My friend sent me this article where Brett McCracken asks is rebranding Christianity as hip, countercultural and relevant “really going to bring young people back to church?”

He notes the use of shock, indie rock and sex to attract young people to church in response to alarming trends:

“Recent statistics have shown an increasing exodus of young people from churches, especially after they leave home and live on their own. In a 2007 study, Lifeway Research determined that 70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly.

He concludes that cool isn’t sustainable, and this is exactly right. I would only add that cool does work in the short-run; it is immediately gratifying which is why so many use it, and why mega-churches are mega. This year, this decade, even this generation, these churches are seen. Forty years sounds like a long time to us because we don’t believe God’s promises are given for generations or note in our Bibles that movements lasting only one generation are dismal tragedies: witness the book of Judges. The land rests for 40 years until the next appalling drift invites capture and desolation. Pastors need to look to the future of their churches–their children and disciples–on the same long time line. Will the next generation be more faithful than this one, or will it be distanced and distracted by our shallowness and hypocrisy? Shock and awe isn’t necessarily hipocrisy, but it is cultivating the wrong thing. It’s hard enough to pull all the weeds when you are growing the right sort of thing, which means that churches in love with worldly cool will have an impossible time sustaining those who are interested in Jesus for the long unflashy haul.

C.S. Lewis said “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” It’s easy to be Gnostic and assume the only application of something so obviously wise pertains to points of doctrine that never touch down in our culture. I heard one pastor, with whom I have much respect for, say that he will hate the band at his church when he is older. Style will trump, and since generational musical beauty and maturity are not objects of “missional” value, 20-year-olds will always be leading the music. Exit honorable grey- heads with decades of wisdom and faithfulness.

How fantastic would it be worship with your grand children (and their friends!) who actually want to sing the same songs that you do because everyone thinks they are worthy in form and content to be lifted up to the King? Now that would be cool.

William Wilberforce relentlessly fought for and won the end of the British slave trade. Here is his life and legacy in 10:55. The movie Amazing Grace is well worth the time, and I’m told the book is excellent as well.

HT: Justin Taylor

Ken Myers of the Mars Hill Audio Journal is featured in this month’s issue of the PCA magazine byFaith. Here is a wonderful quote describing the disconnect so many churches, PCA and otherwise, between theology and culture. Go here to read the entire interview.

My work is really about producing thoughtful Christian faithfulness. If you start to think carefully about how you eat, how you spend time, how you think about place, all those things, some people may think you’re trying to achieve salvation by works. So my sense is that people with that kind of tendency–not just in the PCA–accept conventional ways of living from secular culture because they regard the effort to think thoughtfully and live deliberately as a kind of semi-Pelagianism [A view that man is partially depraved and capable, by his own free will, of cooperating in God’s work of grace]. And the idea that living deliberately is semi-Pelagian just baffles me. Because when you don’t, you end up living in accordance with a very post-Christian, and in significant ways, anti-Christian culture.

It seems to me that a large number of PCA pastors are really committed to theological rigor, and they want to nurture people’s enthusiasm about theology, as if that were the end of discipleship. But theology is a means more than an end. Orthodoxy serves to inform how we live, and God cares how we live. So if all of our theologizing never challenges the cultural conventions that we have uncritically assimilated from the world around us, then our theology isn’t doing what it should.

At the same time there are some in the PCA who, for the sake of evangelism, want to accommodate contemporary culture in significant ways, as long as no biblical law is broken. My sense is that a lot of those people don’t realize the meaning of the cultural changes they’re endorsing. They tend to think that culture’s just a matter of meaningless, arbitrary style. So basically what matters is getting people saved, but there doesn’t seem to be a vision of Christian discipleship that would include challenging how people live from the bottom up.