From an article at Patrol Mag:

But so many twenty-somethings are not calling themselves “post-evangelical” because they know too little theology or have put too small an effort into synthesizing it with reality. They have come from the most apologetics-obsessed generation of Christians in American history, and have realized that many of their prepared answers are for questions that no one is asking. Adrift in the cultural sea, many turned to traditions and theological systems of the past, only to find those similarly unequipped to address the questions of our time. The only choice has been to begin the messy and at times overwhelming process of drafting something new.

The old article is a must-read. HT to iMonk on Twitter.

According to a new Pew Research Center study:

If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, roughly 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

My initial response – welcome to post-evangelicalism, folks.  Denominations don’t matter to a large number of evangelicals anymore.  All sorts of other things – primarily music and programs for kids – have taken over.  In another couple of years, the study will show probably another 44% change, or even higher, and once again denomination shifting will play a role.

This about sums up the mentality about evangelism that you find in American evangelicalism.

Citing his famous 4% statistic (that’s how many current Christian teens will end up “Bible-believing adults”), Ron Luce says in a front-page New York Times (!) article about Christian teenagers:

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

What’s really ironic about Ron Luce’s pessimism is that Teen Mania and ATF are not some unique effort striving to keep teens going with real Christianity while everyone else is failing.  ATF-style events are standard fare in evangelical teen ministries, and they’re failing miserably.  In other words, Ron, it’s your version of youth “ministry” that teens are walking away from.

Why isn’t it working?  The article gives the following statement:

Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.

Which is true.  Joel Hunter at the BHT adequately responds, and nails the problem:

Replacing one religion with another. The problem is that christianized commodities and sanctified amulets do not address the religiousness of the religion of hookups, swinging, or greed. Thus, these evangelicals have no good news of grace with which to counter those things they rightfully deplore.

“No good news of grace.”  All the marketing and Christian subculture crap is annoying, but it’s rooted in an incredible lack of the good news of grace in youth ministry.  In most youth ministries, “Grace” = “Power to Not Sin” (particularly sexually).  Once again, Joel sums up the problem well:

Until our culture’s religion of sexualization is addressed at the level of a religion, with all of its dead-end promises, then all of our alternative attempts to create a bionic superego in our children will be futile. Here’s a test: would you be willing to preach Rom 8:1 straight up, even if you knew half your teenagers and young adults under your care were succumbing to the cultural ethos of sexuality? If we lose “There is therefore now no condemnation,” then we’ve lost everything.

Grace.  Scary stuff, that is.  It’s scared all our youth ministers into moralism and Christian versions of MTV.

God help us.

I’m sure the suggestion would be utterly appalling to Ingrid of Slice of Laodicea. But I think she needs a good lesson in deconstruction. Read the following (HT to iMonk):

When I hear of churches comprised of Christians with mohawks, body piercings, and worship music that sounds like a rehearsal for hell, I am concerned. Before we are Christians, we are all a mess, whether it shows on the outside or not. Nobody can criticize the unregenerate for observing pagan practices of tattoos, multiple piercings, and bizarre hairstyles and immodest or extreme clothing. With the rejection of God comes the rejection of moderation, modesty, etc. But what about after a person is converted? Should they continue to walk around looking like Satan’s own? Should there not be a transformation of appearance in those who have been converted by the power of God? If I dress like a goth with black eyeliner and black lipstick, wear black trench coats, etc., would you not wonder what was going on in my heart? Would not Jesus remove the desire to dress in extreme fashions that scream of alienation, hatred and evil? I say a resounding yes! If a woman is a prostitute, would there not be an immediate desire to cover her body when Jesus comes to reside in her? I am troubled by the idea that because it is “Seattle” or “New York” or any other urban area that somehow spiritual maturity and growth in this area is no longer expected. Our dress is not neutral. Goths and prostitutes dress in specific ways because they are sending a message. When I dress in the morning I send a message, whether I intend to or not. My children know that when I wear office attire, I have business to attend to that day outside the home. My clothing sends a message. If I show up at a wedding wearing jeans and a t-shirt, I am sending a message. Likewise, if after conversion, I dress like a pagan who has never met Christ, I am sending a message that meeting Jesus Christ has no practical effect on my life, that the moral anarchy of the world is still in my heart. People will frequently cite Hudson Taylor’s wearing the garb of the nation where he worked as an excuse to wear blue mohawks to minister to today’s youth. We are living in a country that still has certain norms. Blue mohawks, mercifully, are not the norm here. Hudson Taylor was simply acknowledging that he was working with the Chinese. His attire didn’t scream rebellion and hate and despair, it was simply Chinese. I doubt highly that his wife would have dressed like a Chinese prostitute to carry out her work there. If Jesus came to save us out of these lifestyles of sin, why would we want to dress that way to carry such a message? New believers need good discipleship and teaching after they are saved. If our pastors and church leaders patronize these people by attempting to look and sound like the world, how can spiritual growth and maturity take place? These are some of the issues that come to mind after watching Mark Driscoll’s video. I remember the maniac of Gadera in the Scriptures. He didn’t keep wearing the chains and rags he had on when he was demonically possessed. When Jesus came, he was transformed and he was clothed and clean and in his right mind. You cannot encounter Jesus and still remain as you were and I would think that would include your appearance to the world.

Where to begin? I guess we can just put it simply: Where is the list in Scripture of how we can and cannot dress? Commands concerning modesty can be found, but how does a mohawk communicate modesty or immodesty?

She’s concerned about clothing that communicates rebellion. But how does a mohawk or black lipstick communicate rebellion against Scripture when no command in Scripture dictates that one not wear a mohawk or black lipstick?

The parallels between mohawks, clothing worn by prostitutes, and the chains of the Garasene demoniac is plainly absurd.

