Preaching: You talk about how this hunger for relevance has distorted so much of what we do. How do we avoid the other extreme of irrelevance?
Guinness: I make a case for untimeliness, not irrelevance. The gospel is always truly relevant. In other words, it meets our needs. It suits our times. This new relevance — which is keeping up with the latest trends — leads to trendiness, leads to burnout, leads to unfaithfulness. If we look at it theologically, the beginning of this was in Protestant liberalism. Freiderich Schliermacher speaks about reaching the cultured despisers of the gospel, and liberalism tends to reach them, join them, become like them. That is the unfaithfulness of liberalism. In the 60's it went to extremes. The Protestant mainline in this country virtually committed national suicide in terms of influence. Evangelicals were much more world denying, world engaged but world denying. But with the rise of the church growth movement and seeker sensitive movement, we are now refueling an evangelical version of Protestant liberalism. So young evangelical teenagers are every bit as relativistic as their pagan peers. Or many pastors are as deeply into to divorce or pornography as their peers in the professional world. Or you have bizarre things like evangelical nepotism on the rise, that would have been considered signs of corruption in the past. Evangelicalism is rife with nepotism and all sorts of Christian organizations. Now why all these things? They are seeker sensitive; to be relevant at all costs has actually greased the slipway and made this possible.
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Preaching: How does a church leader avoid getting caught up in this cultural trendiness While at the same time finding a way to communicate so that people can understand?
Guinness: There are two extremes, not one. I am engaging with the dominant trend today, which is dangerous, the trendiness. The other extreme is just to be out of it. There are clearly two extremes not one. Peter Berger calls it to be culturally resistant on one extreme or to be culturally accommodating on the other extreme. So I am attacking one. That doesn't mean there is not another one. The balance is what we want.
The question then is how do we keep the balance? I argue there are three antidotes to resisting this cultural trendiness. One is always being aware of the unfashionable. C.S. Lewis calls this "resistance thinking." If you fit the gospel to your times only, you have a comfortable convenient gospel that sells out the full gospel. So always preach the hard sayings, the unfashionable, the difficult, obscure. That is one thing.
Second, be aware of the historical. I argue that the best way for most of us simple mortals is not great academic tomes but biography. Christians could well get into biographies that would just teach them some of the great people of history. So be aware of history.