Church Clothes

    I’ve been listening to a lot of old Charlie Hall and Matt Maher recently. I say “old”, it’s only been about ten years since the albums I’ve had on repeat came out. And, if we’re being completely honest (and we have to be - that’s the rule of blogs), I didn’t actually listen to those albums when they had their moment in 2009. I just heard some singles covered at worship sets attended by my older brother and his friends, and they stuck with me. Until this year, I had never even heard the original recording of “Constant” off of Hall’s The Rising. Frankly, I like the arrangement I heard in the summer of 2011 better. Sorry, Charlie. 

    Regardless, I’ve been listening to it almost compulsively for several months, along with other music recorded in the same circles around that time. The way the album is engineered, the synthesizers, the vocal styling, all call back to mind a very specific era in the American church that I think, perhaps, I miss. It was like the tension before a wave breaks, but stretched out for years and years: an underground, scrappy, for-us-by-us Christian subculture. 

    As it usually happens, the primary product of this movement was music. The arts are always the forerunner of any significant shakeup, religious or otherwise; that’s why we call it “avant-garde.” Granted, that phrase tends to apply primarily to creative innovation that is weird and inscrutable, but not every movement that leads the way into the next thing has to follow those rules. It can also be beautiful, heartfelt, accessible, even comforting. 

    I still remember the first time I heard Phil Wickham’s “True Love.” I was 14, in 10th grade, and had always gone to larger churches that identified with the SBC. That is to say, the music I was exposed to was primarily bland family-friendly CCM, plus a little alternative Christian metal in my teens. More than anything, it was a cultural practice. I dunno, we’re Christians. Here’s some Christian media. Guess this is what we’ll consume, as Philippians 4:8 echoes in the distance.

    “So you know how Christian music sucks?” My older brother Mark says to me, pulling YouTube up on the desktop during Thanksgiving break. 

     “Yeah,” I say to him, not really in the mood (because no 14-year-old is ever in the mood.) 

    “This is not like that.”

    “Okay,” say I, still not in the mood. 

    This was not like that. 

    This blew my freaking 14-year-old mind. 

    It wasn’t that it was better recorded, or more musically clever, or more impressively sung than the other music I’d heard that also identified as “Christian.” It was the incisive sincerity in each and every note. It blew my mind; “He actually means it.” 

    Let’s stop here a moment. Yes, I do know that Philip David Wickham was not the first man in history to write genuine worship music. I do know that the Holy Spirit did not touch down for the first time when Kim Walker started fronting Jesus Culture. I am absolutely not in any way stating or attempting to imply that after 2,000 years, Bethel’s worship ministry kicked into gear and finally we were all doing church right. 

    Here’s what I’m saying: Charlie Hall, Matt Maher, Phil Wickham, Jesus Culture, Bethel, Passion, etc. provided a new context for the Christian faith for young, disillusioned believers who wanted nothing to do with their parents’ religion. It was less innovation than it was reclamation. It was a means of taking ownership. 

So why did the youth of the early-to-mid-aughts want to separate themselves from mainline Evangelical Christianity so badly?

    Let’s go back to the concept of the avant-garde and its relationship to countercultural movements. For every movement, trend, or era, there are two defining factors: music and clothes. From jazz and flapper dresses to emo and eyeliner, music and clothes are the primary way that the counterculture sets itself up in opposition to the mainstream. Both mediums are deliberately intended to upend social mores deemed unnecessary, oppressive, or morally wrong by the countercultural participants. 

    It really hasn’t been that long since the average Evangelical church couldn’t get away with having loud drums in the worship service. I can still remember when the massive church I attended in Woodstock weathered backlash for simply adding a separate contemporary service. The very idea that loud drums were happening somewhere on a given Sunday morning was just too much for a surprising amount of people to take. But, lest we be too harsh toward the past, let us remember the immortal words of the Reverend Johnny Hunt on the matter: 

    “If loud drums are what it takes to bring people to Jesus, play ‘em until my ears bleed.”

