Holy Rock `n' Rollers

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 5, 1999 | by Julia Duin

A group of progressive pastors wants to use pop culture -- not fight it -- to make church relevant to youths. The text for their sermons is more likely to lie Star Wars than St. Matthews.

When it comes to shifts in popular culture, the people with their ears to the ground aren't always the advertisers, the musicians and the filmmakers. Sometimes they are ministers.

"The church is learning to pay attention at a faster rate," says Doug Pagitt, 32, an administrator with the Dallas-based Leadership Network. He and 150 youth pastors recently attended the "Ministry on the New Edge" conference in Maryland, where they focused on generation X and its younger siblings who inhabit a culture with a whole new take on religion -- one that is driven by pop culture.

No doubt that youth culture reigns at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Md., which hosted the conference. This spring, the church posted a marquee proclaiming a sermon series "God in the Movies" (The Truman Show, Amistad, The Apostle and Wag the Dog). The narthex immediately inside the front doors of the church is arranged like a spiritual Starbucks: Couches, chairs and tables beckon the visitor to sit awhile and partake of coffee and bagels on Sunday mornings. The church is filled with comfortable pine green chairs, amassed in front of a stage with no altar -- just a small, wooden cross.

Other churches are working to find ways to flow into the 21st century, as several young Turks of evangelical Christianity pointed out during the conference. "The typical service uses methods that are decades old and a model based around a lengthy sermon," says the Rev. Richard Dobbins of Emerge Ministry in Akron, Ohio. "... Church is no longer a central part of peoples' lives. In the forties, it was central. Now it's peripheral."

What is central is pop culture, which is why the notion of pop-singer Alanis Morissette playing the part of God in the recently released movie Dogma is not far-fetched, says Pagitt. "She's been spiritually on in her last two albums, so she gets to speak for God" he says. "People who listen to her music say, `That's what my experience was.'"

Some find fault with the theology associated with this movement, which is heavily into concepts of relativity, points of view and context. But for postmoderns, "absolutes aren't possible because they presuppose objectivity" says Pagitt. "Absolute truth is a construct. It doesn't exist in reality, only in theory." The Bible is not absolute truth in this construct, but "it is viewed as very authoritative"

Texas multimillionaire Bob Buford, the moneyman behind the movement, doles out $3 million a year to finance the Leadership Network, which puts out a stream of faxes and sophisticated publications touting its conferences. "What people here are doing is thinking through what'll be the future" says Buford. "These are spiritual venture capitalists, investing in the future. We're trying to help churches be effective at what they do. And when they are effective, they transform the culture."