Aromatherapy or death; or The Emerging Church Movement makes me a Christian agnostic

Seven out of ten kids who are churchgoing at age 18 aren't by age 30.

I could mention oodles of ways in which the church is 'irrelevant' to today's culture, but other people are better at complaining about that than I am.

The cliché response from the church to culture losing interest is to become more fundamentalist. Some churches see that the kids have quit going to church and started square dancing on Saturday night, so they start teaching that square dancing is sinful, it must be, because why else would kids stop going to church?



I've seen a more nuanced response in movements like the contemporary church, emergent church, and seeker-sensitive movements. These movements make it harder for me to believe that God exists.

I suppose these movements have diverse roots, but it seems that the theory behind all of them is that people aren't interested in Christianity because they're not aware of how it relates to their lives.

The phrase 'felt needs' pops up a lot. Back in the sixties, it was more common in evangelism to start the sales job with explaining to marks that they are sinners and are thus damned, and finish with a message about how Jesus will save them from hell if they become Christians.

These newer movements drop the first part of the sales job, because most sinners evidently don't feel like sin is their top problem. The modern strategy is to figure out if someone's looking for community, or healing, or entertainment, or financial stability, and then show them how Jesus can give them that.



If we can make Christianity look more like Pacific Northwest hipster spirituality with yoga mats and candles and incense and craft beer, so much the better.

This doesn't work as well as you'd think.

If you have a non-Christian friend you're trying to convert, and he drinks fair-trade coffee and is militant about recycling, the new strategy is to tell this friend about how Jesus is a militant environmentalist and social justice guru, which is true, but telling people about what Jesus likes isn't the same as encountering Jesus.

There's not a lot of magic to meeting felt needs. Christianity has to give a better sort of peace than can be had from meditation or aromatherapy. Christianity can't just meet a human need for community; people make clubs about tea and model railroads and knitting, we socialize based on who we're related to and where we live. Christianity must lead to an altogether different kind of community. Christians should use knowledge from psychology to heal people's souls, but Christianity has to provide a healing that psychology can't explain.

Relative to Jesus, things like aromatherapy, the Rotary Club, and talking cures are smaller and safer and more believable. Jesus is impossibly hard to believe in and he requires extreme things of us. If you're looking for fulfillment or esteem or peace, Christianity is probably not the shortest path to those things; at least, Jesus didn't seem to think so.

When a non-Christian finds their felt needs met in the church rather than in Jesus, this is a tragedy. If the church makes it too easy for outsiders by fulfilling their felt needs, they might stop short of a dangerous and real relationship with God.



Grandma doesn't have a good marketing department, she doesn't wear cool clothes, she doesn't listen to indie music, she doesn't have a trendy haircut, she's afraid of computers. She used her microwave as a breadbox. I wouldn't have it any other way, because Grandma and I love each other. Movements in Christianity that respond to culture's indifference to the church by trying to make Christianity more relevant scare me, because the church's job isn't relevance, its job is to be God's house, and God is content with living in a tent. The church's job isn't to make God exist, that's God's job. If God is real, our response to culture's loss of interest in the church ought to be faithful reliance on God to demonstrate himself on his own terms. It isn't.

The most useless phrase in the phrasebook

[The following is based on my journal entry from 12-30-2008, while I was in Turkey. That day, Matthew, Paul, and I went to Haya Sofya and the Blue Mosque, and the Istanbul antiquities museums. We then went to two toy stores, trying to find Silly Putty. It is likely that I had, in my pocket, the only egg of Silly Putty in the country. We then went to the spice bazaar and had supper near there at a pide and kebap shop.]

Tonight at supper, I used eight Turkish words. First, I asked the waiter, "Ingilizce konuşuyor musunuz?"--"Do you speak English?" He looked confused, like I'd mispronounced something to the point of incoherance. Onur suggests that the waiter thought that if I knew enough Turkish to ask that question, I ought to know how to order in Turkish.

Then, I said "Ben vejetaryanım"--"I am a vegetarian." The waiter pointed at the three items on the menu without meat: soup, salad, and plain cheese pide. I ordered the pide.

Pide is flatbread with melted cheese on it, typically kaşar. Some people call it Turkish pizza, but some Turks, I hear, resent this--they see pide as being in a category of its own. It does not have tomato sauce.

In restaurants in Turkey, sometimes the bill is left on your table during the whole meal--that is, the waiter will take your order, leave the bill on the table, and append it as you order more things, say drinks or desserts. This seems to me to be a sensible system that prevents bills from getting mixed up. In other restaurants, though, you'll actually have to request the bill, they won't just drop it on the table when they want you to leave. We would have been trapped in limbo if I didn't say, "Hesabı, lütfen"--"Bill, please."

As we left the restaurant, I called out, "Hoşçakal," and the waiter replied, "Güle güle." (You say goodbye differently if you are leaving or if the other party is leaving.)

I felt so ashamed when the waiter looked blankly at me when I asked him if he speaks English. It was awkward, and I have five days of awkward built up.

If I move here, awkward will be my life for months, and I won't ever be normal. That will be hard.

The day after Josh's wedding proper, the party continued. We had a barbecue, then went inside for dessert. There were four languages being thrown around. I got out my yo-yo and did tricks. Claudia tried it, and her dad teased her because she couldn't get the yo-yo to return. Claudia's dad is Chilean, so he mostly teased her in Spanish. My Spanish wasn't good enough for me to translate what he said, but it was easy to get the gist from context. (It was a fun teasing, not a mean teasing.) She would hold her mouth open--her sister, Pamela, told me that she does this when she's concentrating--her dad teased her about that, too. I said, "En boca cerrada, no entran moscas"--"Flies don't fly into closed mouths" and everyone who spoke Spanish laughed. Even the people who didn't know Spanish laughed. That was the first time that I told a joke in a language besides English. That party is probably my favorite picture of heaven.

Today was the first time I used another language when I really needed it, and that experience was more purgatorial.