    In that moment, however - at least from where I sat - Johnny Hunt was the outlier. 

    In addition to loud drums, the list of the profane included jeans, tattoos, sneakers, clothes that showed skin or wear, unnatural hair colors, and so on. These were battlegrounds across the nation, but especially in the southeast. Churches split over splitting hairs, members were expelled for stepping out of line, and, perhaps worst of all, outsiders were never allowed in to begin with. The American Evangelical church was a bubble carefully guarded by precise guidelines and expectations. Instead of a family, we had an exacting and vengeful HOA. 

    It was this concept of maintaining separation from the profane that drove nearly every aspect of evangelical life. It motivated a forceful push-back against the liberal tide through conservative political action, faith-based education, and internally produced media. This greenhouse ecosystem was designed to prevent the children, in particular, from ever experiencing any contact with the secular world whatsoever. The irony of this dogged isolationism is that it produced a subculture that was not in the world, but it was of the world. It was temporally-minded, self-centered, product-focused, and appearance-prioritizing tribalism that devastated souls and dishonored the name of God. It was the very worst kind of profanity. 

    From 1999 to 2008, church membership in America dropped from 70% to 61%. 

    Nine percent in nine years; an unprecedented decline. Obviously, something or somebody must be to blame, and in most of my circles the culprit was assumed to be postmodernism: The Church is dying because the times are evil and the culture has forgotten God. However, there were dissenting voices in the great wide spectrum of Christianity that had other ideas: Perhaps the Church is dying because God’s people have forgotten their mission. 

    And so all of the misfits who had been left out, pushed out, and run out of the mainstream church staged a coup. Tattooed young rebels in torn-up jeans played the drums as loud as they could in warehouses, schools, backyards, theaters, and anywhere else they could find to host a church plant on Sunday morning because they wanted to bring people to Jesus. Come as you are, they shouted, you belong here. Ministries sprouted up left and right founded on the principle that regardless of history and outward appearance, God pursues the ones he loves. 

    The buzzword was “relevant”, but perhaps a more accurate term would be “accessible.” We were done with petty exclusivity and shiny facades. 

We took our church clothes and we burned them.

    Now, this is the part of the show where we stop and acknowledge that I am not relaying new information. You can step into any mainstream American church today and hear “church culture” disavowed and criticized. Visit any standard church website and see reassurances that there is no dress code, come as you are, all are welcome. Established bodies and plants alike constantly work to distance themselves from the inhospitality linked to the Evangelical identity, and good for them! The renewed zeal for the essentials of the Gospel has been immensely encouraging to my faith. 

    From the music to the clothes to the signs outside the entrance, accessibility has become one of the most vital considerations of ministry. Will it meet people? Will it encourage people? Will it show Jesus to people? If the answer isn’t “no”, let’s all calm down. Even at my fairly conservative family-oriented church, the worship leaders have tattoos and the preachers are wearing sneakers. 

    So this is a good thing, right? 

    Yes…? 

    But also, no. 

    It’s inevitable that anything that connects with people will become popular, and anything that becomes popular will be commodified. And lo, we have famous pastors, worship leaders, and cultural figures whose celebrity is derived from the very anti-establishment sentiments we just talked about. Do we drag them out to the guillotine for this? Nah, not today. The mob is just as responsible for commodification as the leadership, if not more so. We’re consumers. It’s what we do. 

    It’s more or less a fact that counter-culture will always go mainstream; it will just be a more palatable, watered-down version of itself. And so here we are, in the midst of a new brand of mainstream cultural Christianity, and it is just as harmful and inaccessible as our parents’ practice. 

    So I guess that’s what this essay is about. We can point fingers all day, but what are we doing wrong? And how do we do better?

