The Gospel Coalition

(Here is another excerpt from my forthcoming book Unfashionable: How To Live Against The World For The World)

Back in the 1950’s, when my grandfather was becoming a well-known preacher of the gospel, a famous actor pulled him aside and said, “Billy, don’t ever try to compete with Hollywood, because Hollywood will always win. You give the world the one thing Hollywood can’t — the timeless truth of the gospel.” The rest is history.

In many ways, we in the church today need to heed this actor’s advice to my grandfather. If, in this context, “Hollywood” represents what’s “fashionable” in our society, then it seems that in some circles we’ve lost trust in the timeless truth of the gospel. We’ve spent too much of our churches’ time and money trying to “do Hollywood” in a thousand different ways.

We need to be reminded of the antithesis between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1–3). Much of what the world esteems as wise, God considers foolish; much of what the world dismisses as foolish, God considers wise. Being “in style” with God often means being “out of style” with the world. Therefore we need to be much more critical regarding “the things of this world,” things which we so quickly embrace under the guise of evangelism and outreach.

Many Christians these days insist that in order to reach the world, they must become just like the world. With good intentions, they strive to look like the world, talk like the world, sound like the world, and act like the world. With evangelistic fervor, many ministries orchestrate their efforts according to the tastes of this world: They ask the world what they like, then give the world what they want. Their efforts and attitudes become guided and shaped more by cultural trends than by God’s truth. Whatever’s “in fashion” becomes more important than what’s theologically sound.

But in following such a course, we inadvertently communicate to our culture that we have nothing unique to offer, nothing deeply spiritual and profoundly transforming.

So our culture is forced to look elsewhere for the difference they crave.

By continuing to pursue worldly relevance so emphatically, Christians will ironically render themselves completely irrelevant. For, as Os Guinness points out, “There is an irrelevance to the pursuit of relevance just as there is a relevance to the practice of irrelevance.”  Or, as John Seel has put it, “The timeless is finally that which is most relevant, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance.”  If we fail to be different from the world, we’ll never make a difference for the world or in the world.

As we’ll see throughout this book, being entirely different from the world around us is exactly what the Bible calls us to, as followers of Jesus. We’ve been given a new heart and a new mind, a new way and a new destiny. That’s why we march to the beat of a different drummer. We operate according to a different standard, with different goals, different motivations, and an altogether different perspective on money, lifestyle, and relationships. Our thoughts are to be different, our affections different, our behavior different. Our priorities, pursuits, and passions are to be different.

Our calling in our culture is to live in contrast to it. In this world, we’re God’s otherworldly representatives. Our privilege and responsibility is to be his people in a world that has abandoned him. We’re his city on a hill, his light in this darkness, his hope in this brokenness. We’re to be “against the world, for the world.”

Ultimately we’re citizens not of this world but of the kingdom of God. We are those who say, “Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). We’re exiles from the world, strangers in a strange land, pilgrims making our way across the wilderness of “this present darkness” on our way to the Promised Land, the New City.

The faithful, in other words, are not the fashionable. They are not supposed to “fit in”; they’re supposed to be “odd.” In fact, as Will Willimon writes, “Our oddness is essential to our faithfulness.”  Or, to put it another way, faithfulness to Christ requires foreignness to the world.

Let me say once more the simple yet profound truth: Christians make a difference by being different; they don’t make a difference by being the same. In fact, as one author observed, it is “those who are cognitively and morally dislocated from worldly culture”  who alone carry the power to change it.