HOW RELEVANT IS RELEVANT?: SEVEN YEARS AGO

Seven years ago I was a janitor. And a Power Point operator. And a set designer.

I moved risers and instruments around on a church stage until they matched the drawing scrawled by my boss. I arranged fake ferns and ficus trees to hide cables and monitors. I vacuumed what the cleaning crew missed. I set up the green room when recording artists came through. I helped drain, and scrub the baptistry where new Christians were dunked and left a ring of mystery residue. Mostly I dreamt from my seat on the bench about the day I'd actually be in on the big plays in the game.

I plodded along in my day job and volunteered after hours to sing hymns for a senior citizens prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. Nothing too fast or too loud. What a waste of my talent - I sometimes thought but of course would never say outloud. I was furniture. And frustrated. And bored. For over a year.

Then, miraculously it seemed, my big break came. I joined the worship planning team, which met to, well, plan the worship services of our church. I was in the game.

I was there for two reasons: First, any creative ideas these guys came up with, like putting a car on stage or building a replica of the Parthenon, would be my job to actually do. So it was only fair that I be there to decide what was and was not plausible given my limited talents, time and a budget of, oh, about nothing. Second, I was the token Gen Xer. Everyone in the room was at least forty (There may have been one young whipper snapper in his late thirties). I was 25. They had degrees in theology or divinity or management or finance. I had a degree in music composition and theory. They watched a movie a month. I was at the theatre every weekend. They turned to ESPN or CNN and I absorbed hours of MTV. They still had cassette players in their offices and listened mostly to "worship music." I had hundreds of CDs from every genre spanning the last twenty years of popular music.

Basically, I was told, they wanted to be "relevant" and they knew they weren't. They thought I was. They asked for my help.

So I got paid to sit at the big boy table and drink Dr.Pepper and listen to seven men twice my age describe the "theme" of next week's sermon...sorry, message. Then I'd tell them what movie clips and songs - "elements" - to incorporate into the church service. And they listened. Sweet gig if you can get it.

I felt important. I felt for the first time like all that useless pop culture trivia in my head was actually useful. I watched movies and listened to music voraciously and with a greater sense of purpose - you know, like Fight Club and Matchbox Twenty weren't mere entertainment but possible bait for or bridges to the non-Christians in our town.

My aim, our aim in those days, was to build church services that were relevant. Relevant. That word was passed around the church offices like Kool-Aid at a Jim Jones gathering back then. I drank it. A lot of it. I drank until I was drunk enough to embarrass myself.

When the oldest man in the worship planning meeting shot down a risky suggestion I'd made, I arrogantly ranted about the importance of being relevant to my generation. I thought I was reminding him of something he'd obviously forgotten or negligently stopped caring about. I spouted stats about the number of people my age who weren't attending church. I swore if we'd just go a little further down the road marked relevance we could change those numbers. I ended my mini-sermon by lecturing, "Relevance and power are inversely proportionate in the Church today. The older a person gets, the more power and position he has but the less relevant he is to the generation most in need of being reached. And the younger and less powerful a person is in the Church, the more relevant he's likely to be because he's more in touch with popular culture. The powerful need to listen to the weak if we're going to be relevant and turn things around."

My pastor let me finish, let me hang myself with my own diatribe. And then he said calmly and kindly, "You're passionate and I appreciate that. But what you lack is wisdom."

I tucked my tail between my legs and started praying for wisdom. I admit I confused it with knowledge so I sought it by reading more books - mostly about being relevant, written by big named worship pastors at mega churches and books those pastors recommended at their conferences. But I also spent time with older men and reluctantly asked them to teach me. I was afraid though. I wanted to be wiser without becoming irrelevant like them and the middle-aged guys around that planning table. Relevance was essential to being the Church in the modern world.

I thought.

Until one day...