    The primary thing I think we need to admit to is the rise of Shiny Church™. We’ve been accused of choosing style over substance for years, but let’s own that for a second and really dig into it. One can more obviously see the tendency toward superficiality in megachurches, but the truth is that we’re all guilty of it: Shiny Church isn’t just about numbers. It deals in a specific aesthetic, vocabulary, and currency. 

    I think most of you reading this have a good sense of what I mean by aesthetic and vocabulary. You’ve observed this on some level, and you more or less agree. We can unpack all those things some other day. However, it’s worth sitting for a moment on the currency element of contemporary mainstream Christianity: The quickest means of earning status in the Millennial Church is the evidence of faith. 

    We perform righteousness. We do. We do it for likes on Instagram, and status in our faith communities, and money. We do it in the exact same way that believing people have for thousands of years, we just have different tools at our disposal. We know this about ourselves and we do it anyways, for our own gain and our own glory. And the really messed up thing is that we talk about this literally all the time. On Instagram. 

    Real quick: I’d like to propose that pious captions do not cancel out performative imagery. I’m sure I’ll get on that high horse for a whole essay someday, but for now here’s what I’ve got to say (And truly, I mean this as kindly as I can): 

    Before you assume that your position as a Christian Influencer is okay because you post to share faith and encouragement, please consider whether or not the medium is cancelling the message. A picture is worth a 1,000 words, and you can only cram 2,200 characters into a caption. The photo’s gonna win. Be careful. 

    And in truth, that’s all I’m saying. We need to stay alert and be careful. Patting ourselves on the back is not going to protect us from going the same way as the past generations we want so badly to be different from. The preachers are wearing sneakers, sure, but now they have price tags for thousands of dollars. The garb of dissention has become the uniform of the new establishment, and it signals wealth and opulence and cool instead of accessibility. 

The fact is, we are building a religion that our children will reject.

     There’s this concept of generational cycles in the Bible, specifically in the Old Testament. It’s one of the things the Children of Israel are best known for, actually. God does something amazing, works some sort of incredible miracle and delivers the nation from their enemies hands, and everybody’s way into it. Until, you know. They aren’t. Over and over again, we see Israel fall away from the Lord into idolatry and cultural sin so fast it gives us whiplash. How could anybody be that flakey? Didn’t all those people just see a Red Sea parted? Didn’t those people just now see the walls of Jericho brought down to dust? Who even are these people? 

   Well, I’d argue that it starts making a lot more sense when read in context. And not only that, but it also starts to look uncomfortably familiar. In Judges 2, we see a generation of Israel confronted with their disobedience by the angel of the Lord and turning immediately to repentance (v. 2-5). But as time passes, things begin to slide: 

    “After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what He had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals.”

    Judges 2:10-11

    The people had no firsthand knowledge of who God was, and so they lost their reverence; the Why behind the What. Whether or not we want to admit it, the truth is that time plus repetition equals ritual without context. Faith becomes religion, and religion is flexible and self-serving. This is the mistake we make when we elevate “the way we do church” above the Gospel; while that mindset is certainly harmful to us, the real victims will be the generation who comes after us. We will leave an inheritance of empty language and misguided pageantry, and there will be no way to distinguish between the worship of the Living God and the worship of everything else. 

    In addition to generational cycles, continuing on through Judges reveals the even more disappointing pattern of cultural cycles. Starting in Judges 3, we see the beginning of a familiar scenario: 

    “The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord; they forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Asherahs. The anger of the Lord burned against Israel so that He sold them into the hands of Cushan-Rishathaim king of Aram Naharaim, to whom the Israelites were subject for eight years.  But when they cried out to the Lord, He raised up for them a deliverer, Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, who saved them.” 

    Judges 3:7-9

    The passage goes on to say that after the eight years of captivity it took for Israel to repent, the land enjoyed forty years of peace under the new leader Othniel (v. 11). Considering the average lifespan at that time, neither eight nor forty years was too terribly long. But then, Othniel died. 

    “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and because they did this evil the Lord gave Eglon king of Moab power over Israel.”

