Unfashionable

I recently read the Kindle for iPhone Edition of Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian. This is an excellent book written at a popular level to help Christians see that they “make a difference in this world by being different from this world; they don’t make a difference by being the same” (Location 284).


That makes sense. If you want to change something, you have to make it different in some way. If what you want to change is a culture / people group / nation, you have to create a different culture within it.

One excerpt:

Ironically, the more we Christians pursue worldly relevance, the more we’ll render ourselves irrelevant to the world around us. There’s an irrelevance to pursuing relevance … To be truly relevant, you have to say things that are unfashionable eternal, not trendy. It’s the timeless things that are most relevant to most people, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance. (Location 405)

There is another way to look at this. A subject’s relevance to me really depends on my situation, not my perception.

A train coming down the tracks is relevant to me if I am standing on the tracks in front of it, no matter whether I perceive the train’s whistle to indicate a threat. Whether I think the train is important, it will crush me if I don’t move. If you bring the train and its threat to my attention, I will consider it relevant immediately.
The gospel is like that. If we bring to someone’s attention that they are under the wrath of God, then they will see that Christ having died for the sins of the world is important to them. The gospel is relevant in the extreme.

(Additional comments on the book can be found here.)