Post by Watchman on Apr 11, 2006 12:41:45 GMT -5
By Ron French / The Detroit News
TROY -- Ah, Easter morning, a time for families to dress up, go to church and watch "The Matrix."
Wait, that doesn't sound right. Ah, Easter Sunday, a time for reflection as you sidle up to the coffee bar in the middle of the sanctuary.
Let's try that again. Ah, Easter, a time to put on your Easter bonnet and walk through the stage-created rain shower on the proscenium stage.
It's not your father's Easter, perhaps, but it's not your father's church either. Traditions are remarkably untraditional in Metro Detroit's growing "postmodern" churches, which are successfully marketing themselves to young adults.
"I grew up in a church with hymns and pews," said Jen Lundquist, 28, of Birmingham. "I never felt connected. It was something you did on Sunday morning and felt good about and then went home."
Lundquist now attends Genesis: the Church in Royal Oak, which often shows movie clips during the service. Last week, the church showed clips from Monty Python's "Life of Brian."
"This is more real, like you're actually experiencing something rather than going through the motions," she said.
In effect, these start-up churches have replaced the pomp and circumstance of traditional church services with bells and whistles of their own. There are movie screens and coffee shops, performance artists and Led Zeppelin, all in facilities with names that sound more like nightclubs than houses of worship.
On the busiest day of the year for Christian churches, the popularity of these nontraditional and nondenominational groups is a symbol of the increasing interplay between pop culture and religion.
Fewer young adults attend church than any other age group. Only 30 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 attend church services regularly, according to one survey, compared to 40 percent of Americans overall. Many drift away from the routine of Sunday services after they leave home and don't come back until they have children.
Some don't come back at all. The number of Americans who say they have no religion rose from 9 percent in 1992 to 14 percent in 2002. Among those born after 1980, 27 percent said they had no religion.
With their emphasis on relaxed settings and hip Web sites, the churches may represent the next wave of evangelic worship, becoming for Gen-Xers what megachurches became for baby boomers in the 1980s.
"We're trying to help you feel it, smell it, see it and, most of all, make it (religion) relevant to your life," said Dave Wilson, teaching pastor at Kensington Community Church in Troy, the largest postmodern church in Metro Detroit. About 8,000 people attend services weekly at Kensington's campuses in Troy and Rochester Hills. The main church in Troy has five huge video screens. Wilson peppers his sermons with quotes from John and Paul (of the Beatles) and last week pulled out an electric guitar and played "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin.
"I knew a guy who said he'd come to church when they played Led Zeppelin there, so I played it," Wilson said. "Our goal from day one was to reach the unchurched guy, the guy who's been turned off by the church. The guy who says, 'Maybe I need to know more about this whole God thing.'"
The church has been wildly successful. Kensington held five Good Friday services and 13 Easter services, all of them "sold out" by midweek from people who downloaded free "e-tickets" off the church's Web site. The Easter services include an elaborate stage in which congregants are encouraged to walk across a 6-inch-deep pool while a stage-created rain shower falls around them.
"If we're doing bells and whistles just for bells and whistles, we're failing," said Wilson, who is also the team chaplain for the Detroit Lions. "It's like an NFL team: If you're going to keep winning, you've got to keep adapting. If we are relevant to the culture, hopefully we'll grow."
Kensington is one of more than a dozen postmodern churches in Metro Detroit and hundreds across the country that draw people with little formal church background and that stretch the definition of worship service. At Bluer in Minneapolis, the pastor sits behind a drum set; Scum of the Earth in Denver features pizza and a DJ; another church in Denver called K2 has a minister who sometimes rides into the sanctuary on a motorcycle. An Indianapolis church, The House, held a body-piercing contest.
The Journey in Clarkston has a Starbucks motif, complete with a coffee bar in the middle of the sanctuary and congregants sitting at round tables rather than in pews. "We don't sing hymns; we don't have an organ," said lead pastor Mike Harris. "We have a band, dramas and movie clips. Some people might want to sit in a pew. There are plenty of churches that offer that. But there are others who want more of an open environment."
The average age of members of The Journey is about 30. Many don't have a church background. That's the group Harris and leaders of other nontraditional churches are trying to reach.
"There are more and more people not going to church," Harris said. "They say they don't have a problem believing in God but with the relevance of the churches they've attended. They're not bad churches. But culture is shifting; family needs are shifting. There are people not being reached. The Journey was born out of a desire not to compete with other churches in our area, but to tap into that culture that is not finding an experience that is relevant to them."
Critics of nontraditional churches say they offer members God-lite. "Churches are in a difficult bind," said sociologist Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life at Boston College. "They can have a deep and satisfying religion and have few members, or have a reasonably shallow religion and have a lot of members. There's no doubt in my mind these churches are giving up seriousness."
Wolfe points to nontraditional churches' rejection of traditional music as an artistic and cultural loss. "Some of the most magnificent church music was written by Bach, and it's more inspiring than Christian rock," Wolfe said. "A whole generation of Christians is losing a taste for some of the best music ever written."
Harris says critics of nontraditional churches would think differently if they'd come to a service.
"We're evangelical conservative, very Biblical. We're definitely not liberal," Harris said. "I've got theology training and degrees. I read from the Bible. But there are a lot of people wanting to understand what the Bible is teaching without the trappings of church."
"People resonate with our honesty," said Steve Norman, lead pastor of Genesis: The Church. "We try not to teach with any pretense."
Today at Genesis, the Easter service includes movie clips from "The Matrix" and "The Truman Show." Sometimes a graphic artist, sculptor or painter creates a work of art during the sermon.
"Some people are offended by our embrace of popular culture," Norman said. "If you throw everything that is pop culture out, you're throwing out a lot of what people think about.
"Our theology is pretty similar (to traditional churches). It's our methodology that is different."
For Lundquist, churches like Genesis appeal to her generation not only because of the pop-culture settings, but because of the topics they cover.
Recently, Genesis completed a series on human sexuality that included discussions on pornography and homosexuality. "That's appealing to a lot of young people," Lundquist said. "In the past, it was always hush-hush, we're Christians and we don't struggle with those things. Here, they say we all struggle."
One of the major issues facing Gen-X churches is what will happen when their members get older. The churches haven't been around long enough to determine whether members will stay or migrate back to more traditional churches.
Already, Kensington is serving an older demographic than churches such as Genesis. "Genesis is 15 years younger than us," said Kensington's Wilson. "There are people we'll never reach. We're asking that question every month: Are we still cutting edge?"
Lundquist doesn't know what church she'll attend in 20 years. But she feels certain that Genesis won't look like it does today. Churches built around pop culture rather than tradition will change with the times.
"My children may go the other way and go to a traditional church," Lundquist said. "They'll look at Genesis and say, 'Oh, that's what my parents did.'"
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