"What happens when church and cool collide? What happens to the church when our concern with appearances equals or outweighs our concern for sound doctrine or faithful practice?" Fellow Wheaton alum Brett McCracken addresses these questions in Hipster Christianity, an entertaining, thoughtful read that addresses the growing sentiment among Christians that the church must keep up with culture.
What is cool? This is the starting point for McCracken---examining the essence of cool. He defines cool as "an attractive attribute that embodies the existential strains to be independent, enviable, one-of-a-kind, and trailblazing." In other words, something must have sense of independence and uniqueness to fit the hip bill. "Hipsters," he says, are "fashionable, young independent contrarians." Once something, be it a fashion, music, etc. is commandeered by corporate America or the public at large, it loses the qualities that make it cool. The transient nature of cool presents a problem for hipsters, of course. In order to remain cool and "relevant," a hipster constantly has to scramble to stay two steps ahead with the trends they choose.
Hipsters---recognizable by their dress and musical tastes (described at length by McCracken) as much as their contrarian attitudes---have become a more recognizable piece of the Christian puzzle in recent years. Their growing influence in the church coincides with both the rise of emergent theology and the rise of hipsterdom in general, marked by the release of Relevant in 2003 (an edgy Christian magazine that caters to hipsters). While McCracken does an admirable job describing the history of the movement, his more important argument is that the evangelical church has mirrored the hipster desire to mingle cool with Christianity. This should come as no revelation to any of us evangelicals who have had our eyes and ears open over the last decade. Undoubtedly, the church has latched on to the notion that we must "meet people where they're at" and be as "relevant" as possible in order to attract people to our "product." (Jesus is not a commodity to be packaged, and even if he were, would we really need to dress him up to somehow improve on what he already is?)
McCracken cites several problems with the Church's desire to make itself relevant---individualism (promoting a "meet the customer's needs" mentality), alienation (cool is lonely as you're only relevant as long as you stay hip), competition (the mad scramble to be on the cutting edge and to stay in front of the church growth race), pride and vanity (the ego that develops as our churches "thrive"), a focus on the now (cool is all about being trendy NOW, whereas Christianity should be about the transcendent and eternal), rebellion (by definition, cool is contrarian and we drag that cancer into the Church when we insist on being cool), and the reduction of our identities to the visual (how good our worship team sounds, how neat our lights are, how inviting our foyer is, how cool our pastor dresses, etc). Ironically, the Church already IS relevant at its core, and it has been for two thousand years. By bowing down to the trendsetters and what we think our culture wants from Christianity, we have made ourselves just like the rest of the world in form and over time that actually erodes our relevance...we have chosen transience over transcendence. Christianity remains relevant when we hold fast to truth of Scripture and set ourselves apart in our liturgy, our worship, our service, and our fellowship. It's relevant because those were God's chosen modes or reaching the world and they haven't changed just because the culture has. Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to abandon the rich history of the Church in favor of the latest fad in church culture, fads that are sure to be here today and gone tomorrow.
So, Christianity, McCracken argues, can be transiently relevant or transcendently relevant. One fades, and the other lasts forever. I highly recommend reading this book as he explores these issues in much more depth than I can communicate in this forum. This topic of mingling hip and faith is crucial for all of us planted in the Church to think on deeply as we look to impact our culture in ways that honor our Lord.
No comments:
Post a Comment