The Church Needs to Stop Pandering to Trends
Nine times out of 10 somebody in the back of the room raises their hand and says, “So what you’re saying is, we need to bring in a cooler worship band?” And I proceed to bang my head against the podium, because time and time again there’s this assumption that what will bring millennials back to church is if we add a fog machine, put a coffee shop in the lobby, have a pastor who wears skinny jeans that they’ll just come flooding back.
I think that this tends to underestimate millennials. They think that we’re more shallow than we are. The truth is, sometimes those efforts will backfire, because we millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, and we can tell when somebody is just trying to sell us something. I think church is the last place I want to go to be sold another product. It’s the last place I want to go to just be entertained.
.. I think when you look at the people who Jesus surrounded Himself with, that’s what our churches are supposed to look like. They’re supposed to be filled with super uncool people. Folks from the margins of society, and folks who are misfits and oddballs and sick and hungry and homeless, outcasts, the people who are typically despised by the religious.
So when the church looks like that—when it looks less like a country club and more like a recovery group—that, to me, signals that it’s a healthy church.