The Post-Modern Church Walks Into a Bar

A few weeks ago, Jess and Eden went out of town to Kentucky for a few days, leaving me at home here in Maryland. Though Maryland is, indeed, beginning to feel like home, I wasn't much in the mood to be by myself, and so I ventured out to the bar of a restaurant in a more hip part of Annapolis. I sat down at the bar, ordered some food and drink, and pulled out my notebook and Bible to start working on lesson plans.

Occasionally I would look up and feel wholly lost. There were lots of couples; dating couples and married couples. There were groups of friends, dressed a bit too nice for the atmosphere, and, crowded at the bar with me, legions of single and divorced men, to whom I've taken a liking to meeting and engaging in conversation. Behind the bar were, of course, the bartenders, who I always find interesting. Bartenders are typically the smartest and hardest working people in the restaurant, make nearly the most money of all the restaurant employees, and almost always are using bartending as a means to do something else with their life. Watch bartenders: they'll either crash and burn in a few months, or be gone within a couple of a years doing something successful.

Every patron in the bar was trying to answer the same question and quench the same thirst. It was a Friday night, and no one wanted to be alone. The allure of a crowded, noisy, poorly lit environment drew in the masses. By 10pm, no one seemed to mind anymore if the bar wasn't the actual answer to loneliness. A community of lonely people erupted into a community of those who chose to try to solve their one-night problem. Everyone cheered louder, drank more, wore less, and I quickly realized it was time for me to leave. I had arrived with the same question as everyone else but realized I had answered it incorrectly. Rather than stay and convince, I realized the largest statement I could make was to follow my own convictions.

The liberalism and Christian complacency of the 19th and 20th centuries has brought many American Christians to the same party. We have all begun asking the same questions, feeling the sense of urgency that betrays our silent condition. But, as it is during the beginning steps of all transitions, most of the answers we're coming up with are dead wrong. Christians have not betrayed the poison respectability that weakened the Modernist church; they have simply re-framed it by the murder of our parents for their sins and downplaying the most important point of the Gospel: God is just, yet wants to show mercy and grace. Therefore Christ must bear the punishment of sins. Christ then conquered death, allowing us to do the same. This brings us to peace with God.

The Christian party is filled with voices that want to talk about everything else the Gospel may be about, for fear of irrelevance, and as if their parents weren't guilty of the exact same crime. Do you really think that the church became smaller because of a commitment to the simple, rich truth of grace and peace through Jesus Christ? "Relevance" is nothing more than respectability. Pursuing relevance through respectability, for a Christian, is covert and a lie. Jesus never sought respectability; he didn't need to. Jesus delivered his message unapolegetcally, as did the apostles. It got them killed. It got them exiled. But it also led to the mass conversion of many souls. They gave up the notion that they could ever earn the world's respect. Those very basic facts paint a different picture than the one being promoted by the conversants of my generation and that of my older brothers and sisters.

The right questions are not the right answers. Honesty may be the beginning of integrity, but it is not the whole of it. I am indebted to those who have started the conversation, but let's not pretend for an instant that we're arriving at anywhere near the same answers as the martyrs and fathers.