    Judges 3:12

    Hooh, boy. That was quick. And, once again, Israel was given over into captivity as punishment for their sin - this time for eighteen years (v. 14). Which still wasn’t that long, if you really think about it. Clearly it was just long enough, though, and the people realized their error and cried out for deliverance again. Likely a lot of the same people, if you really think about it. The point is, God raised up another champion and the land had peace for eighty years. And that is, actually, a pretty long time. 

    But then: 

    “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, now that Ehud was dead.”

    Judges 4:1

    Twenty years of captivity, forty years of peace. 

    “The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites.”

    Judges 6:1

    Just this little slice of history, Judges 3 through 6, 206 years total, includes four distinct instances of the Israelites leaving God. Considering the average lifespan during this point in history appears to be between 100 and 120, we are absolutely not talking about the result of a faithful generation dying out and the kids ruining everything. These were the same people ruining everything, over and over.

It’s the difference between a people with no firsthand knowledge and a people who know and simply forget.

    But why? How? What is the sin the Israelites keep doing that’s so terrible, and why is it relevant to a conversation about the modern church? 

To really understand that, we have to define what it is that scripture keeps referring to as “evil.” Let’s go back to the beginning of Judges 3:

    “The Israelites lived among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. They took their daughters in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods.”

    Judges 3:5-6

    What we see here is a progression of compromises. The people of Israel, who have finally come into the land they were promised when they left Egypt, are surrounded by people groups who have their own customs, practices, and gods. In fact, in verse 4 it explicitly states that the Lord left those people in the land on purpose to see if Israel would remain loyal to Him when it was no longer convenient. As we’ve already seen, the answer was “no.” And it started when the Israelites began playing by the world’s rules instead of staying obedient to the word given to them through Moses. We do evil when we forget God, and we forget God when we begin to allow grey areas in our loyalty.  

    And this happens fast in the absence of good leadership.

    “All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshiped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced.” 

    2 Kings 17:7-8 (emphasis mine)

   Note the difference here from the pattern we saw in Judges. Rather than bringing the people back into right relationship with the Lord, the leaders in this passage doubled down on the idolatry of the nation. 

    Idolatry. 

    There’s a heavy word for you. 

    If you’ve been around the church scene for a minute, I don’t have to tell you that an idol isn’t just a statue made out of wood or stone. An idol is anything we put before God. It can be a thing, but it can also be a person or an idea. Essentially, any noun. That being said, don’t allow the broad strokes of the concept to allow you to miss the nuance. 

    One of the most famous and specific accounts of Israel turning to idolatry comes just after the miracle of being freed from Egyptian slavery. As Moses is literally speaking to God on Mount Sinai, the people below start getting antsy. 

    “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’”

    Exodus 32:1

    And there it is. That, right there, is the whole thing spelled out. Israel turned to idols when they forgot the immanence of God. They no longer perceived Him as present, so they had something created that would be. 

    “He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, ‘These are your gods,  Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’

     When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.”

    Exodus 32:4-5  

    Don’t skip over Aaron trying to shoehorn this created thing into the worship of the Living God. How many of our idols fall under the umbrella of “church”? How many of the things we build altars to in our hearts masquerade as “ministry” or “Christian Values”? How many of those things do we hold onto because they provide the same comfort to us that the calf provided to Israel? 

    The calf offered something tangible. It was a physical, empirical thing that the people could see and touch and dance around. In contrast to the invisible God they had followed out of Egypt and the leader who had disappeared to speak to Him, all of their senses confirmed that this entity was real and present. 

    In addition to that, the calf offered something familiar. The Egyptian religious tradition was centered on a pantheon of gods who were worshiped in man-made forms, and the Israelites had been in Egypt a long, long time. The God who had brought them out was almost a foreign thought, and the unknown can be frightening. Why not seek comfort in the same old thing? 

