Being Cool Is Harder Than It Looks
ALLAHPUNDIT is surprised at the severity of the religious stereotyping in a set of four would-be uber-hip commercials for a church franchise in and around Naperville, Illinois. Tellingly, he says:
Their “Journey” page doesn’t say much but judging from the ads they’re not entirely comfortable being called “Christians,” at least in the cultural sense. Either that or they’re trying to convert unbelievers by first turning them into hip, laid-back “Christ-followers,” at which point they’ll proceed to what the CCC portrays as phase two: full-fledged dorkwad Christianity.
AllahPundit has been kind enough to put together a convenient playlist of the videos for us:
This is an interesting barometer of this kind of approach to church: hip, influential, culturally connected non-Christians are finding themselves unimpressed by the attempt of Christians to be hip, influential, and culturally connected. It continues mercilessly in the post’s comments:
“Christ-follower” sounds WAY dorkier than “Christian!”
This is a legitimate criticism with which fans of the former phrase will have to contend. Escaping the charge of dorkiness is hardly the highest calling of Christians (or even Christ followers, for that matter), but clearly the folks at Community Christian Church are trying hard enough to dodge it. Survey says they’re failing.
Next one “spamat” weighs in:
Oh goody. Muslims worldwide are returning to their roots while Christians are fighting over who can reject their past more strenuously.
“Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”
With any luck, the hipper-than-thou Christians will focus-group themselves into irrelevance, but I doubt it.
The seeker church might impress soccer moms, and the emergent church might impress disaffected artistic youths, but for whatever it’s worth, spamat isn’t buying any of it. I wonder how typical he is. I suspect more than some would like.
Speaking of the emergent church, one commenter suggested that this place is one, the implications of which he went on to explain patiently to the readership of the blog. Not likely. How can I tell? First of all, what would the Emergent Conversation say about a multi-campus congregation? Seems pretty Boomer to me. Second: the web site uses tables for layout. The thing has more td’s in its About page than a seeker megachurch has uncritically accepted modernist assumptions in a whole year’s preaching. And everybody knows emergent churches use valid XHTML 1.1—works better with screen readers, you understand—and CSS.
Yes, you had to be both an armchair theologian and a web designer to get that joke, but hey, this ain’t a general interest blog. And I’ve got the traffic stats to prove it!
The broader point concerns the virtues of rejecting the label “Christian” for cultural reasons. It’s not unusual for missionaries to Muslims to avoid this term because of its intractably negative historical and cultural associations in that context, and I think we can all give them a pass on that. It’s not like scripture gives us a certain label we are required to use for ourselves. “Christ follower” is surely a candidate, but personally I’m troubled by the emphasis it carries. I am, after all, a Christ believer before I am a Christ follower. Perhaps I spend more of my time following than believing, but the former is worse than useless without the latter.
I’m sure no simple label will be able to articulate the nuanced synthesis most Protestants make of the biblical teaching on faith and works. And it’s not like any label is going to do an adequate job distancing me from the various characters I’d rather avoid. Does “Christ follower” make it clear that I’m not emergent, not seeker-sensitive, not old-school fundamentalist Landmark Baptist, not contemporary-music-loving-program-driven-broadly-evangelical, not fire-breathing-exclusive-Psalmody-TR? Perhaps I could obsess less over the label and spend more time being friends with people, hopefully defusing their negative stereotypes in the process? That process doesn’t scale as well as mass media, but it just might work.
OOPS: Community Christian Church’s “Recommended Websites” page (calling it “Links” is so 1996) links to Leonard Sweet and The Ooze! I guess I’m wrong: emergent it is. In fairness, The message of the videos could as easily be seeker-driven as anything else, so it’s hard to say for sure from here.
P.S. If you don’t know who AllahPundit is from his previous blog, ask me in the comments and I’ll tell you. The name is odd enough to warrant explanation.
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- Posted by Tim on Thursday, December 7, 2006 at 6:34:26 pm PST
- Category: Religion
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8 Responses to “Being Cool Is Harder Than It Looks”
As someone who previously attended a church that also used the term “Christ Follower” I have a great deal of sympathy for the term. I read through some of the comments on the original posting, and it seems like many missed that the term is just an expanded way of saying “disciple” (which ,after all, is by definition what a disciple *is* - a follower of Christ).
Sometimes I think it may be better to use new terminology if the old terminology has unfortunately connotations. If nothing else, it gets people thinking more about what the terms actually mean. I wouldn’t recommend such a course of action in most cases, but I certainly have a lot of sympathy for what such communities of faith are trying to accomplish.
I will stick with being called a Christian. But I think that, if I were in a context where this term did more harm than good, I would seriously consider abandoning it. After all, it is just another label (albeit an important one). And the label isn’t the reality.
Paul.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 9th, 2006 at 11:15 pm |Okay, somebody somewhere is going to say I’m reacting to this because it “struck a nerve.”
And maybe they’re right.
But what I want to know — yea, what I almost want to scream in fury, is, “How the heck does running down Christians who are less hip than you and portraying them as legalistic people who don’t get it, serve the cause of Christ?”
