A Wake Up Call For Churches
In a post entitled Why I Walked Out of Church, writer/artist Julie Neidlinger assesses what’s wrong with many of today’s churches (hat tip: WorldMagBlog):
A recent cover story at World Magazine about “NextGen Worship” inspired a strong desire to smack the pastors depicted in the article and in the photos. The cover photo alone enraged me, with the pastor wearing baggy jeans and untucked button-up shirt with flip flops and an ear microphone. Later, the same guy is shown out front of a church holding a paper Starbucks-like cup of coffee. Could he try any harder to be lame?
I’d have liked to have taken that cup of coffee and dumped it on his head. But it’s nothing personal against that guy or his beliefs or sincerity. It’s an anger at something else.
I’m not going to be one of those starched-collar Christians who, based on personal preference, say that this is a sign we’re going to hell in a handbasket and that all things are wrong unless they are done as they were with the Puritans. What I’m saying is that I can’t stand the phoniness, or trendiness, or sameness — or whatever I’m trying to say here — that the church seems to catch onto at the tail end, not even aware of how lame it is. The fact that this is not only actually successful in appealing to people, but attracts them, also disgusts me.
It makes me want to throw up.
It’s buying into some kind of lie or substitution of cool culture as being relevant when it isn’t.
The entire article is worth reading very carefully as Julie has a lot to say. No doubt there are many other people that feel the same way.
Filed under: Christianity • Tom
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Why is dressing in jeans and flip flops “phony”? What if that is the way he dresses everyday?
I’m unsure of what is angering this person.
Reading her whole essay, I guess I can agree that I’m certainly not into “cool culture,” or trying to fit into the mold of the world with its fashions and trends. But it’s just that I don’t buy her complaints about the specific clothes or language.
In my world, people DO dress in jeans and unbuttoned, untucked shirts and flip flops. They DO say words like, “Sweet,” and “duuuuude…” It’s part of how some people live and talk.
And so I see no reason why they should assume some artifice of piety or a special set of clothes for Sunday morning than they have any other day of the week.
Again, I have to wonder what it is she was looking for in the church that she didn’t find? How should the pastor have dressed and talked?
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a non-church-goer once who was complaining about how the church so badly mistreated gays, rejecting them as outcasts and deviants. When I pointed out that not all churches do that – that my church, for instance, welcomed and affirmed our gay brothers and sisters – she responded by saying, “Well, that’s just not right! Churches should be a certain way!”
It’s like she didn’t know what she wanted. Or rather, she did: She wanted churches to be condemning towards gays so that she could, in turn, be condemning towards churches and use it as a reason not to go.
I think, if you only see my essay as about flip flops and untucked shirts (which seems to be what too many are taking away from it), I’ve been ineffective in what my real message was.
I do say, in the essay and in later comments, that it was not so much the clothes that these people wear, but that that is the outward “symbol” that reminded me off a larger issue.
I am mistakenly being taken for a person who thinks we should all wear suits or skirts or something to church which, or sing all hymns if you read a number of posts on my web site (such as this one about skirts, or this one about hymns), is anything but the case.
It has more to do with a lowest-common-denominator element in the church, which is fake and repulsive to some people (i.e. me, and those saying “I agree with what you are saying!”) The photos and the magazine article in World Magazine happened to be, essentially, the straw that broke the camel’s back. That, combined with the experience at the church, was what instigated the post and made it so I could not stay silent on the matter any longer.
It has nothing to do with, say, flip flops, which, for some reason, has sparked heated debate devolving into such silliness as whether people in California have more business wearing them than someone in the Midwest.
So, if people normally wear jeans and flip flops and say “dude,” then you’re okay with them doing so on Sunday morning?
It just seemed an especially volatile response (“smack the pastors,” dump the coffee over their heads, throw up) to certain clothes.
If you had wanted to talk about trendiness and appealing to shallow cultural trends and materialism, I am right there with you. I just didn’t get that from the initial excerpt above.
But, on any given sunday at my church, you can be sure to see folk wearing flip flops, jeans, tshirts and saying, “Dude! the Dark Knight was awesome!” as they worship God.
If I were writing about concerns about trendiness and materialism in churches, I would probably target cell phones, designer shoes, expensive clothes or SUVs. But that’s me.
But indeed, volatile responses come from volatile reactions/people, particularly in “final straw” moments. I have such a personality. I would certainly wish that I would write better so that less messenger and more message were the focus, but…
Regardless, there is more to be had than a dissemination on the message as filtered through a volatile personality. If you could disregard me dumping coffee on someone (which I’ve yet to ever do), there is something else being said.
“If I were writing about concerns about trendiness and materialism in churches, I would probably target cell phones, designer shoes, expensive clothes or SUVs. But that’s me.”
That’s fair enough. But, since I’m just me, I went after…dude, coffee, age segregation, herding of emotions, and a whole bunch of other stuff as a way to get a handle on trendiness and materialism in the church. See?
I made a comment over on the WorldMagOnline site about the strange focus the clothing/coffee part of the essay is getting vs. the emotion herding/barcode-in-a-pew aspects. One reason, I suppose, is that that is an easy target. I understand that the excerpts people are running on their blogs tend to be the one associated with the clothing the pastors in the World Magazine article were photographed in, but there is much, much more that I am talking about than the clothes.
Fair enough. I’m with you on the trendy church thing.
I’m still not clear, though, on the clothes: IS it okay (in your opinion) to preach wearing jeans and flip flops? In spite of your message pointing out the larger problem of trendiness (which I sort of agree with), you still DO have some commentary in there specifically about clothes, as if that is an issue for you. Is it?
I don’t know that I should say “this is OK and this isn’t” since all I can offer you is my personal opinion.
And my opinion is that feet gross me out so I’d really love my pastor to not wear flip flops. But that’s me.
I don’t mind the jeans, since I live in jeans.
Really, I’m not prone to obsessing about the exteriors. The difference for me here is that there is a kind of “collection” of hip exterior things that compile to form some kind of uniform that says “look, I’m cool and just like you and I’m gonna give you the gospel in a cool way.” The reason I didn’t stay on the exterior clothing bit, and went on to the rest of the discussion that I did, is that it wasn’t the most important thing. And really, it is probably the least important thing in the discussion I was trying to make, though it was the appearance of those hip pastors in the magazine that was, as I’ve said, the absolute final straw that made me snap and write the post.
I do think that those who are leaders are sometimes unaware that seemingly innocent personal choices affect those they are leading. We follow as we are led — do we want casual followers? I’m not just talking clothing here, but there is an inter-connectedness that I must also consider in my own life, too.
Thanks for the extra thoughts.
A wise man once said something like, “I am all things to all people so that by some means I might win them to Christ.” Let’s all do that and you can wear whatever you like!