    Last of all, the calf offered something immediate. They didn’t have to wait on someone else’s timing for a next step. We want a thing. Aaron, make us a thing. Here, take our stuff. Make the thing. No waiting, no delays. Just quick, controllable results; Here’s the thing. 

    The golden calf isn’t just a silly joke. In this account, we see a reflection of every systemic solution to the discomfort of reckoning with the mystery of God. Idols are systems, and systems are an inevitable component of organized religion. Whether we’re looking at the Catholic tradition, the Orthodox tradition, or the Baptist tradition, the trap of systems can’t be avoided. We are constantly striving to invent a means of ensuring our own holiness. We want control of our own destiny, and so we either create a new system or we fall back on an old one. 

    “By some such stubborn tendency toward error Fundamentalism in our day is moving back toward spiritual slavery. The observation of days and times is becoming more and more prominent among us. ‘Lent’ and ‘holy week’ and ‘good’ Friday are words heard more and more frequently upon the lips of gospel Christians. We do not know when we are well off.”

    A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

    This is not to say that all ritual is unequivocally harmful; let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I actually have a great affection for the church calendar, which I talked about at length in my last blog Joy & Light. And, beyond my personal feelings, it cannot be denied that scripture commands us to do certain things at certain times for certain purposes. It always comes down to context, and ritual within context is beautiful. In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul gives us an excellent template for how we should approach this element of faith:

    “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

    1 Corinthians 11:23-26

    Remembrance. What we do, we do to remember. We do to acknowledge. We do to set our eyes on the Kingdom of God, both as it is now and as it is to come. This applies both to ancient rituals and the rituals we have developed in more recent years. Liturgy and rock church, commentaries and Bible studies, feasts and conferences -  All function as a formal means of worshiping God by remembering who He is, what He’s done, and what He’s promised to do. Ritual within context is beautiful. Still, let us not be so arrogant that we miss the advent of our own idolatrous systems. 

And can we avoid that trajectory? Can we, really?

   Honestly? No. 

    We can strive, and police, and obsess over every cultural moment, but it won’t be enough. All of the sneakers and impeccably torn tees in the world cannot save us. We, as a culture at large, will go the way of our parents, our grandparents, and the children of Israel. We have to; it’s been the most basic truth of human nature since the Fall. We simply cannot escape failure, and thus we cannot escape the disdain of our descendants at large. 

    But. 

    (And praise God that there is always a “but.”)

    That is not to say we cannot operate within our culture with integrity as individuals. We can, and indeed must, keep showing up in our churches, our communities, and yes -  Even online. There is no reason we shouldn’t declare the glory of the Lord everywhere we are, and that does include Instagram. Far be it from me to insist we seclude ourselves from public places so that the sacred is never “tainted.” The practice of sharing testimony on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is as much ritual as anything else, and ritual within context is beautiful. We just need to keep a finger on the pulse of our intentions and our audience. Per 1 Corinthians 8:11, we’re responsible for the little Christians who might stumble over our Shiny Christian™ images and miss the meat of what we want to say. 

    Stay alert and be careful. 

    That is what we can do. We can take stewarding the faith of the younger people in our lives with all the gravity that it deserves.  We can teach and disciple and live out the truths we claim to represent. Instead of clamoring on about Christian Values or joining lynch mobs on Twitter, we can daily lay down our lives and take up our crosses and be like Jesus. Even when nobody’s watching. And, most of all, we can live in humility. So that when our children reject the hypocrisy of our systems, we cheer them on. 

    Lord willing, the kids are coming for our church clothes. Chances are it’s already beginning. They will build a bonfire out of our sneakers for the sake of the Gospel, and Lord willing we will be the ones handing them the matches. Or, if you like, the torch. 

    May they continue the work of building the Kingdom of God on our ashes. 

“Then we Your people, the sheep of Your pasture,

will praise You forever;

from generation to generation,

we will proclaim Your praise.”

Psalm 79:13

- Kyle