Should Christianity Be "Accessible?"

Christianity and Culture, Part 1

Last week there was a robust discussion (translation: people were mad online) about whether churches should avoid singing certain worship songs on the weekend because they aren’t accessible to unbelievers. One of the things I’ve said about the church I work at, Seacoast, is that we do a pretty good job of making Christianity accessible. Is that a good thing, though? Not everyone agrees. Over the next couple of weeks I want to consider what it means to make our faith accessible, and why it matters (or doesn’t).

When it comes to Christianity, let’s face it — there is some pretty weird stuff. We believe that an obscure itinerant teacher who was killed by the provincial Roman governor rose from the dead and rules the universe. Moreover, we believe his torture and bloody death were not incidental but somehow necessary. We also believe that weakness is strength, that we should serve one another rather than insist on our rights, that it would be better to save our “soul” (something we cannot sense or identify in any way) than to gain everything the world has to offer.

There are things in our faith that are challenging for people who have been Christians for decades, let alone a non-Christian whose wife dragged him to church. Shouldn’t we try to help people on the outside of Christianity understand what it’s all about? Some say our only responsibility is to “speak the truth” and that God will do the rest. While I do hate the watered-down sort of Christianity that seems embarrassed of itself, I do not agree with the "just speak the truth” crowd. I think we have a responsibility to make our faith accessible to outsiders.

Now, some think the best way to do this is to only focus on the things about Christianity that people naturally resonate with, ignoring what might push them away. Teach people to be kind, to forgive, to be generous. Or how to become better spouses, parents, and employees. All of that is fine, but it only goes so far. What does this sort of Christianity do for someone facing an early death from cancer? What can it offer parents who have just lost a child? Nothing, frankly. Their source of hope is precisely in the strangest, most off-putting parts of our faith. Those who suffer need a God who suffered. It’s tempting to think that an empty tomb is more accessible than a bloody cross, but there is no other path to that tomb than through that cross.

So, what does it mean to make Christianity accessible? I think it simply means to make it clearly understandable in the time and place we find ourselves. If the Gospel is timeless, then every culture and people group will find things about it that both resonate and repel. Our responsibility is to understand what those things are and why that is the case, so that we articulate the Gospel in a way that can be heard and received.¹ Making Christianity accessible to every culture and time isn’t a preference or a strategy, it is a requirement.

In 1549, Jesuit Francis Xavier began the first missions effort in Japan. He and his companions quickly realized they were in a culture utterly different from their own. The Jesuits, having taken a vow of poverty, wore simple black robes. But it soon became clear to them that their poverty kept anyone from taking them seriously. Even the peasants mocked them. From the Japanese perspective, Christianity was apparently a religion for poor people. That might be an attractive aspect in other cultures, but not there, not then.

The Jesuits decided to adapt their dress and behaviors accordingly. They began wearing orange silk robes like the Buddhist bonzes; many of them stopped eating meat; they learned the culture of gift-giving in order to gain audiences with powerful daimyo (feudal lords) and the Emperor himself. They also learned about Japanese religious beliefs, and used them to help explain Christian concepts. Within 30 years, almost 2% of the population had converted to Christianity, which is extraordinary.

A desire to make the Gospel accessible does not say, “These people can’t understand complicated things; I need to dumb it down.” Rather, it asks the question, “What might keep people from understanding Christianity in this time and place?” The seeker-sensitive movement correctly perceived that unchurched people thought church was boring and that the music was bad. So, they tried to make sermons more relevant and created music that people liked. It worked, and millions of people came to church who otherwise might not have.

Photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash

Notice that those things I mentioned above have nothing to do whatsoever with the content of Christianity. They were simply aspects of worship which made many people uninterested in giving up their Sunday morning. They thought Christianity was irrelevant to their lives and it was important to change their perception. Now, are cookie-cutter self-help sermons and fluffy content-free worship songs also downstream of that? Of course they are. But every movement has good and bad consequences and the latter does not necessarily invalidate the former.

The effort to make Christianity more accessible by getting people to church was worthwhile, I think. But I also believe that the task before us today is different. It’s common to hear that the West is in a “post-Christian” age and I think that is broadly true. If it is true, though, it also means we are in a “pre-Christian” age, where a significant part of our calling is to introduce people to a Christianity that they are wholly unfamiliar with.

Part of what made the seeker-sensitive movement a success is that they could depend on a shared set of cultural values and moral language. Even completely unchurched people were familiar with the basics of Christian morality. That is becoming less and less true. We find ourselves in the unique position of sharing Christianity with a culture that was built by it, but has no real understanding of it. This is why removing the “weird” or off-putting elements of Christianity is the worst possible strategy. People don’t need the Gospel simplified, they need to hear it for the first time. And that means that the one thing we absolutely cannot do in our efforts to make the faith more accessible, is change the story.

I remember watching the Leonardo DiCaprio movie “The Man in the Iron Mask” when I was a teenager. I hadn’t read the book before seeing the movie and when I did read it years later, I was shocked — the movie completely changed the ending. In the movie, Louis XIV’s good twin brother, Philippe, successfully replaces him as king, and the bad Louis is locked away. Yay! But in the book the plot to replace Louis fails, Philippe is imprisoned once more, and the three Musketeers (and D’Artagnan) almost all meet tragic ends.

Obviously, the filmmakers decided that the book version was too depressing and wanted to make a movie that audiences would enjoy. An understandable motivation, but perhaps there is a reason that Dumas’s book is still being read 175 years later, while the movie was universally panned. Is it easier to watch the movie than read the book? Yes, but you aren’t actually getting the real story.

Next week, I’ll talk more about worship songs, sermons, “Christianese,” and why using language that might be strange or confusing to non-Christian ears is not the same as being inaccessible.

1. This is not to say that we have to make the things that repel people attractive. Often an aspect of Christianity repels people because it confronts their sin. On the other hand, sometimes a person reacts negatively to something because they misunderstand it, and in that case we should seek to correct or clarify.