While we dare not pander to religious expectations by trying to accommodate every itch and fad (an impossible task, in any case), our thinking about Church and ministry should not be too far removed from responsive tension with the felt needs and hopes of the actual people of God. Tension requires both difference and similarity, distance and familiarity. If our notion of the Church is so different and distant from the community in which we minister, it may well result in interpersonal tensions of confusion and alienation, but it will not result in that creative tension which helps a community to become what it truly is.
Wise words, these. Pastors (and theologians and preachers and…) should be aiming for this kind of “responsive” or “creative” tension that, while not sacrificing all else at the altar of “relevance,” resists the temptation to fly off into the clouds of theological abstraction. Difference and similarity, distance and familiarity—that is the balance to strike. Preaching and theological instruction must, at some point, intersect with the actual world that people live in. Too many preachers walk out of the pulpit patting themselves on the back for their doctrinal accuracy, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their sermon never made meaningful contact with the hearers of that sermon.