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"To think that world-changing vision could be cast again to a new generation for a new era gets them excited," Tchividjian said. "Even the old people get excited, because they remember what happened here 30 years ago."

But it's New City's church culture that Tchividjian plans to bring to Coral Ridge. Scott Spell, New City's pastor of administration and body life, took a course taught by Tchividjian at RTS Orlando. He sees remarkable consistency between Tchividjian's original vision for New City and the church today. Then as now, Tchividjian defends his vision with theological rationales unbowed by changing circumstances. And having lived outside South Florida for 10 years, he balances an outsider's critique of cultural idols with an insider's familiarity. He makes little effort to impress the region's beautiful people. Of course, the attempt to be cool is one sure sign that you are not. Skeptical young seekers, as Tchividjian was as a teenager, reject such posturing.

"Younger generations don't want trendy engagement from the church; in fact, they're suspicious of it," Tchividjian writes in Unfashionable. "Instead, they want truthful engagement with historical and theological solidity that enables meaningful interaction with transcendent reality. They want desperately to invest their life in something worth dying for, not some here-today-gone-tomorrow fad."

New City practices what theologian Ed Clowney called "doxological evangelism." Last Halloween, New City opted for an outreach event quite different from the bounce houses and fall festivals preferred by some churches. New City members invited neighbors and family to see the church in worship, complete with the old liturgy and a mix of hymns, contemporary songs, and even the Psalter.

"If you want your friends to know New City, come and watch her worship her Lord," Spell said. "You'll know much more about us when you see the God we worship and how we respond to him in worship than if you were to come and the kids get their faces painted."

When I asked Tchividjian what experiences shaped his views on cultural change, I expected to hear about his conversion, which is where Unfashionable begins. Instead, he mentioned two books he read while an undergraduate in 1994. The first, Os Guinness's Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity, takes church-growth strategies to task. Guinness's critique resonated with Tchividjian's experiences in churches that over-contextualize the gospel. Another book published in 1993, David Wells's No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? shaped his views on how to appropriately apply theology to the times. Reading Wells led Tchividjian to the writing of theologian-sociologist Peter Berger, whose phrase "against the world for the world" found its way into Tchividjian's vocabulary.

Like Manhattan pastor Tim Keller, Tchividjian believes biblical fidelity holds the Reformed and Anabaptist views on church and culture in creative tension. "Why haven't any Christ/culture models taken over the orthodox world the way other doctrines have? Why can't we come to consensus?" Keller asked when we discussed Tchividjian. "It's because none of them really captures everything, and all of them are really good critiques of each other."

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May 2009, Vol. 53, No. 5