Cool Christianity

The Wall Street Journal has pegged "Cool Christianity" in a recent article. They look at the trend in churches to add "cool" elements to draw in the crowds of young people who are fleeing established (i.e. boring) churches. You can read the article and form your own opinion, this is my blog so I'll share mine. Deal? Deal.

It has always been a problem for the church to attempt to appeal to popular culture. In the first and second centuries they were showing how Christianity really lines up with Greek philosophy. Today they're showing how Christianity is cool (we have Bono, right?). Whatever is the social capital of the time will be used by churches to win people to their position, and it usually fails. Sure it might work for a short while, but like my good friend Kevin Woods said about youth ministry: "We need to win them to Jesus. If we win them to a program we'll have to have a bigger and better program next time or they will go somewhere else, but if we win them to Jesus they'll stay because they love Jesus."

But there are churches that are just cool. They have cool people, they do cool stuff, they have cool music, they're just cool. It's not fair really. The thing is, I've been to some of these cool churches, and what I discovered is a radical call to live out the good news of Jesus that appealed to people (who happened to be cool) and they expressed their faith and worship in church (which happened to be cool). The goal wasn't to be cool and attract cool people. Rather the goal was to love Jesus and love people, and the cool people got loved in too.

What do you think?