We Should See Other Blogs

We really don’t get it.

When we waltzed into church with our electric guitars and drum kits, hoping to make the painfully dated music of the church cool, we didn’t understand what that would lead to. Where the pursuit of cool would go.

It’s like hippies railing that the culture had co-opted their subversive coolness. They didn’t realize that the counterculture was the culture, or at least became the culture.

So the church seized on “relevance” and “authenticity” and suddenly became uncool and inauthentic. The church counterculture became the church culture, and we still don’t get what’s going on.

There’s no problem with updating the music of the church. That’s an ongoing process that’s been ongoing for as long as the church has been the church. The pursuit of coolness, of hipness, though, that’s new. And it’s not a good thing. The church youth movement with its fads and horribly imitative para-culture ends up looking like a stale translation of secular idea. Along the way we forgot that decking ourselves out in faux-clever t-shirts, eating Christ-flavoured mints, and listening to bad imitations of bad secular music isn’t the same as actually being a Christ follower.

The hippies became the yuppies as the culture at large gradually figured out how to make money off of youth and beauty counterculture. Now every clothing and shoe company in the world is trying to be subversive. And of course when everyone is subversive, no-one is. The culture doesn’t care how they make their money; if they can sell you something to make you feel hip or cool, they will. In any case there’s nothing to subvert because hippies defined themselves largely by what they bought. I’m sure Volkswagen thanks them for that.

In the same way, church counterculture is church culture. You define yourself by a certain style of music and a certain way of dressing, and people will sell you that stuff. People will sell you clothes and music and guitars and accessories with Jesus tacked on (if necessary). Just follow the money.

In the name of relevance, the church will embrace your fads and try to turn that into membership and numbers and whatever else they’re focusing on in the end. If you’re particularly jaded you might say, Just follow the money.

We’re repeating the same process in the church now that the culture at large is repeating over and over again. A new type of subversive church arises and become mainstream. The young and hip make a new church because the mainstream seems tacky. That new church becomes mainstream. Rinse, repeat.

There’s only one way out of this cycle, and the answer is the same for the church as it is for counterculture in general: Opt out. Don’t define yourself by the things you wear or listen to. Don’t chase cool. Don’t jump on or co-opt fads.

Instead try to create authentic community. (I even hesitate to use the word “authentic” here.) Which is hard, doesn’t depend on slogans, doesn’t need a certain kind of music, doesn’t fit well onto a t-shirt, and doesn’t support a cottage industry of moneylenders in the temple.