Is the Modern American Church Irrelevant?

New Age, Charismatic, and even regular old-school preachers across America are striving to make the modern church relevant. What methods are they employing in this relevant revolution? Well, they have:

Installed coffee cafes inside the church building (because a caffeinated congregation is an awake congregation?), discarded classic Spirit-moving hymns in favor of edgy quasi-Christian pop-culture songs, set up video game consoles (no, for real!), watered down the Gospel to make it acceptable to a broader demographic, removed those offensive religious symbols called crosses that used to identify churches as houses of worship, or just went and built new structures with stages that more closely resemble rock halls than pulpits, and begun quoting popular and best-selling 'spiritual' books, relegating the old dusty Bible to back-up status.


As pleasant as these techniques might sound to 'progressive Christians', a point can be made here that those who employ these methods to make the church relevant are more interested in satisfying modern impulses than in serving up the hard truths of the Gospel. (Uplifting messages are great and they have their place, but they rarely serve to convict, and without conviction there is no repentance.) The problem lies in our mentality. In this age of instant gratification and consumerism we think of relevance in terms of newness.

But we must ask ourselves three vital questions: Has the Word of God suddenly become defunct? Has our need for salvation changed? Has the path to salvation changed?

If you've correctly concluded that the answer to these questions is a resounding NO, then you realize only one pertinent question remains. Are these efforts to modernize the Church truly building up the body of Christ? If the purpose of the message is to win souls to Christ, then any and all effort must be expended, but if in these efforts we begin seeking new methods, we inevitably wander from the one narrow path to salvation, which is Christ. By adopting methods that tweak the Word instead of us, we compromise our faith.

The modern American Church has indeed grown apart from God and needs to be made relevant. But we must inspect the root cause of its irrelevance before we can hope to make it relevant again. The Gospel has not changed, nor has our need for it. The only thing that has changed is our desire to hear something new (2 Timothy 4:3-4). We will explore these RELEVANT verses and how to make the Church relevant again in a BIBLICAL manner next time. Good day and God bless!