In addition to their long-established Sunday services, many churches offer a "contemporary worship service." Although we know what we mean by the phrase, it may also be a kind of Christian Freudian slip implicates us in a disturbing thought: that what's on offer the rest of the time must be terribly behind the times.

Cultural Relevance
It's not that we're not trying. "Cultural relevance" books and conferences abound. Long-standing theories of what it means to be "church" are being re-examined. Christians are increasingly salting the marketplace in clever ways. Yet we never seem quite "contemporary" enough. We can find some help here by examining the often overlooked biblical question of our "wisdom."

Wisdom
According to the Book, wisdom is about the link between ideas and actions, beliefs and behaviour. It is about the way a person sees life and lives in it (according to how it's seen). It is about the way one makes sense of creation in order to live in it effectively (it will affect what we think is effective living too). It is about the relationship of what goes in the mind to what is acted in the world. Call it knowledge applied, if you will (as long as you mean more than just empirical conclusions). In a word, wisdom is about both theory and practice.

We can approach solutions to our lack of contemporary saltiness by asking how we get our wisdom. Perhaps the best analogy is found in the way we come to speak our mother tongue. We pick it up as we go along, by hearing, by imitating, by others correcting us. Long before we are in school to "learn English" from textbooks, we are already using it with considerable fluency. We develop in our wisdom in the same way. We absorb it from childhood, more or less uncritically, as we go along. Its ideas, values, and beliefs get inside us from any number of religious and secular points on the world compass and get put into practice. It forms our integrity, gives life meaning to us, keeps us sane.

Renewal
We cannot enter a discussion of the implications here, but we can note that however much of our wisdom as Christians remains swamped in failed ancient or failing modern 'isms', it precludes our imagination and language from learning the wisdom of a radical difference, which so necessary for today's fast-paced and pluralistic culture. To use the apostle Paul's way of putting it, we need a special kind of the mind's renewal, a radical one, because different from the world. It's not that everything old must go. But things have got to be fresh too. And this, Paul notes, will give us a new way of thinking and reasoning about life.

As John Peck and I write in Uncommon Sense, an analogy might be found in one particular way to replace your woollen jumper. You could go to Marks and Spencer and buy one of the same type and pattern as the one being discarded. But if you were making the sort of change Paul calls for in Romans 12:1-2, you would need to find a person to take the old jumper and wash it, unpick the wool, dispose of the worn out threads, and then knit the wool into a different style, fit, and pattern. It would not be completely new but "transformed by the renewing of the jumper."

In one sense, we would go on perceiving the world like everyone else does, but when our mental patterns change under the influence of Scripture, our wisdom changes and we begin to have fresh things to think, say, and do in family life, education, politics, business, science, art, law, and so on. It begins with a task I call examining our own eyeballs. And in the end, it will make us very contemporary indeed.

Charles Strohmer is the author of several books, including, with John Peck, Uncommon Sense: God's Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World; SPCK, 2001. He is the founder of The Living Wisdom Centre, which publishes the quarterly alternative magazine Openings and seeks through books, seminars, and other means to develop and promote a biblical Christian wisdom that appreciates the unity, diversity, and complexity of all of life.

Email: livewise@esper.com

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