Today, many people view churches as irrelevant and outdated formats of religion. What ministries need today to save themselves from the demise of becoming obsolete is a willingness to adjust and be balanced out by a need to keep Jesus present in our messages.
There has been a decline in church attendance among millennials in the past couple of years. Church attendance amongst people aged 18 to 29 years has dropped in America. Some vocal members of the age group are voicing out a need to change some things in the church, but many ministers have decided to stand their ground, concerned that changing just to stay relevant might make us lose the essence of the gospel.
Staying relevant doesn't always mean abandoning the gospel, and if by any chance that that becomes a precedent to evolving some practices in church, we shouldn't budge. But that doesn't mean that we stop changing everything all at once.
To know how we can keep the message of the gospel, it must be clear to us what the gospel is in the first place. The good news points to the grace of God made available through Jesus Christ.
Often, out of an attempt to keep things black and white, pastors avoid change altogether. We refrain from "church marketing," abandoning social media and blogging and keeping worship, preaching and services old-school because being contemporary might belittle the message of Christ.
Don't get me wrong about the idea of relevance. I'm not suggesting that we water down sin issues and allow issues such as same-sex marriage, alcoholism, drug use and the like. Sin is still sin, but when we start shutting down doors to gain access to Christ, we're actually losing the essence of the gospel in hopes of saving it.
At the heart of the gospel is the message of a God who reaches out to us, not us who reach out to God. We need to make sure that we never close off people from the message. If there's anything we should change, it is the channels by which we get the gospel out. Anything else is really a non-negotiable.
So if we're talking about pastors wearing skinny jeans, worship leaders changing their genres and preachers speaking messages with cool illustrations and pretty graphics, then by all means we have to "be Jews to the Jews and Greek to the Greeks." But in doing so, we must remember that Jesus is still honored in all we do as being the way, truth and life.
