Relevant and Accurate

Last night, I got a call from someone I’ve known for a long time, and one of the first people to know about my decision to pursue a more passionate relationship with Christ almost four years ago.  He and I had a long talk one night that led me to opening up about some of my struggles with sin.  In fact, he was the first person I ever drop the s-bomb in the middle of giving examples of God’s love for him.  That’s beside the point, but just wanted to throw that out there. 

Since then, our everyday lives led us to different, separate obligations, and I haven’t seen him on as much of a regular basis.  He does continue to check on me from time to time though to see how I’m doing.  When we talked last night, we got on the subject of church, and he asked me where I was going.  I told him TrueNorth.  He didn’t seem like he’d heard of it, and since the conversation was winding down, I searched for a quick way to sum it up to a church-goer.

This is a paraphrase of what popped out: 
It’s a modern church in style, but they tell the truth.

Sad, huh?  Or do you not see the opposite of happy part about that?  Because there is so much junk out there being disguised as the truth–even labeled “Christian”–I felt the need to end my statement about where I go with a conjunction and validation of my church’s beliefs. 

It really is the bad growing with the good to be weeded out at a later time, but it gets to me how careful we have to be about our pursuits sometimes.  No church has it exactly right, but in some congregations it can be a holy swap shop of truth for compromise and interpretation.  We are called to be in the world and not of it, and what satan does with some churches makes their beliefs the first half of that, which makes me take the extra step in explaining myself in some contexts.

If anything is reaching out to the culture at large, it is being relevant.  In a Christian church, I need more than relevance; I need accuracy.  I thank God that where I go, I get both.  You will never find the perfect church, but pleasse don’t settle for anything less than one that is based out of the very Scripture that God breathed, his followers recorded and we have with us as the truth.