A Cool Church

I'm not very cool.  Never have been. My wife sometimes tells me I am, but she's incredibly nice and terribly biased.

I suppose I never will be one of the "cool kids."   I don't listen to the right music, partake in the right activities or wear the right clothes. I really wanted to like Mad Men, but sadly, I just didn't get it.

Even so, I have a tendency to want our church to be "more cool" than it is. There is something in me that wants everything at our church to be fashionable and state-of-the-art. There is something in me that yearns to have our church be the kind of church that is attractive to the "in" crowd.

We could call that something "sin."

Rachel Held Evans is a talented writer, with whom I sometimes agree and sometimes disagree. I suspect she's far cooler than I am. Regardless, in my opinion she couldn't be more right than in these words from an older blog post which was brought to my attention today:

Jesus taught us that when we throw a banquet or a party, our invitation list should include “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” So why do our church marketing teams target the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced?

She continues...

Some of us wear our brokenness on the inside, others on the outside. 

But we’re all broken. 

We’re all un-cool.

We’re all in need of a Savior.

May this truth guide our ministries so that they are less concerned with who we want to hear the gospel, and more concerned with who needs to hear it. And even more so, may it guide my heart and yours, so that we would truly see how much we are all a part of that latter group.

Now that would be cool.

 (HT: Rachel Blazer)