A Far More Relevant Church

I didn’t trip over his first sentence; some did, and rightly so.

“It’s not important for the church to be relevant. It is important for the church to be holy and wholly incarnate by being Jesus good, Jesus true and Jesus beautiful.”

Leonard Sweet wrote that and posted it publicly yesterday. I grabbed onto it and zoomed to the way he ended that thought.

“It’s not important for the church to be relevant” is not a call from him to seek irrelevancy.

Quite the contrary: he’s inviting us to “holy and wholly incarnate by being Jesus.”

And I immediately flash to Bill Mallard, another of my heroes from seminary days. (Ask me about him sometime; loved that guy, and have a letter from him that’s framed in my home office.) He taught us the importance of the Incarnation — or, as John 1:14 says, The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. That, and the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Christ were among the chief tenets of the early Church.

Dr. Mallard would couple that with John 3:16, God so loved all of creation, to stress how big and broad and complete is God’s grace.

Dr. Sweet weaves much of that together in calling us into being “holy and wholly incarnate by being Jesus good and Jesus true and Jesus beautiful.” He’d which he’d be the first to say that’s far more relevant than something like a screen in a sanctuary.

Your thoughts?