this is a first draft of a paper i wrote for my Modern Ecclesiology class. It is a response to the book that I posted on last time. enjoy!

What makes a church relevant? Fifteen church leaders were asked this question, and this question is one that I have asked myself for a great long time. Perhaps I have no worded the question as such, but the church hopping that I have endured is testimony to the idea that I did not see churches that had it. They didn’t have the spark factor and I was looking hard. This question is one I am just now finding an answer to.
Over the past three years, I have been seeking a place to call my church home. I left my home upon heading to Olivet Nazarene University as a religion major. Since I am a PK, I am a critic of the church in a great way. Nobody does church like my dad, seriously, nobody does. For most my life, he has had it right, and everyone else needs to adapt to his style of church.
This is incredibly hard to do when I think of the kind of church I left. It was a Nazarene church practicing a liturgical style of worship. Expecting other Nazarene churches to do the same was completely irrational of me. So the last three years I have been bashing the local churches and had all but given up on the church in America.
I flailed my arms up in defeat and utter despair and hopelessness upon returning to America from Russia. I went to church 3 Sundays in a row to the same church that I had been attending pretty faithfully for a year. I sat in the foyer waiting for a friend to sit with for about 20 minutes each Sunday, and each time, no one spoke to me. Everyone filed into the sanctuary and took their normal seats. I heard mediocre preaching and ended up madder and madder at the Jell-O-O hard sermons.
I juxtaposed this church with the one I attended in Russia. This church is now my church home, and though I am thousands of miles from my home, I know that my brothers and sisters meet every Sunday in prayer and in communion with the Holy Spirit. The Calvary Chapel of Nizhny Novgorod Russia was incredible. They have a mediocre band that sings American praise songs translated into Russian. They meet in a severely dilapidated soviet children’s theatre. It has been closed to all other activity and the church only gets use because of some loophole in the law. The walls are thin on the south side so that in the Russian winter people bring coats and blankets to stay warm, the miniscule children size bleacher seats are covered in graffiti with both Russian and American swear words, and the ceiling with its massive hole falls on people constantly mimicking the snow that generally falls in Russia. The church is in no way ascetically pleasing. Yet they possess something intangible.
The people of this church worship in true community. They depend on each other for their daily lives. They know when someone is not present, they cry when others suffer, they exult when others are happy, they come together as one body and the concern of one is the concern of the whole. During my time there, I made known to the pastor my desire to help the poor in Russia as well as the ecology. Pastor Vlad immediately proposed that he and I go to the train station and feed the homeless there that night. Unfortunately, we did not go. Vlad is one of the busiest pastors I have ever met, starting work in the morning, and he returned home at about midnight with still more work and phone calls to make. The pastor personified the spirit in these people by his willingness to work in conjunction with the desires of one of his parishioners. Yet my comments did not stop there. The very next time that the church was in the country, people showed up early to clean the area where they were living. All because some audacious American said that he interprets the call in Genesis to dominate the earth as one to protect the world in which we live.
The greatest part of this church was the communal worship. They came together on Tuesdays for the women’s bible study and Thursday for men’s. They had an outreach on Mondays and Saturdays was youth group. Fridays were opportunities for seminar teaching and Sunday nights were worship in the form of sports. This community of faith would go to the local arena and play soccer with the neighborhood kids. Witnessing through their spirit and inviting them into the church or to a Christian concert. Yet Sundays and Wednesdays were the greatest days. This is when they came together for bible-centered preaching. The pastor basically gave an exegesis on a chapter in a book of the bible. We worked through the Wisdom literature, Major and Minor Prophets on Wednesdays and then Sundays were going through the epistles. They had already covered the gospels.
The model of church that I see in Russia is one that complies with two of the trumpet blasts written in The Relevant Church. Mark Driscoll says that “What held it [his church] together was a godly Bible-centered pastor and a community of people from various stages of life and backgrounds.” The written word taught to people in an inadequate worship service made Driscoll’s church relevant. He also points out that the church is not perfect. The Calvary Chapel was not without fault and the church I was raised in had plenty of drama. Driscoll accurately claims “that the Church is people and that people are sinful, and therefore churches are messy” Yet this does not depress him nor I, for He has faith that being a faithful community is valuable.
This idea is incredibly reinforced by Todd Spitzer who I imagine shouting (though he probably only typed it) “God’s Word does not return void” (93). He furthers this idea by saying “God’s word is relevant, not our words about Gods word, and it is God’s spirit that transforms the heart of a person.” He says “we seek to re-dog the old wells of the fathers in this time of spiritual drought and bring the refreshment found in the Scriptures to a new generation.”
This trumpet blast cuts right to my heart, because so often I sit in churches without the word present. The church I grew up in was chocked full of scripture and relevant tradition. My new home church, which lies on the other side of the ocean, uses the bible as a spring, as a well providing quenching water and true food. I see that in order for the church to be relevant, it need not fight over worship styles or service times/locations. Instead the focus should be on presenting the message of Christ and the liberating power of His revolutionary love. Driscoll adequately predicts,”Churches that embrace cultural relevance over biblical faithfulness will in time become heretics like Hymenaeus. And Spitzer says the cure to “sickening spirituality”

is simple and yet profound: Teach the truth of God’s Word and see regeneration occur as God’s Word reveals to us who God is, how much He loves us, and that He died for us. He will impact your community with the greatest message the world has ever heard, a message just as relevant today as it was when Jesus first crashed into history.