New, Hipster, Earthy,Marketed, Evangelical-Crap Exposed

Hey I got an idea, maybe focus more on the teachings of Christ and His Saints and not the sunglasses and laser shows, then maybe young Christians will stay (or they'll become Orthodox, which is just fine and dandy :)).

Folks, the purpose of the Christian life is to acquire the Grace of God, to acquire Theosis. Fully-realized it is nothing less, than to come into constant communion with God's Divine Uncreated Energies. The purpose of Christianity is not nor has it ever been to, market, advertise, sell, capitalize, create cultural shock-value, screen rated R movies, or any of the other new-fangled guitar rocking crap that goes on in Mega-Churches.

If I could deliver, from my small corner of the internet, a message to all those lost congregations and denominations it would be thusly;

For goodness sakes, stop! What are you doing? 1,000 years ago there was one Church and it worshiped one God, until one Roman Pope, decided to change the Nicean Creed without even informing the other Popes. When word got out, he anatomized them, and they anatomized him. Then, 500 years later, The Roman Church found itself in some scandal, yes, and it was an unfortunate business they'd gotten themselves into. But creating a whole new religion, a whole new Jesus, a whole new Church, this was not, nor was it ever, Martin Luther's intention. Martin Luther wanted to return his followers to the Christianity before the 1054AD split. He even wrote to the Patriarch of Antioch seeking acceptance. It was his followers, who decided they'd had enough of tradition (based on the Roman version of it) and decided they'd do away with tradition, the Saints and everything, and go it alone. And the Protestant Church has been nothing more than a political movement ever since.

There, I said it. Protestantism is not a religion beyond the fact that it is merely a protest against the Roman Church and also against Tradition.

Now here you are, sitting at your Starbucks meet, pouring over some verses here and there, nooooo, idea what any of them mean, it seems you've made it your life's mission never to open a single Homily by the Saints which would greatly shed light on the passages you seek answers to. But no, that's too, "traditional ", it's too, old-fashioned, to just ask the Church that decided what books to put into the Bible at the First Council of Nicea, what those books mean. No, no, you are scholars! That's what you need all that Coffee for right? To guide you through all those sleepless nights, pouring over 6-degree connections between some passage and whatever Democratic President we have at the time.

Stop the politics, stop the silly antics. Come back to the Church that wrote the Bible and your understanding will become much easier. You won't have to pour over paradoxes about how can a God Who is Love yet also have hate or Righteous Anger? Well stop the guessing and just ask the Church that wrote it, because that's where you'll find the answer. And then you won't be forced to practice the usual cognitive dissonance to try and explain to yourself that our God is both Loving and hateful, unable to question and unable to explain any of it simply doing more to disillusion your fellow men rather than enlighten them.

By Brett McCracken

‘How can we stop the oil gusher?” may have been the question of the summer for most Americans. Yet for many evangelical pastors and leaders, the leaking well is nothing compared to the threat posed by an ongoing gusher of a different sort:

Young people pouring out of their churches, never to return.

As a 27-year-old evangelical myself, I understand the concern. My peers, many of whom grew up in the church, are losing interest in the Christian establishment.

Recent statistics have shown an increasing exodus of young people from churches, especially after they leave home and live on their own. In a 2007 study, Lifeway Research determined that 70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly.

Statistics like these have created something of a mania in recent years, as baby-boomer evangelical leaders frantically assess what they have done wrong (why didn’t megachurches work to attract youth in the long term?) and scramble to figure out a plan to keep young members engaged in the life of the church.

Increasingly, the “plan” has taken the form of a total image overhaul, where efforts are made to rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant. As a result, in the early 2000s, we got something called “the emerging church”—a sort of postmodern stab at an evangelical reform movement. Perhaps because it was too “let’s rethink everything” radical, it fizzled quickly. But the impulse behind it—to rehabilitate Christianity’s image and make it “cool”—remains.

There are various ways that churches attempt to be cool. For some, it means trying to seem more culturally savvy. The pastor quotes Stephen Colbert or references Lady Gaga during his sermon, or a church sponsors a screening of the R-rated “No Country For Old Men.” For others, the emphasis is on looking cool, perhaps by giving the pastor a metrosexual makeover, with skinny jeans and an $80 haircut, or by insisting on trendy eco-friendly paper and helvetica-only fonts on all printed materials. Then there is the option of holding a worship service in a bar or nightclub (as is the case for L.A.’s Mosaic church, whose downtown location meets at a nightspot called Club Mayan).

“Wannabe cool” Christianity also manifests itself as an obsession with being on the technological cutting edge. Churches like Central Christian in Las Vegas and Liquid Church in New Brunswick, N.J., for example, have online church services where people can have a worship experience at an “iCampus.” Many other churches now encourage texting, Twitter and iPhone interaction with the pastor during their services.

But one of the most popular—and arguably most unseemly—methods of making Christianity hip is to make it shocking. What better way to appeal to younger generations than to push the envelope and go where no fundamentalist has gone before?

Sex is a popular shock tactic. Evangelical-authored books like “Sex God” (by Rob Bell) and “Real Sex” (by Lauren Winner) are par for the course these days. At the same time, many churches are finding creative ways to use sex-themed marketing gimmicks to lure people into church.

Oak Leaf Church in Cartersville, Georgia, created a website called yourgreatsexlife.com to pique the interest of young seekers. Flamingo Road Church in Florida created an online, anonymous confessional (IveScrewedUp.com), and had a web series called MyNakedPastor.com, which featured a 24/7 webcam showing five weeks in the life of the pastor, Troy Gramling. Then there is Mark Driscoll at Seattle’s Mars Hill Church—who delivers sermons with titles like “Biblical Oral Sex” and “Pleasuring Your Spouse,” and is probably the first and only pastor I have ever heard say the word “vulva” during a sermon.

But are these gimmicks really going to bring young people back to church? Is this what people really come to church for? Maybe sex sermons and indie- rock worship music do help in getting people in the door, and maybe even in winning new converts. But what sort of Christianity are they being converted to?

In his book, “The Courage to Be Protestant,” David Wells writes:

“The born-again, marketing church has calculated that unless it makes deep, serious cultural adaptations, it will go out of business, especially with the younger generations. What it has not considered carefully enough is that it may well be putting itself out of business with God.
“And the further irony,” he adds, “is that the younger generations who are less impressed by whiz-bang technology, who often see through what is slick and glitzy, and who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them.”

If the evangelical Christian leadership thinks that “cool Christianity” is a sustainable path forward, they are severely mistaken. As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don’t want cool as much as we want real.

If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it’s easy or trendy or popular. It’s because Jesus himself is appealing, and what he says rings true. It’s because the world we inhabit is utterly phony, ephemeral, narcissistic, image-obsessed and sex-drenched—and we want an alternative. It’s not because we want more of the same.