Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Jason has had some good thoughts recently on the whole postmodern "cool" thing. It reminds me of a story I heard last week.
There's an old small country traditional Baptist church in the central valley of Calilfornia - agricultural area. They recently began burning incense in the foyer of the church. Even the traditional Baptist types who don't like the mystical hooky-spooky stuff (you know the stuff . . . the stuff Jesus likes) really thought the incense was cool. They said it helped them get into a more reverent, spiritual frame of mind. It's one change that they seem very pleased about. The thing they weren't told about the incense was that it was there for another purpose. Basically, the bathrooms, which are just off the foyer, have been so permeated over the decades by the smell of urine that the pastor found that the only way to effectively deal with it is by masking the stench with another fragrance.
It causes me to ask along with Jason if many of the expressions of cool in church these days aren't just the latest fragrance, meanwhile the smelly darkness of hearts that have only been marginally exposed to the Master are still there needing some real transformation. How 'bout this for a new Brian McLaren book . . . "A New Kind of Cover Up"?
