This week, I'm giving my take on an article written for Relevant Magazine by pastor Cole NeSmith. I've been mulling for a long time on the idea of churches that strive to be cool.
One one hand, being the cool place at the moment isn't necessarily a bad thing. A wise church would use it's current popularity to further the spread of the Gospel.
We are humans, however, and our nature has us striving for the shiny, new thing, or better yet, trying to be the shiny, new thing. When a church follows this line of thinking, the results can be devastating for the congregation.
When the church wants to be cool, it realizes that the culture is constantly changing, so it will constantly change to keep up. Nothing wrong with that, except that the changes in culture always lead in one direction...toward immorality. At some point, the cool-seeking church will face a decision that causes it to pull back from the brink or go along with the destructive culture.
The landscape is littered with churches and denominations that have sacrificed God's truth in order to pursue the culture. They were at one time the strongest in Christianity, but today are toothless dragons. Their people long for the days when they were once cool, but never for the days when they were effective ministers of the Gospel.
These remind me of the churches at Sardis and Laodicea that are mentioned in Revelation 3.
So, if coolness isn't where it's at, what is? Find out tomorrow.
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