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.

The Long Marriage of Mindfulness and Money

In a recent Harvard Business Review piece, the executive coach David Brendel wrote, “Mindfulness is close to taking on cult status in the business world. But as with any rapidly growing movement—regardless of its potential benefits—there is good reason here for caution.” Brendel’s fear is that meditation might make executives too mellow and compassionate; he described one client who asked for assurance that she could embrace Buddhist meditation and still fire people. Brendel expressed hope that “mindfulness culture” will remain focussed on “optimizing work performance,” so that people can achieve “genuine happiness and fulfillment.”

.. For well over a century, business-minded Americans have been transforming Hindu and Buddhist contemplative practices into an unlikely prosperity gospel.

.. “With business meditation, we have a practice that is extrapolated from Buddhism and secularized so that all of the theological underpinnings are swept away,” Catherine Albanese, the author of “A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion,” says. “So we have Buddhism stood on its head. Mindfulness meditation has been brought into the service of a totally different perspective and world view.” By now, that’s part of a venerable American tradition.

Rev. Robert Schuller, 88, Dies; Built an Empire Preaching Self-Belief

But for more than 40 years, Dr. Schuller was an apostle of positive thinking and a symbol of success. A charismatic shepherd, he was one of television’s first preachers to reach audiences around the world with a hopeful message of self-healing and self-empowerment.

.. He retired as the pastor of the Garden Grove Community Church on the first day of 2006, handing over leadership to his only son, Robert A. Schuller, and leaving the church deeply in debt, largely because of the lavish building project. His son was pushed out within two years, setting off a family feud when his sisters and their husbands took control of the church in 2008