Another great article from Christiantiy Today. This is an excerpt from a new book (which I haven’t read), but this is good stuff. Most of this post will be lengthy quotes from the article, because he says it very well. The author, Paul Grant, states:

Admit it: you want to be cool…Cool is all around us, saturating our culture. We can’t escape it. Cool informs both our mundane activities and our significant decisions. It is an attitude, a habit, a worldview, a feeling. Sometimes we control cool, but sometimes it controls us. And sometimes, cool reduces us to extras in somebody else’s fantasy—passers-by to whom he or she can feel superior.

This is thought provoking stuff. And I have to admit that I feel the pull to be cool, to be accepted. He goes on:

I define cool as the private performance of rebellion for rebellion’s sake.

First of all, cool is private. It is individualistic from beginning to end, even when small groups of in-the-know insiders are involved; even in tight-knit cliques, membership is less about faithful friendship and looking out for each other, and more about excluding outsiders.

Second, cool is a performance. Cool exists to show off to an uncool audience. And since performance is always immediate, cool does not care about yesterday or tomorrow, only about right now.

Third, cool is about rebellion. Cool communicates categorical disrespect for authority. Cool accepts no limits on behavior and no limits on identity insisting instead on an individual authority to define oneself, and to know others without being known. That’s why sunglasses are cool. They allow the wearers to look at the world without revealing who they are.

Finally cool’s rebellion is for its own sake. There are many reasons that people rebel, from injustice to petty disagreements, but normal rebellion ends when the conflict is resolved. Not so with cool: cool shows universal contempt for authority extending across all space and time. Cool is never done being cool. Since this contempt for authority applies to traditional and current affairs alike, we can say that cool exists outside of time.

Wow…how do we live in this highly, individualistic culture in which “coolness” drips at every turn or click? Grant says:

If we are going to live whole, healthy lives, we’re going to have to step away from the shame and fear we hide behind cool. Authentic faith is uncool in the sense that it is unashamed. Christians are far richer than the empty bravado behind cool because our story is a great story: a God dies to give us life in abundance. And once we’ve begun to live uncool, our story will get ever sweeter.

He finishes with some powerful statements about resting in the community in which God’s love is known and experienced.

Here then is the crossroads we face: a cool moment, or a freeing, healthy life in Christ. We can’t have both. The church’s greatest power lies in its being the “beloved community—the supernatural community created by none other than God himself through his Spirit. God’s love is the most deep-feeling, creative force in the universe, and the incredible truth is that this love lives in the church. In its sharing of Christ’s suffering, and in its practice of inclusive hospitality, the beloved community displays cool’s fundamental phoniness to the world. Cool in one corner, and the love God gives his followers in the other? It’s not even a fair fight. The beloved community shatters cool’s rebellion.

As God’s people living out the full life Jesus promised, the freedom Paul claimed for us, the beloved community must escape the cult of cool. We’re so used to pursuing cool that being uncool is scary. But what other honest option do we have? We have been given Jesus’ words of life, and stewarding those words in a world suffering the effects of cool is a serious matter. Jesus proved his kingship by dying as a contemptible criminal. Following his example, we can and must die to ourselves. We must die to cool. But when we open our hearts for Christ’s sake, we will live authentically: at the level of human suffering, as theologian Ray Aldred has said, because that is where God’s power is greatest. The sooner we understand the impossibility of the church’s being simultaneously cool and authentic, the better.

Shane+