One Step Ahead

So I was really frustrated when this article wasn't allowed to be published in The Record, our school's newspaper. Tell me if you can see why:

A lord one day sent out a messenger to a far land to carry a message to a foreign king that a war had risen near their lands and that he required their aid to repel the invaders. The messenger very clearly understood the message and the situation at hand, but arriving at the courts of the allied king, he found that he was entirely unfamiliar with the native language of the foreign king and hence unable to effectively relay the message. The help never came and much more destruction was inflicted upon their homeland than would have been otherwise.

Certainly this seems an absurd oversight for this king, but considering the dynamics of communication, especially in our high-speed and highly diverse age it is not at all laughable. A similar dilemma confronts us as Christians today. The Gospel and many of the foundational truths we value have been so repeated, ad nauseum, that they no longer carry for us or for others the same impact as they were once supposed to hold. To tell another, for example that “God is love” has been so overdone that it simply no longer carries the weight it used to. We must face the fact that in our dynamic world, the simple is outmoded and ineffective. Although this does not mean that every nuance contributes to our message, nearly anything with which we can effectively intrigue our diverse audiences may be preferable.

Take, for example the Evangelical catch-phrase, “The Bible is God’s love letter to us.” Although, in its own way, it is profound and inspiring to portray God’s divine revelation as a form of romantically inclined stationery, with today’s understanding of romance complicated by teen pregnancy, the detrimental divorce rates, not to mention the issues of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, we need a more dynamic evangelical rhetorical scheme to keep the image of God’s love ahead of the times so that our presentation of the Gospels is always fresh and readily accessible to whomever we may encounter.

Look at the classic song “Jesus loves me, this I know…” In its own time it was effective in sharing God’s pure and simple message of love. However, because of the ambiguities that the modern era has brought to Christianity, and because our audiences are increasingly diverse, what we effectively have instead of “Jesus loves me,” if adjusted to fit the ears of our world, begins to sound more like, “The physical Incarnation of the Indivisible, Triune Deity, whom we happen to call Jesus, has a certain incomprehensible disposition, which displays itself in certain actions such as creation, physical and eternal blessing, and especially the Crucifixion and Resurrection, towards you and me alike, and no less to Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians, South Americans, Middle-Easterners, Eastern Europeans, the French, etc.”

What could be more profound and beautiful than that? This is by no means exhaustive or complete, but by defining what we understand God to be to our modern world, we set absolute boundaries that may be clear to the modern mind. Upon hearing such an aphorism spoken each time, it will be clear who God is to us as Christians. Moreover, in instances such as this, we could use such a lyric for our Sunday Schools instead of the traditional version of the song. This could serve to instill sound doctrine early on in our children’s lives to help them attain to a more child-like faith.

Thus we find that by forsaking the cumbersome weights of traditional maxims, we can breathe a fresh Gospel to the world each new day and show the world just how impressed God is by the many creative ways with which we can shine his light unto the world.