Our Methods Matter

Yesterday an article on the Huffington Post caught me off guard; and frankly, upset me. The title: "Church Embraces Bribery To Draw Easter Audience"

The article was first posted on Friday 04/22/11. Here is the full script:
One church in the Minneapolis area is taking an unconventional approach to recruiting new people to their services this Easter weekend -- bribery.
The Crossing, based in Elk River, Minn. is offering the chance to win a 3D television or a new Nintendo 3DS gaming system to those in attendance at the church's Easter worship service. The Crossing's pastor, Eric Dykstra, has no qualms about using the promise of prizes to attract a greater audience.
"I have no problem bribing people with crap in order to meet Christ," he says.
This is not the first time that The Crossing has used this method to attract people to its services. Last year, the church gave away cars to a few lucky attendees of their Easter service. So far the tactics seem to be working, as the church's attendance has steadily grown since its founding five years ago. This year, The Crossing expects more than 5,000 people on Easter Sunday.

As I think about the methodology of this church, it reminded me of a statement from the 19th century British pastor, Charles Spurgeon who said that "He who marries today's fashion is tomorrow's widow."

When the size of God has seized us more than the size of our attendance, only then will we be redemptively different and serve as God's new creation agents in a world longing for change.

What is ironic is that the more the church pursues worldly relevance, the more it will become more irrelevant to the world around it. There's an irrelevance to pursuing relevance, just as there is a relevance to practicing irrelevance. As Tullian Tchividjian has written (in "Unfashionable"), to be truly relevant you have to say things that are unfashionably eternal, not trendy. It's the timeless things that are most relevant to people, and we must not forget this in our pursuit of relevance.

This includes our methodology. This matters. It must match the message and the goal. As God told Moses numerous times in his building of the tabernacle: Build it according to the pattern on the Mount. The way Moses built the tabernacle mattered to God as much as the fact that Moses built the tabernacle. In our methodology, we should not be appealing to the very thing we are called to die to--the flesh.

Hear the timely words of a remarkable preacher of the early-mid 20th century, Martyn Lloyd-Jones on this very issue:
We seem to have a real horror of being different. Hence all our attempts and endeavors to popularize the church and make it appeal to people….But the world expects the Christian to be different and looks to him for something different, and therein it shows an insight into life that regular church-goers often lack…If a person feels at home in any church without believing in Christ as personal Savior, then that church is no church at all, but a place of entertainment or a social club (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years 1899-1939, 141-42.