Is your church uncool?

There is so much talk today about the method of ministry rather than the message in ministry. The American church seems to be hung up about being relevant to the culture. As a former pastor I heard comments like the following "listening to hymns is like hearing someone run their fingernails down a chalk board." Friends, that is style lacking substance when you hear those kind of comments. So often there is no attention to the words, meaning and theology as people just mindlessly sing the chorus and listen to the beat of the music. You might think this is negative but it is a realistic look at modern church for the most part. I am not being critical as much as observing the current state and letting the facts speak for themselves.

I have posted an article and thoughts from Dr. John MacArthur, who has pastored Grace Community Church for 40 years. Here are some of his comments on the church today.
"Those arguments have been stressed to the point that many evangelicals now seem to think stylishness is just about the worst imaginable threat to the expansion of the gospel and the influence of the church. They don't really care if they are worldly. They just don't want to be thought uncool.

That way of thinking has been around at least since modernism began its aggressive assault on biblical Christianity in the Victorian era. For half a century or more, most evangelicals resisted the pragmatic thrust of the modernist argument, believing it was a fundamentally worldly philosophy. They had enough biblical understanding to realize that "friendship with the world is enmity with God. Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God" (James 4:4).

But the mainstream evangelical movement gave up the battle against worldliness half a century ago, and then completely capitulated to pragmatism just a couple of decades ago. After all, most of the best-known megachurches that rose to prominence after 1985 were built on a pragmatic philosophy of giving "unchurched" people whatever it takes to make them feel comfortable. Why would anyone criticize what "works"?

Whole churches have thus deliberately immersed themselves in "the culture"--by which they actually mean "whatever the world loves at the moment." We now have a new breed of trendy churches whose preachers can rattle off references to every popular icon, every trifling meme, every tasteless fashion, and every vapid trend that captures the fickle fancy of the postmodern secular mind.

Worldly preachers seem to go out of their way to put their carnal expertise on display--even in their sermons. In the name of connecting with "the culture" they want their people to know they have seen all the latest programs on MTV; familiarized themselves with all the key themes of "South Park"; learned the lyrics to countless tracks of gangsta rap and heavy metal music; and watched who-knows-how-many R-rated movies. They seem to know every fad top to bottom, back to front, and inside out. They've adopted both the style and the language of the world--including lavish use of language that used to be deemed inappropriate in polite society, much less in the pulpit. They want to fit right in with the world, and they seem to be making themselves quite comfortable there."