I'm glad we're not the 'cool church'

I’m glad we’re not the “cool church.”

Christian disciples are people who believe that in Jesus of Nazareth they have caught a glimpse of the world as it will someday be and let that glimpse inform how they live in the world as it is. Their commitment to the world as isn’t yet may frequently cause them to look senseless in the world as it currently is. This is does not give the Christian license to be ridiculous for ridiculousness sake as we’re so used to seeing in our context (especially where social politics are involved). It’s just to point out the obvious: adjusting oneself to the world as it should be implies some level of maladjustment to the world as it is.

Half a century ago a Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. referenced the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that all people are either hammers or anvils (shapers of history or shaped by history) to warn us about the dangers of being mere products of the “mass mind”—mere tools of the majority ethos of our time rather than acting subjects capable of making conscious decisions about the world around us.  Splitting the difference between their eras, an English journalist and Catholic apologist named G.K. Chesterton warned us that there is no more “humiliating slavery” than being a “child of this age.” Ten minutes of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” or “The Bachelor” will reveal the truth of his words readily enough.

The alternative to this kind of slavery, again in MLK Jr’s words, is to be a “transformed nonconformist”—someone who is so taken with a vision of what the world could be that they refuse to be fully adjusted to what it is. Again, one can just be a nonconformist willy-nilly and never get anywhere. Chesterton would add that being a transformed nonconformist requires some fixed point, a dogma even, to which the world is supposed to be transforming.

Here in this century, we’re not just in danger of succumbing to a mass mind but multiple mass minds in a constant ideological battle, which never ends and no one wins. The “culture wars” that our media speak of (and largely create) are as much generational wars, if voting records are any indication.   

This is what’s so unfortunate about churches that consciously cater to one particular age cohort (the same could be said of any other kinds of homogeneity, but the ageism implied in what goes by the name “Gen-X ministry” or “Boomer ministry” is my focus here). It makes no difference whether it be the stodgy old denominational bulwark with a hundred year old aesthetic that calls to the minds of its nostalic members (read: shareholders) a simpler time that never really existed or the “cool church” that conjures a trendy nightclub or a chic urban studio feel that enables its “seekers” to reconcile the incongruities of a lifestyle defined by deeply held convictions and yearnings on the one hand and “Double Rainbow” remixes on the other. A church where everyone basically shares the same outlook and a very similar set of life experiences will inevitably reflect a particular slavery of “this age” more than the kingdom of God.

The problem is that our vision for what God’s future should look like tends to closely resemble the prevailing mentality of our peer group.  When we surround ourselves with only one demographic, we eliminate the chance for constructive critique on our favorite thought and behavior patterns. Living in a too narrow peer group distorts our vision of what is authentically Christ in the world and what is only our hasty construction of “the good.” That future to which we are supposed to orient our lives becomes not Christ’s future but the future of my own favorite political ideology or lifestyle preference.

What results from this should be pretty obvious. Whoever opposes that ideology or lives a different lifestyle becomes to us the anti-Christ bent on holding the world back from that future. The solution is invariably to eliminate them on a scale of violence ranging from political victory, to character defamation, to out and out war. At this exact point, lacking enough self-awareness to catch the irony, we have just created what’s wrong with the world in our effort to take the side of what’s right with it—another way of stating “the Nazi paradox” noted in my previous blog.        

If we are to buck this human tendency, then gathering around the communion table with people who are different becomes not something we tolerate in order to receive our own personal sacrament but the very point of the sacrament itself—hence, the double meaning of Paul’s word “body” at the communion table. The different worldviews, life-experiences, and political leanings that we bring with us to the table, while not unimportant in the world as it is, take a backseat in our communion with the world as it will be.

This isn’t to say that we should just distract ourselves from the political challenges of the moment with some sort of transcendentalism, though Christians have been guilty of this often enough. But it does mean that the current division between you and me on whatever issue happens to be trending at the moment will not permanently divide us. If we celebrate sacramentally that our future is one of reconciliation beyond our current debate, then refusing to find constructive solutions now, on the ground, is a refusal of what’s ultimate for the sake of what’s penultimate (i.e. we’re straining a gnat while swallowing a camel).

At the congregation I serve, I’m thrilled by how many people we have showing up to worship because they “get it” as far as this goes. By that, I mean twenty something singles and DINKs (Duel Income, No Kids) who forgo the recreational opportunities, cooler music, and obvious lifestyle benefits of going to the hip church down the street because they get the importance of learning from people two or three times their age and mentoring people half their age; I mean Greatest Generation people showing up in protest to the “world is going to hell in a hand basket” narrative of the nightly news and staying open to the possibility that Millenials are not just acting backwards in order to irk them but might just be making necessary adaptations to a quickly changing world; I mean bleeding-heart liberals and dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who discover, in spite of the rhetorical games of TV attack adds, that we all mostly want the same things somewhere in the middle.

And in this strange hodge-podge of all ages and political stripes, the Gospel has an opportunity to reveal itself as more than the latest political outcry or the mores of a particular demographic.   

Christians are nothing other than people who believe, somewhat bizarrely, that they have seen the end to which the human project is moving, and it is good. Carrying this vision with us is what sustains us from slumping into the nihilism of the present, saying, “Que sera, sera”; “Eat drink and be merry”; “All is vanity”—so hangout only with those whom you find most agreeable. It’s our intentional engagement with people who don’t look and sound exactly like us that keeps us honest about the true vision.