So, Barack Obama is Dick Cheney’s cousin, Now, how’s that for a plot twist? Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work for climate change The stock market plummeted 367 points on Friday, which would be really scary to me if I was actually in the stock market. The House of Representatives failed to override President Bush’s veto of a bill to provide health insurance to 10 million children.

I’m wondering how much of that most of us knew.

I’m wondering how well informed the black church is. Current events and staying informed about them isn’t usually stressed in the black church. While the white church tends to be politically active (if politically conservative and politically manipulative), the black church, in my experience, rarely informs or educates its membership on matters of social or political importance. This benign ignorance of the world around it only underlines the increasing irrelevance of the black church. Once a powerful institution for social justice and change. I believe many of us have moved the church from the center of our lives and communities, mainly because the church itself has, over time, become a kind of self-parody, an in-joke, such that it speaks with the same ferocious voice as it did in its 1960’s heyday, but it has nothing to say.

Ever see that? A fiery preacher who has mastered the art of delivery but whose sermon is really weak? The black church still looks like the church we remember growing up. It sounds like that church. It even smells like that church. But that church had something to say. That church was on the front lines of social change and empowerment.

I remember when R&B producer Norman Whitfield took the legendary Motown group The Temptations down the road of relevancy and social protest. The group became megastars with such hits as Ball of Confusion, Papa Was A Rolling Stone, Runaway Child Running Wild. But the group protested that Whitfield’s zeal for mining the new social consciousness took them to far afield of their romantic roots. That, coupled with Whitfield’s ever-expanding ego, eventually forced Whitfield out, at which point the Temps went immediately back to syrupy love ballads and faded to irrelevance.

Today, the Temptations certainly look like the Temptations, even sound like the Temptations, but they no longer have anything to say. Nothing past Love you, baby. It’s a shame, this hollowed-out tree. Millions of fans belly up to the bar, hoping for just the smallest glimpse of the brilliant anger that once made the Temps so much more than mere entertainers, only to be disappointed by the overall shallowness of their music these days.

This is the black church.

Clinging desperately to the 1960’s while, incongruously, being too timid and/or too selfish to commit its time, its resources, and its very life to matters of urgent importance. While appearing, externally, to be the same thing we remember as children, the black church is, in fact, a hollow tree. A self-parody of its former self. Pastors no longer have that fire in the belly for relevance, for social justice. The pastors are content to just keep the head count high, to pass the plate around. To get their check.

It’s important to note Jesus never got a check. That Jesus laid down His life for change. To open doors. To make a difference.

Our season of contentment is a sad legacy for a once-great institution. Pastor, I implore you: read a newspaper. Watch CNN. Get online. Ask questions. Learn. Grow. Then take all of that back to your congregation, processing it all through God’s word. Informing, educating, urging your people to open their eyes to the world around them.

That’s how you make your church relevant again. That’s how you move it from some fringe extreme back into the center of your congregants’ lives. This Sunday, take five minutes and make your church make a difference again.