The problem lies here: Ingrid is unaware of her own prejudices and presuppositions about what is “normal.” Listen: if mohawks, tattoos, and goth clothing represent rebellion against Scripture, show me where (and let’s please avoid that one out-of-context reference to the tattoos, m’kay?). If you can’t show me where (and you can’t, so don’t bother), then we must conclude that the rebellion is against Ingrid’s own preferences and conclusions about what is “normal.” And Ingrid’s normalcy becomes the standard for everyone, with the approval of God stamped on it.

Plainly put, if a blue mohawk represents rebellion against bad authority, what exactly is the problem? Didn’t Jesus “rebel” against bad, legalistic “authority” in Israel?

“We are living in a country that still has norms.” Right. White, middle class, prejudiced norms.

“Blue mohawks, mercifully, are not the norm here.” “Mercifully”? Why? Where is the biblical prohibition of a blue mohawk? The prejudice in this statement is manifest.  The real irony is that if blue mohawks were the norm, Ingrid would be saying, “Short, neat hair, mercifully, is not the norm here.”

And furthermore, the parallel to Hudson Taylor is absurd. Hudson Taylor dressed like the Chinese to win them over, and we can of course dress like Americans to communicate the gospel, just so long as we only dress like the “normal” ones. And “normal” = Ingrid.

To hell with the abnormal ones (literally). We’ll just stick to dressing like and evangelizing the normal Americans, who, surprisingly (even though they are unbelievers), dress just like us.

Clothing does send a message. Ingrid just needs her prejudices deconstructed in order to better hear what message other people are sending, rather than just concluding that notIngrid = notNormal.

I can feel a new “Fred the Fundamentalist” episode coming on…

Alastair lays the smack down on loony American evangelicalism.  I just gotta say this plainly: these are all the things I’ve been wanting to say about American evangelicalism, but just haven’t done so, aside from in private conversation with my wife.  Here’s hoping Alastair’s sentiments encourage a bit more bravery in myself and others on these issues (without losing love, of course).

Is there any section of the Church that is more messed up than what passes under the name of Evangelicalism? Like it or not, most people who call themselves evangelicals in the US and the UK today are holding a form of religion that only bears a tenuous relationship to the historic Christian faith. Whilst we would like to quibble about the historic meaning of the term and complain that it has been hijacked by fruitcakes, there comes a time when we simply have to accept the fact that the term ‘evangelical’ now carries a radically different meaning to anything that it ever held in the past. The weird, the heretical, the fad-driven, the fruity, the fanatical, the culturally and intellectually bankrupt has become the mainstream.

People, evangelicalism is a greater threat to Western civilization than Islam is. Islam may oppose the Christian faith, but modern evangelicalism trivializes, parodies and cheapens it to the extent that it is no longer deemed worthy of opposition and cannot be taken seriously. With all of its handwaving emotionalism, kitschy culture, intellectual vacuity, collective narcissism and blinkered politics, modern evangelicalism demands all the respect of a shabby circus freak.

Not that I know anything about the South, being the Yankee that I am, but Wyman Richardson has some excellent reflections on Flannery O’Connor’s statement about the South’s being “Christ-haunted” that are applicable to us all:

Kierkegaard spoke often, if shrilly, of the need to recapture Christianity for Christendom. Such is the case today. “We in the South may be in the process of exorcising this ghost which has given us our vision of perfection,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. Good. Let us exorcise the ghost of the phantom Christ that comes to us on the last whispering remnants of the almost-completely-gone culture of the Bible Belt and renew ourselves in the concrete reality of nails, wood, bread, wine, flesh and blood: “the blunt assertion” of fact. “The Christ of faith over the Christ of history,” the neo-orthodox used to say, as if the a-historical phantom of a God was enough. It is not.

One must be centered on the Christ who lives in the realm of raw fact, Waugh’s “blunt assertion”: fact that cannot be explained away by the nuances and sophistry of wordsmiths and theologians gone awry but rather that must be confronted and responded to in all of its glorious and embarrassing naked starkness. Give us the real Jesus who spoke real words and whose story is recorded in a real book. Give us a real church of flesh and blood people who are committed to this real Christ. And away with the ghosts.

I put my favorite line in bold.  You can read the whole thing at Communio Sanctorum.

Brad the Broken Messenger and I might have differed on Harry Potter in times past, but he’s taken a strong and necessary stand against Guilt By Association (GBA) “discernment,” particularly of the kind that goes on at a blog that I haven’t been able to stomach reading for more than about 12 seconds before I clicked somewhere else. 

I think that its time that those who blog and affirm TULIP, Calvinism and Reformist teaching to take a hard look at one of thier own, and if justified, to stand up against the kind of blogging that resorts to ridicule and false triumphalism that appears to be mainstays in much of its content.

Good luck with the fallout from this one, Brad.

Paul Owen at Communio Sanctorum posted Five Questions that he asks himself these days. They’re an excellent summary of questions that a lot of evangelicals need to ask themselves, particularly those who are terribly disconnected from the historic church. Be sure to read them and ask yourself the same questions, if you need to.

If you’re having trouble answering them, check out Blue Raja’s answers at BHT.

At BHT, Matthew Johnson posted these words to a "worship song" sung at their church this morning.  This almost makes me want to become one of those "exlusive psalm" folks.  Seriously…I’d sing something like that to my wife, if only the lyrics weren’t so cheesy, trite, and cliche.  How does this possibly count as a "worship" song?  Which pastor or worship leader in his right mind is letting this junk be sung to Almighty God as part of "worship"? 

There.  My rant is now over.

Gaines has a series of links on Worship Leaders and Theology that probably addresses these issues well, though I haven’t had a chance to read the articles yet.