the gospel is irrelevant

And that’s exactly the point.

The world has diagnosed its own greatest needs, and surprise, the gospel is not among them. Type in “the world needs” and Google sends back some suggestions: love sweet love, more lawyers, currency leadership, a global new deal, diaster-resistant hospitals, and so on. Reconciliation with God is not even close to the top.

This is where the evangelical projects of meeting felt needs and adopting the priorities of relativism and post-modernity fail.

If we rush in with the gospel to meet felt needs, we provide a misplaced remedy, like chemotherapy for a headache. And the world has plenty of aspirin for the headaches it thinks it has. Even more, we distract ourselves from the real task at hand: helping to enlighten the world to its true need–salvation from the cancer of sin.

Likewise, it we adopt the priorities of post-modernity–self-conscious doubt and uncertainty, personal truth, generously inclusive language–in order to mediate the gospel, we lose it in a crowd of a million equal philosophies. The gospel stands out precisely because, on first consideration, it appears irrelevant; in its exclusivity, in its supernaturalism, in its concerns. If we remove these offenses, we remove some of the very elements that should earn it a hearing.

Our task is not to make the gospel relevant, nor to insist that it already is relevant. Our task it to show the world how the irrelevant gospel is the only relevant truth there is.

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

1 Corinthians 1:21-25