By: Jeremy Ng
In preparation for this week’s university group discussion, I came across this term from my old seminary notes: “challenging relevance”. I love the use of these two words together and how important and hard it is for us to be both. We can be challenging without being relevant, or be relevant without being challenging, fairly easily. We can simply preach the gospel and try to challenge everyone, but we might end up talking over them without any relevance or grace to their world or the lives that they live. Or we may be incredibly relevant without the courage to challenge the world that we live in. Perhaps, there’s a greater call to the world and culture around us to be both.
You know what’s interesting though? We are either one or the other depending on whether we see people as one of us or as someone who is different – whether they are an insider or an outsider. Let me explain. To those we consider to be insiders, as one of us, it’s easy to be relevant. It comes naturally to us because they respect and share community with us. We watch the same movies, play the same games, eat at the same places, and share the same lifestyles; but it’s scary to challenge the status quo. It’s hard to challenge our friends and our community because we don’t want to be different. We don’t want to be the outsider within the “right community.”
On the other hand, it’s much easier to challenge those on the outside, those that are different from us. Because they are different, because they are not one of us, we assume the worst of them, so we judge and challenge them. Here’s a quick example: one challenge society often gives to those on social assistance is to get a job because the assumption we have is that those who do not work are lazy. By continuing to challenge them and reinforcing the differences between us, we actually lose our ability to challenge as we are no longer relevant. Yet, it’s hard to be relevant to those that are different because we don’t want to be seen as the same. We don’t want to be considered an insider within the “wrong community”.
As we consider what it means for us to be challenging relevance, personally and corporately, let us reflect on who we consider to be insiders and outsiders. Challenging relevance means we need to engage with those on the inside and those on the outside to break down the barriers, which exclude others. For us, it means we need to start challenging the insiders and being relevant to the outsiders first. When was the last time you challenged your friends who you are already relevant to? When was the last time you were relevant to an outsider who, perhaps, without knowing, you had already judged and challenged? Let us not shy away from this call but actively seek to explore more of what it means to break down these barriers and be a challenging relevance to the world.