In the new issue of Touchstone, the Southern Baptist theologian Russell D. Moore writes critically of Christians who go overboard trying to make the faith "relevant" to popular culture as a way of evangelizing. The article is not (yet) online, but here's an important passage:
Early in my ministry, I served as a youth pastor in a Baptist church near an Air Force base in Mississippi. Like every other Evangelical youth minister, I received all the advertisements from youth ministry curricula-hawkers, telling me how I could be "relevant" to "today's teenagers." The advertisements promised me ways I could "connect" with teenagers through Bible studies based on MTV reality shows and the songs on the top-40 charts that month.All I knew how to do, though, was preach the gospel. Yes, I knew what was happening on MTV, and I'd often contrast biblical reality with that, but I fit nobody's definition of cool -- including my own.
A group of teenagers, mostly fatherless boys, some of them gant members, started attending my Wednesday night Bible study. Some of them arrived at the church engulfed in a cloud of marijuana smoke.
I found they were't impressed with the "cool" supplemental video clips provided by my denomination's publisher. They laughed at Christian rap stars, in the same way I laughed at my high-school history teachers' effort to "have a groovy rap session with you youngsters."
But what riveted their attention was how weird we were. "So, like, you really believe this dead guy came back from the dead?" one 15-year-old boy asked me. "I do," I replied. "For real?" he responded. I said, "For real."
They were amused at the fact that my wife and I had dinner together, and that we didn't really want tobe smoewhere else. "Dude, this is like 'Nick at Nite,'" one said, referencing the black-and-white family sitcom reruns on television each night. "The mom and dad are here, 'how was your day,' and the whole deal. They couldn't believe that in our church, elderly people and teenagers talked to one another, that Latino military officers joked around with white enlisted men around a Sunday-school coffepot.
It seemd strange. And, just as at Mars Hill, this strangeness commanded attention. Some believed; some walked away. I was heard, and I was even loved, but I was rarely cool.
Don't know about you, but I relate to this. I drifted from Christianity as a teenager because it was either banal and bourgeois (I remember thinking, "If this stuff in the Bible is really true, why don't we live differently?") or, among the kids my age I saw who were into the faith, it was a matter of being caught up in a Christian pop culture that was ersatz and to my eyes, kind of pathetic.
It was only when I got caught up in the radical strangeness of Christianity, and saw that men like Kierkegaard, Dostoevesky, Merton, Percy and others I respected were also captivated by the story, that things changed for me. And then when at long last I began to take instruction in the faith, there was Father Frootloop and Sister Stretchpants, reducing the liberating weirdness of the faith to therapeutic banalities that they apparently thought we could accept. God bless crusty old Father Moloney, to whose rectory parlor I flew. He was not interested in watering anything down in an attempt to be "relevant." Which is why I listened to him, and followed the path he set out for me. He wanted me to follow, but he respected me, and the gospel, enough to tell me how otherworldly and countercultural this well-trodden path was.
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I'm 100% in agreement with Daniel on this one. A lot of people will never see some lovely chapel on the other side of the world or read high brow authors or even have the priveledge of being raised by parents who are models of Christian faith. However, many of those people are being reached in strip malls, stadiums, and everywhere in between by charasmatic preachers who speak in rhyme and repitition and loud music with people singing their hearts out at the tops of their voices in praise of God. Just because Rod and some of the other posters here wouldn't deign to be so undignified in their setting and behavior doesn't lessen the fact that as long as Jesus is at the center and lives are being transformed, God is there and about His good business.
Also, Mr. Howard who wrote "Being Catholic" which is reviewed above seriously needs to research early (IE 1st and 2nd century) Christianity. I understand the rcc's claim to reach back to Peter and hold authority, but to claim that the way they worship, the mass, the artwork, and the prayers harken back to the very earliest days of Christianity simply shows an ignorance of history.
Consider the word 'cool'. Dispassionate, nonchalant, unmoved. The opposite of 'earnest'. No, even if you could avoid seeming patronizing or clownish, I don't think 'cool' is what you should go for.
Now consider these words: passion, enthusiasm, inspiration, awesome, ecstasy. They once had religious connotations. A religion that justifies those connotations should have no trouble attracting young people.
My overwhelming impression of young people is that they'd jump at the chance of passion, authenticity, intensity - if they could bring themselves to believe they weren't just being snowed yet again. They've come to expect hypocrisy, and despise it. They're tired of irony and insincerity, and they want something real.
I don't think it's really a problem of aesthetics, though the kitsch and cliché probably don't help. It's what so many of the commentators have said, about growing up knowing Christianity only as an apologetic for bourgeoisie banality. Whatever happened to, 'Our God is a consuming fire'?
MM,
About Blue Like Jazz... I'm 42, and am sensitive to the fact that the book is aimed at someone younger. But it was passed along to me by a 38-year-old Baptist minister in town, a friend of mine who thought I would just love it! He based this assumption, I think, on the fact that I'm the editor of a local alternative newspaper with lots of friends who are professors, artists, and the like. This minister knows I've recently come back to the church (thought not HIS church) after two decades, and I guess he just assumed I'd prefer a "hip" approach to Christianity. He could not possibly have guessed how weary I've grown of all things "hip." But God bless him for trying!
Daniel, et al., have a valid point, but I think the thrust of Dale's post (mine was really an off-topic aside called forth by my excitement at finding that someone shared my love of those churches), was less the aesthetics than the grandeur and force of the message conveyed. Of course you're correct in saying that people need to be reached however they can, merely not at the expense of vitiating the message. But I don't think truth can be wholly divorced from aesthetics in the broadest sense, either, although that's another long and involved conversation. In case you think I'm making a case only for high culture and "chanting and incense and bearded white men in robes", one of the most moving and Christ-centered funeral services I have attended was one at a modest African American Baptist church, where the emphasis was on what is central, i.e., on the departed going to "see the face of Jesus", and the congregation clapped and exclaimed and swayed, a far cry from the anyodyne, more high church funerals I'd been attending, which hardly mentioned God at all. If it were merely aesthetics in the narrow sense, believe me, I'd not attend my own church, where the choir is frequently off key, and one of the loudest voices in the congregation sings everything in a flat monotone, enough to get me off track, as well--though I am glad the person joins in unabashedly, as that's what I think we all should be doing.
Thanks, Marie! I'm also glad to see a fellow admirer of Torcello. You, me and Ernest Hemingway... :)
Daniel, I'll just add to what Marie said: it's not an argument for aesthetics, much less a call to uniform High Churchianity. What it is is a desire for authentic (yes, the dread word), unabashed Christianity. A church that doesn't chase off after the culture in an endless quest to be relevant, each time arriving only to learn that the train to fadsville had departed five years earlier. Stryper, "His Blood's For You" with a mock Budweiser logo and the novels of Karen Kingsbury--pardon me, I have to go find some way to mortify my brain.
But if the megachurches are raising up real disciples, more power to them. However, I know that one of them here in metro Detroit offers Playstations for the kids while mom and dad go down to the auditorium for the presentation. Of course, the games aren't inappropriate, but there's something askew about that in a way that I can't fully articulate.
But I definitely take issue with Joel Osteen as a paragon of gospel inculturation. There's no there there. It's the gospel of self-esteem meets name-it-and-claim-it, "The Secret" with a choir. 25 Orthodox chanting the Divine Liturgy on Sunday have more Gospel than a year's worth of Lakeside bromides. And don't get me started on Peter F.N. Popoff and his "miracle spring water." You can call the "God as slot machine" theology many things, but never the Gospel of Christ.
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