I’m an unapologetic child of the 80’s. Somewhere in my parent’s home is a HYPERCOLOR sweatshirt to prove it.
Search “High School Stereotypes of the 1980s,” and you come up with terms like:
-Preppies
-Jocks
-Valley Girls
-Skaters
-Headbangers
-Goths
-New Wavers
-Overachievers
…the list goes on.
And if you’re like me, you recall, from your teen years, individuals who changed to fit into a particular group. They wanted so badly to be accepted that they were willing to endure wholesale change of their identity to achieve it.
That is what is sadly occurring within the evangelic church today: churches so desperately in need of feeling embraced by secular society that they are rushing to be seen as the most tolerant, loving, open-minded and sympathetic.
But as John MacArthur notes below, chasing cultural acceptance is neither the Church’s mandates, nor ultimately feasible.
If there is any doubt about this, it is worth asking why popular evangelicalism’s greatest fear is being out of sync with the culture. Pastors and leaders are chasing the culture, so that its trends show up in their churches. They treat this pursuit as a necessary evangelistic strategy. But the only way to be in sync with the culture is to diminish the presence of the Word of God, because unregenerate culture will always be fundamentally and irreconcilably incompatible with the truth of God. By catering to the unchurched or to the unconverted in the church, evangelicalism has been hijacked by legions of carnal spin doctors seeking to convince the world that Christians can be just as inclusive, pluralistic, and open-minded as any postmodern, politically correct worldling.
However, true biblical Christianity requires a denial of every worldly value and behavior, and Christians must be willing to make a commitment to the Word of God, with a full understanding of the implications of doing so. Jesus plainly tells the disciples in John 15: 19 that the world will hate them because they are not of this world. God has chosen believers out of the world, and the world hates them. In Luke 6: 26, Jesus says, “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.”
Why is the world so fixed in its animosity toward the truth of God? Jesus says in John 7: 7, “The world . . . hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil.” Contempt for Scripture is not intellectual; it’s moral. As the Lord explained to Nicodemus, “Men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil” (John 3: 19). How tragic for the church to seek to accommodate that worldly affection, since it is impossible by any human method to overcome the sinner’s resistance to the truth and the gospel (2 Cor. 3: 14). The only time the church has made any spiritual impact on the world is when the people of God have stood firm and have refused to compromise, boldly proclaiming the truth in the face of the world’s hostility. In the end, seeking cultural relevance will only result in obsolescence, since tomorrow’s generation will inevitably renounce today’s fads and philosophies.
In the face of ever-changing cultural trends, the church needs to boldly proclaim the eternal relevance and evergreen applicability of the Word of God. In particular, Christians must embrace and exalt six truths about the Scripture: its objectivity, rationality, veracity, authority, incompatibility, and integrity.
