Alternative Worship...

David Wayne over at Jollyblogger has a post titled, The New York Times > Week in Review > Alt-Worship: Christian Cool and the New Generation Gap, in which he gives his thoughts on both the seeker sensitive and emerging church movements. He brings up some very good points, especially in addressing the aspect that these movements seem to think that Christianity must react to whatever secular culture it finds itself in. I like his following comment:

This is one of the things that bugs me about the seeker sensitive movement and the emerging church movement. Both claimed to be reactions to culture. The seeker sensitive movement reacted toward a perceived insensitivity toward cultural trends and became "tragically up to date," to borrow a phrase from George Grant. The emerging church has realized the bankruptcy of that, and they also think that the rest of the church has it all wrong too. The non-seeker sensitive churches are allegedly caught in the grip of modernity. There is a lot of truth to this, but all the emergent church has done is shucked the modern culture to embrace the postmodern culture. And, these leaders (in all fairness, maybe its only some of these leaders) see their movement as a very temporary thing.

We're sometimes told that Christianity must adapt, or die. I find that laughable. Although cultural demographics may influence our approach, they should never determine it. Our target audience is humanity, not PoMos, seekers, techno-geeks, etc. Ours is not the business of selling a worldview, much less an experience. We should be in the business of proclaiming the Truth - which is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. David closes nicely with,

The seeker sensitive church isn't the answer and neither is the emerging church. In fact, we need to get rid of the "church of what's happenin now" altogether and just have "the church" - the Bride of Christ, following Him, obeying Him, serving Him, undaunted by the changing winds of culture.