Relevance. It’s a simple word that can (and usually does) become a tremendous reason why churches today start the programs they do, participate in the ministries they do, and pretty much exist in the form that they do. In church speak, “relevant” is a word that, when boiled down to modern English, basically means: “cool.” Churches want to be cool, they want to have coffee shops attached to their sanctuaries, to have their sermons downloaded on iTunes, and they want to play a significant role in the lives of the people around them, and they do that by being… you guessed it, relevant.
Quite often this relevance rubs off on the individual churchgoer, inspiring them to do things that are socially acceptable and “cool” outside of the church, but they put a Christian spin on it, in a way that says to the nonbeliever, “Oh you do that? Well, I do that, too, but I do it for Jesus, so there.” One such activity that has been seeing a lot of activity recently in the Christian community is tattoos.
Traditionally, tattoos were looked down upon as something that only bikers, Satanists, and African American professional athletes did, and thus Christians, or anyone featuring a decent set of morals, were to stay away from tattoos at all costs. However, that opinion has increasingly been written off as the persuasion of our parents’ generation, and just like that, tattoos are now progressive!
Many Christians view tattoos as devices for a declaration of faith, using phrases such as “marked for Christ” or “making my faith permanent.” Such phrases often come from those Christians who fear they may forget that they’re Christians entirely, and need something they can look at to remind them of that fact.
Another popular argument for the Christian tattoo is that it’s a springboard for religious conversation– it gives the Christian something they can use to relate to those people who may not normally be church-going folk. (i.e. “Hello! I noticed you gentlemen have a few tattoos. Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but I have the word ‘hope’ in Hebrew letters on the side of my left foot. Perhaps we could get coffee sometime and talk about our religious views?”)
As with all things in the church, though, acquiring tattoos should be done in moderation. Typically the Christian tattoo is limited to a small symbol in an indiscreet place, a short word or phrase in an ancient Biblical language, or a depiction of popular Biblical characters. Any further than this, and the Christian begins to stretch the limits of what is acceptable in the current popular view of the church. However, just as tattoos slowly became accepted by Christians, in time the tattoo trend should grow even more, and our horizons as to what is an acceptable Christian tattoo should broaden.
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