”There are new people and new needs. The problem of the church in every generation is to meet those new needs of new people without forfeiting the values in its heritage from the past. To live in the past is to fail the people in the present.” It is the duty of every generation to make the faith relevant to the needs of that generation.
This does not mean playing fast and loose with the essentials. The necessary conservatism comes in here. The essence of the faith is not subject to adaptation; otherwise, what we have is not Christianity but some other religion. But the expression of the faith is another matter. This generation has the responsibility equally with every other generation to tell its contemporaries what Christianity means in terms they can understand.
It is worth reflecting that the word “radical” derives from a Latin term meaning “root.” A radical in the strict sense is one who goes to the root of the matter. In this sense evangelicals must always be radicals. Again and again we must go back to our roots. But plants grow from the roots and what the roots supply. So we apply what we find in our roots to the needs of the day. We do not simply bury our heads in the sand.
We reflect that our Master refused to go along with a hidebound conservatism. There was a conservative party in his day, the Pharisees; but he rarely sided with them. He accepted as fully as any that the ancient Scripture was authoritative. But he saw that the traditional attitude to it had prevented some of his contemporaries from seeing its real meaning. He pointed out that Scripture testified of him (John 5:39). And when he spoke of the man who simply says, “The old is good” (Luke 5:39), he was not commending him: he was castigating him for refusing even to consider the new.
There are always risks in living in a new age. But there is disaster in trying to live in a past age. It is necessary that we conserve the values of the past. But we need the present also. It is always easy to dig in our heels and refuse to be budged from the comfortable past with those values we appreciate so well. It is not particularly difficult to see ourselves as radical, open to the best insights of our day. We are called on to do something much more difficult and important: combine the two.