Um, urgent?

In Cultures of the Religious Right today, we discussed a 2003 manual for pastors by Dan Kimball called The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Kimball's church in Santa Cruz has reached out to young people curious about spirituality but indifferent to religion by using knowingly "retro" setups like acoustic instruments and an atmosphere more like a coffee shop than the TV show-like spectacles of megachurches like Rick Warren's Saddleback, let alone a traditional church.

Kimball claims that the generation of people in their teens and twenties now are different from any generation in the past, and that none of the forms of Christianity which worked for their predecessor generations will work for these. In particular, the strategies the likes of Warren used to reach "seekers" (people alienated by the churches they were forced to attend as children, but seeking a "purpose" for their lives) - deemphasizing religious symbols and rituals - don't work with this new generation, which thirsts for the real thing: crosses, candles, even (maybe) theology. Being "postmodern," however, they won't put up with dogmatic authority claims. The church must reach out to these people, or it's doomed to die.

Kimball's "emerging church" way to them is through "vintage Christianity," the re-presentation of traditional symbols but newly interpreted - and emphasizing the multiplicity of possible interpretations. It's like "vintage clothing," my student T insightfully pointed out, which might be used clothes or might be newly made but roughed up to look worn (indeed you'd kind of prefer it to be the latter, but not sure). Kimball provides pointers for generating spaces appealing to these "post-seeker" generations, and I decided to try to remake our classroom along those lines. I closed the shades, and put little candles all over. I moved the chairs out of rows and circles and made random-seeming clusters. I put on some Christian music. But the coup de grâce was on the screen where we project films and stuff from the internet. Kimball (p. 185) had contrasted

MODERN CHURCH (Seeker-Sensitive)
Stained glass taken out and replaced with video screens

EMERGING CHURCH (Post-Seeker-Sensitive)
Stained glass brought back in on video screens

so the washed-out image of one of the rose windows of Notre Dame in Paris (above), copied off the internet, grainy and clearly untrue to the colors of the original, shone a bluish light over the proceedings. It was pretty cool. But were lives changed? I don't think so. My students may be post-post-seeker, or rather, seeking a way to be over the whole post thing (which doesn't necessarily make the analyses of the emergent church less relevant). But there was a slightly different energy to the room...