Cool Jesus

I was reading someone’s blog today and noticed that she referred to God as “The Chief,” and it made me wonder about her motivations. Others had criticized her last post and she was playing the irrefutable divine inspiration card; The Chief had told her to write her last post. How can you argue with that! But more than what she had to say I was curious about her use of the word Chief. I suppose there is nothing wrong with that word – it certainly conveys some proper sense of divinity – but why not, as millions of English-speaking Christians have said for at least 500 years, Lord?

I don’t know but highly suspect that it might have had something to do with, at all costs, wanting not to sound in any way like a 1970’s born-again Southern Baptist. That would be the nadir of uncoolness, and The Chief forbid that she should ever sound like a church lady. And this got me to thinking again about something that has been bothering me lately, why does it seem that many of this generation’s Christians are obsessed with being cool, even to the point of inventing a “cool Jesus”? I think I know for the most part the answer to that question, but I’ll postpone that for a post on another day. For now, here are some things that have bugged me about the emerging cool Christian movement.

First of all, we have to be missional (yes, I guess this is now a cool English word…) and this means that we have to target people where they are, but it seems like maybe God is really only interested in cool people, so that helps narrow the scope of our missionalness. We must shoot almost exclusively for young twenty-somethings who are turned off to the last generation’s Christianity (probably because it was so uncool), consider themselves socially aware, have swallowed hook, line and sinker everything their public school upbringing has fed them about abortion, homosexuality, evolution and politics, are college educated, live in a loft in the city (not the uncool suburbs, and certainly not extremely uncool rural America), like alternative modern music but also consider 1930’s jazz and probably the Beatles to be very cool, and are natty dressers.

Knowing the target demographic, our church marketing departments can now really hone their foci. (Hey, I was a math guy, so I actually knew the proper plural for focus without looking it up. Anyway, I digress…). Hey, wait a minute, since when did churches have marketing departments? (I think the answer to that is since maybe about only 1990, but sorry, I digress again – maybe that should be another post). Anyway this all has serious ramifications for worship and preaching and fellowship and evangelism and everything! But I think the thing that bugs me the most often, though not necessarily the most deeply, is where this need for coolness has taken church language.

The standard line is that old churchy language is jargon and inaccessible to most “seekers.” So it must be changed. But I ask you, to your standard unchurched or non-Christian person, is “fellowship” really that much more weird than “doing life together”? I don’t think so. Although I know this is now the really cool term that is supposed to describe Christians spending time together, learning from each other and bearing one another’s burdens, I have to say that the phrase “doing life together” really just creeps me out. And honestly, I strongly suspect that your average 40-year-old factory worker probably feels exactly the same way, but I admit that our well dressed and highly educated urban dweller may not agree. The factory worker is not in our target demographic anyway.

Well, that is probably enough of that rant, but I am going to close with one more Christian coolness observation that really made my blood boil. The first time I heard Todd Agnew’s “My Jesus”, I carefully followed the lyrics and thought it was a good, challenging song, but then here he came, Agnew’s cool Jesus, the one who Todd was pretty sure would “prefer Beale Street (a center of really cool Blues clubs in Memphis) to the stained glass crowd.” I don’t know what this cool Blues-loving and organ-music despising Jesus really has to do with the poor-loving Jesus we had been hearing about in the rest of the song, but at that point I was finished with it. I personally don’t care for the old organ music and the “stained-glass” style of worship that I grew up with, but I have this thought for Mr. Agnew. How dare you. My nearly 80-year-old mother has lived her whole life for Jesus Christ, loving Him with her whole heart and singing uncool stained-glass style songs from her heart to God. I have never known her to care one bit about appearing “cool” to man, and I think she understands way better most of us what the REAL Jesus meant in John 17:14. Shame on you, Todd. Your cool Christianity disrespects this past generation of believers.

Cool Christianity confuses the message of the gospel with new and unnecessary jargon. Cool Christianity is a contradiction. We should stop trying to be cool and instead hold out grace and truth as our Lord did.