Doesn’t that dorky little book with the handles that the Christian guy was carrying around say something about bearing with the brethren?
Isn’t that what “trying to live your life in a way that follows Christ” (I don’t remember the cool guy’s exact words) is at least partly about?
I’m getting really sick of this running down other Christians in the name of being more authentically Christ like, and carping that the brethren are the real problem and the real barrier to reaching the lost. I see it a lot, including from some people that I think are entirely well-meaning — but it’s way off the mark. Is it true that a lot of Christians have various hangups, baggage, attitudes, sins, that weigh us down and cause us to be less than ideal representatives of Christ? OF COURSE IT IS!
Does that mean that it forwards the gospel for one group of Christians to try to portray themselves as better than their brethren? NONSENSE, NONSENSE!
This is insane. It’s one thing to look inside oneself and one’s church and say, “Are there pitfalls that Christians fall into that I should avoid? Are there things we really need to take a hard look at and ditch, even if they’re dear to us, because they don’t authentically reflect the gospel?” It’s quite another kettle of fish altogether to pit yourself against your brethren to score points in the eyes of the world as being the “real Christians! Look at us, don’t look at them!” Is that supposed to be some reasonable form of evangelistic endeavor? I THOUGHT it was supposed to be “look at Jesus.” And since WHEN is cutesy mockery (the “I’m a dork”) stuff supposed to be a way for Christians to relate? We’re not talking about two friends here who understand each other and kidding around, we’re talking about two brothers who are apparently somewhat in need of reconciliation, and the approach of the “really authentic” guy is make the other one look stupid. Not to use hard but loving words, just make the other guy look stupid. Wow, way to just follow Jesus.
“I’m not themism” is a disease that has plagued American evangelicalism for a long time. Maybe it’s justice that it’s coming back to bite some of us more traditionalist types. But that still doesn’t make it right.
God protect me from now going out and trying to advocate my approach to theology, worship, evangelism, and covenant life as more stable, reasonable, and charitable as those loosey-goosey hippie seeker sensitive types. It’s an error either way.
Maybe a short way of what I’m saying is, Let’s assume (against inclination) that the “Christ follower” people are 100% right in their underlying beef against the “Christian” types. A little meditation on how one deals with the weaker brother and how the “spiritual” are supposed to restore their brethren “caught in sin” might have improved the approach a WHOLE lot.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 11th, 2006 at 8:25 am |I have to admit. I got a good chuckle at the first video…until I saw the final final stamp “Christian no more.” I think it is a bit healthy to laugh at ourselves from time to time and acknowledge the ways that we are stereotyped. But this video was not kidding around with one another from the inside, rather one group of Christians was slapping another group around. I agree with pentamom’s frustrations.
Our pastor on Sunday really encouraged/admonished us to try to step our of our contemporary Christian culture for a moment and time warp to the year 2156 (though he did not use those exact words) and look back at 2006 and try to distinguish those cultural trappings and mindsets that do not follow from a Biblical worldview. This contest to be the hippest Christians may be one folly that needs to end sooner rather than later.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 11th, 2006 at 11:24 am |But, lest anyone misunderstand me. I don’t think that stereotyping and mockery is the way to mutual understanding and brotherly love.
Paul.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 11th, 2006 at 11:46 am |Nancy:
Amen about the sermon. OUTstanding.
pentamom:
Yes yes yes, but how are your suggested changes supposed to fit into the snarky aping of the popular Mac vs. PC commercials? What you’re saying would make for pretty lame TV. What are we supposed to do with our video projector at church? How are we supposed to reach the masses? I’m confused.
Paul:
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 11th, 2006 at 4:24 pm |I affirm and encourage you.
LOL Tim. And just to reaffirm what Nancy said — yep, it would have been tolerably cute if it had been an inside job. But of course these things never can be anymore — whatever may once have been possible. And that is evidently not what it was intended to be anyway.
Like I said (way more long-windedly) before, it’s making the weaker brethren the enemy of the gospel that I find highly problematic — not just in a “can’t we be nicer” sense but really at a theological level as well.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 12th, 2006 at 9:06 am |Hi Tim.
Welcome back!
I’ll bite: Who is Allahpundit? Why the choice of name?
Craig
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 21st, 2006 at 12:10 am |Craig:
Welcome back to you as well!
A few years back the author known as Allahpundit wrote an eponymous blog that covered War on Terror news in a very creative (if not particularly respectful) way: by presenting the news as Allah re-imagined as a foul-mouthed gangsta. He gained a substantial readership, but eventually closed his blog down in what I think was a combination of legal issues with CafePress and normal blogger fatigue. His reasons for using a pseudonym are obvious.
I never linked directly to him just because of the utter poverty of his strategy for engaging Muslims. (He did not suffer for the lack of links from me, pretty sure.) He is an excellent news gather, a good commentator, a gifted humorist, and pretty mean with Photoshop to boot, but probably open mockery of a religion is a bad idea. All my giggles in reading him were guilty ones. Fortunately he’s back now at HotAir with all his strengths and none of his weaknesses, save the name.
Comment Permalink | Posted on December 22nd, 2006 at 9:55 am |