At various times in my evangelical youth group upbringing, I remember looking at youth pastors or church leaders and feeling either endeared (by how nerdy and yet believable they were) or repulsed (by how phony their attempts to be “culturally relevant” often seemed). Looking back, it’s very clear to me that the teachers and leaders I most respected and learned from were not the ones who were trying to be “cool,” but rather the ones who were honest about who they were and willing to learn about who I was.
But I don’t begrudge any youth pastor for trying to be cool. We all try to be cool. We all want to be insiders rather than outsiders. We want to be “in the know” rather than “out of the loop.” It’s a natural human tendency, as basic as our drive to want love or to conquer something. And because the temptation is so constant, it’s easy to take this pursuit-of-cool mindset for granted and not see it for the negative, does-more-harm-than-good endeavor that it often is.
In his lecture “The Inner Ring,” delivered to university students in 1944, C.S. Lewis described this pursuit of cool as being the desire to be in the “inner ring.” He spoke about the dangers of letting ourselves fall prey to the allure of the “inner ring” for the sake of being an insider, noting that “in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”
It’s not that what’s inside of inner rings is necessarily bad, Lewis is careful to point out. Rather, the problem is that the inner ring desire is often not as much for the good things that made the inner ring cool in the first place, but rather for the “delicious sense of secret intimacy” that comes with being on the inside.
Unfortunately, this motivation—to be an “inner ringer”—is widespread in the evangelical church today. So many pastors, youth pastors, and church leaders are terrified of being excluded or left behind. They want to be relevant. Do they have the right music on their iPods? Do they keep up with shows like Mad Men? Do they own a pair of Clarks Desert Boots? It’s so often just a game of catch up, of frantically maneuvering to be in the inner rings of culture and fashion rather than the dreaded periphery, where no 15-year-old churchgoer would ever be attracted, right?
Are you a wannabe cool pastor, reading all the right magazines and resources to stay up on the latest trends, or are you truly seeking to understand and appreciate what makes trends trendy in the first place? Churches today that are developing arts or film ministries, for example, should ask themselves: Do they really value the arts and film for their own sake? Or is it mostly a means to a “relevant church” end?
In McCracken’s second post, coming soon, he outlines the difference between cultivating authentic taste rather then mimicking what’s cool.
