limited view of the world with all of the presupposition, bias and baggage that comes along with it and yet chose to acknowledge the larger story of God that supersedes our limited perspective? What if we took spirituality at face value even when it calls into question our habits and patterns? This spirituality might look very different from our tightly edited relevance of today.

Editing a book sounds like a good thing. We give out Oscars for exceptional editing of movies. But the editing of our spirituality just sounds a little wrong doesn’t it. Unedited spirituality; that seems like something we can all get behind, right? The tough thing, of course, is that to face into spirituality unedited we have to acknowledge the presuppositions that have forced our edits in the first place. The reason we edit our parts of our spiritual journey is because they don’t fit into the presuppositions we bring with us to the table. The most common example these days is the modern presupposition that everything in the world is ordered and rational and within our theoretical ability to grasp, replicate and communicate. To fit our experience of faith into that presupposition we have edited out most of the mystery and ambiguity in a very real sense, defines spirituality. We have developed theology and theory and diagrams and acronyms to explain almost everything we could possible question about faith.

We have somehow taken the mystery of what it means to respond to Jesus and edited it down into four easy to remember spiritual laws. Our relationship to God has become little more than a simple diagram. You and I as stick figures on the left side of the page, separated by a gulf of untouched page across from the stick figure god on the right hand side. Jesus doesn’t get to be a stick figure; He gets to be a bridge in the shape of a cross that you and I, as stick figures remember, get to walk over to get to God. Somehow the God of the universe has become a simple transaction. Your sins (-) plus Jesus suffering (+) equals zero.

We have developed apologetics in an expressed attempt to make it unreasonable to accept anything but a Christian worldview. Of course we have long since forgotten the fact that Christianity is anything but reasonable. We believe in some entirely crazy things, things that are beyond the definitions of empirical science. But this is the essence of faith; that we chose to believe in what we cannot prove. And somehow in the world of faith, those pieces that we can’t explain or prove become, amazingly, the solid cornerstones for our lives. To edit out the mystery quizzically leaves a pretty precarious house of cards to live in.

The paradox in our pursuit of relevance is this, that in an attempt to define a God that fits within our presuppositions about the world we have edited him down into a form that is relevant to none of us. We have made the gospel about a series of propositions that universally hang over every head instead of the open ended relational dynamic that the kingdom of God hinges on. We have thought that if we could define and disseminate our understanding of God we could make everyone believe the right things or do the right things. All the while God has been trying not to be relevant to everyone in one fell swoop but to become relevant to each of us in the uniquely divine relationships that define the kingdom of God. I know that seems like an incredibly inefficient way to go about running the universe but thankfully for us, he is still God. If we were to take our limits off of God we might actually find that there isn’t any need for us to make God seem relevant because we would find that he is already present in every moment, every interaction, every relationship inviting us to come to know him in a more meaningful way.