Relevance And Obedience

One thing that I have written about here from time to time in the past is our current society's deep-seated need for relevance.

I have most often done this in the context of the Modern Church movement, which (in my opinion) has often pushed the historic Christian faith to the side in order to appeal (be relevant) to the current population (sometimes known as "seeker friendly").  But really it has become embedded in every aspect of our population, driven largely by a social media experience that rewards attention and novelty, sometimes to the detriment (even death) of those that participate in it.  Studies have come out where portions of the population of the young say they want to be a "social influencer" - someone who is relevant to the culture by creating content or even movements consumed and followed by others (often rather than creating something of value, be it a physical creation or any sort of actual existing work).

I would argue that it is a deplorable development.  Instead of encouraging others to critically think, we teach them that to be thought of as almost worshipped is the most important thing.  Instead of teaching others the importance of creating, making, and implementing things, we teach them that a high-level razor-thin depth of knowledge and practice of anything is more important as long as one can make it look good.  And we teach them that influence - on others, on the culture, on the world - is the only meaningful metric for success.

In my haste to critique the world of this, it has come to my attention that I suffer from the exact same need to be relevant.

The initiating action was both logical and silly:  over the last 1.5 months, there has been a steady reduction of "visits" to the blog.  Part of that, undoubtedly, was due to a spammer finally being blocked in a meaningful fashion.  But it continued to fall.  In my pride, I saw it as "significant".

The second factor that confirmed this was a comment on another blog.

On the whole, I have a pretty narrow ring of blogs that I visit and comment on - most of them are two the right there (all reliable and solid people over there) but there are also a few which, due to the sort of content we do not discuss here, I never link to but do visit.  In my haste one morning to perhaps be "relevant" and make what I perceived to be a deep and penetrating comment, I posted.  And was effectively cut down (by words, mind you) at the knees for the better part of the day.  If one could measure relevance by follow comments and discussion, I had "achieved" it.

But what it really did was make me question my own need for "relevance".

Oddly enough (as it turns out), "relevance" is not something that The Bible specifically speaks to.  Oh, it speaks to relevance in the sense of the relevance of God's word to our daily lives, but almost nothing about any command where we are told to "Be ye relevant".  There is, however, a great deal in there about "Be ye obedient".

Obedience is, obviously, not relevance.  If the two cross paths at some points - where our obedience makes us relevant - it is only by accident and almost, I suspect, never by choice or chance. We are called to be obedient as obedient children, as witnesses of the orderliness of the Christian live, to demonstrate our sanctification (holiness) through obedience.  It is even suggested that good things come from obedience.

Obedience is commanded, relevance never so.

It has certainly made me go back and re-examine my own life.

That re-examination has taken two paths.  The first is simply - for a lack of a better phrase - to "stay in my lane".  My ability to generate relevant posts, at least on other sites, is demonstrably minimal at best.  Better to simply let that go.

The other path is in my own writing.

Every since I started this blog (many years in the rear view mirror now), I secretly had in my heart that somehow this was going to be a "relevant" blog (of course, in those younger days "relevance" was also measured by the vain notion that people make money at this).  I let that part go, but secretly all these years it appears I have still cherished that desire in my heart. And when I feel like I am not hitting it, I try to go be "relevant" elsewhere - with predictable results.

It likely will not change how I write (although I have already asked God about why I am doing this anyway and is it what He still thinks is good).  It will, likely, change a little what I write about though - perhaps my personally worst blog posts are the ones where I try so hard to be relevant that the whole thing is forced: forced in reading, forced in understanding, and indeed forced in somehow pretending I did my best work.

What I reminded, as it turns out, was exactly what I have pointed out in others:  my call was and is never to be relevant.  It is to be obedient.  Because, as Scripture demonstrates, God works on and through the Obedient.  Almost never does He work through the Relevant - except usually as an object lesson.