Hip to be Square? (1 Corinthians 1-3)

I have heard many other pastors say that they would like their church to be a "New Testament church."  I'm not always sure what pastors mean when they say that, but I am pretty sure that they do not mean that want to be the church at Corinth.  Corinth is after all a New Testament church.  But it is also a church that clearly had a lot of problems.  The word dysfunctional may have been invented just to describe this church.  The scary thing is that most modern churches are probably more like Corinth than any other New Testament church.  The problems of 2,000 years ago live on today.

The biggest problem at Corinth was disunity.  Read through Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, and you will see that the Corinthians liked to squabble about many things.  The church at Corinth was a church divided.  Most of this disunity was the result of competition.  The Corinthians competed with one another to see who could be the best and most spiritual Christian. In the opening three chapters of the book, Paul attempts to correct the Corinthians' approach to their faith.  The opening chapters make clear that the Corinthians had been captivated by those who had an appearance of earthly wisdom.  First-century Greeks, like the Corinthians, were a philosophical bunch (their cultural heroes would have been people like Socrates, Plato, etc.).  They undoubtedly valued people with big ideas and strong rhetoric.  Paul had none of these characteristics.  Apollos who ministered at the church after Paul had many of them.  But Apollos labored in the service of Christ.  The Corinthians may have missed that fact.  In admiring Apollos, some in the church focused more on the style than the message.  It seems that many of the Corinthians had begun to serve logic and rhetoric more than Jesus.  They were more interested in demonstrating their cultural cache than in sticking to the Gospel.  They thought that Christianity would be advanced through being hip and contemporary rather than through the Gospel and its rightful subject Jesus.   

Paul urges the Corinthians to get back to the Gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit.  He reminds them of an important fact in 2:3-5: "I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.   My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power,   so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power" (NIV, 1984).  We need that lesson that Paul provided the Corinthians today.  I think there is a tendency in the American church to try to make Christianity hip and cool so that we might win people to our religion.  There is certainly nothing wrong with presenting the true Gospel in culturally relevant ways (that is what Apollos did).  But when we alter the message or we depend more on the style than the Spirit for winning converts, then we have drifted into the Corinthian error.  We have to be careful that Jesus and not style or cool are always the center of what we do.