Christianity Today ran some stats about the inconsistent values of teens:

24% of American teens say their prayers are answered “all the time.”
49% of teens say they’d likely attend prayer meetings before or after school.

29% of teens say they read the Bible at least once a week.
35% of teens say they never read the Bible (implying a lot of teens do).

8% of American teens say music piracy is morally wrong.
80% of teens have bought worship music in the past six months and also engaged in some form of music piracy in that time.

OK, you’ve seen the Lego Bible, but have you seen the Lego Church? Seriously, a woman built a 7×5-foot church out of Lego building blocks. She calls it the Abston Church of Christ, a name playing off the ABS plastic used to make Legos. She even wrote a dedication sermon encapsulating some of her thoughts on the importance of church buildings. The whole thing is pretty accurate, right down to the baptismal and lack of racial diversity (while it accurately portrays your average church, I’m guessing it’s more a result of the lack of diversity among Lego figures. UPDATE: While the Community Workers figure pack is a homogenous bunch, the NBA Collectors sets offer more diversity. And more facial hair!).

There are 740 megachurches across the U.S., defined as non-Catholic churches with 1,000 members or more, and the Twin Cities has more than any other city, according to a recent Minnesota Christian Chronicle article (link via Planet Hunt). Apparently there’s a “spiritual awakening” in the Twin Cities. It’s fertile ground for megachurches, thanks to a religious culture, plenty of land for mall-size churches, generous Minnesotans, a plethora of “superstar preachers” and four large evangelical Christian colleges in the area (Bethel, Northwestern, North Central, and Crown).

Megachurches are hot. Forbes magazine recently compared megachurches to corporations and even the Brits are taking notice. While the Christian Science Monitor pointed out that megachurches go for a ‘power of positive thinking’ spin that won’t touch controversial subjects like abortion or homosexuality, Greg Boyd, pastor of Twin Cities megachurch Woodland Hills, warns such an approach could compromise the “inherently offensive nature” of the Gospel (MCC).

However, the Twin Cities, home of the megamall and capital of megachurches, is also home to a pile of post-modern and alternative churches. Both the local Star Tribune and the national New York Times (free reprint in the Pioneer Press) have profiled Twin Cities alterna-churches.

Chris Seay, pastor and author of The Gospel According to Tony Soprano, made a powerful point about entertainment in an interview for my upcoming New Man magazine article on making entertainment choices that ties in nicely with Gene Edward Veith’s comments about entertainment saturation:

I don’t know if we ever get to watch something just for entertainment. There really are better things to do with our time. Sometimes there are things we thoroughly enjoy and are funny — our God’s a God of laughter and humor and story. Almost anything we look for we find spiritual truth in it.

‘Entertainment’ applies to mindlessly absorbing without a purpose. I don’t think we ever get to do anything that isn’t purposeful. We should be thinking reflectively about what we see. That does put us in a different place than the rest of people in culture that are looking for an escape.

A recent RelevantMagazine.com interview with author Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart) discussed the atrophied state of Christianity:

“People come to Jesus and say, ‘I want some of your blood for the forgiveness of my sins, but I don’t have any intention of following you or obeying you, and now if you’ll excuse me I’d like to get on with my life’.”

This idea of using Jesus like a ‘get out of jail free card’ is rampant and A.W. Tozer actually called it outright heresy. Willard described such people as ‘Vampire Christians,’ an apt description of the walking dead in faith, soulless, and having little impact on those around them besides feelings of religious fright.

Brings new meaning to the B-movie Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

You can taste the tobacco, smell it on your clothes hours later. Granted I’m a clean-cut guy. A dork. But tonight I was painfully and forcefully reminded of it. After the stodgy, squeakiness of EPA I went to a local hole in the wall bar to hear Romantica play. Talk about culture clash. Alcohol trash and cigarette mash. Looking around the smoke filled room I felt like I was 12.

The show was at the Turf Club, a bar located right next to the bus stop I walked to for two and a half years. I always thought the Turf Club was just a hole in the wall little bar. I was only partly off.

We went to the show with a few other clean-cut friends, and watched the place fill up with hip, trendy folks who seem to frequent bars all the time, imbibe their drink of choice and chain smoke.

Now I come from a pretty conservative background that I’ve trying to distance myself from as much as possible. I’m so conservative that I’m just now getting used to the idea of drinking alcohol as an acceptable activity. When a friend orders a drink I no longer freak out. But that step has taken some time.

Then put me in a situation where it’s just one or two drinks, the pitchers keep coming. And the chain-smoking. I can understand drinking, sort of. But I don’t get smoking. Maybe watching my grandfather sneak a smoke behind the garage, and later puff away outside the nursing home like it was the last thing he could still feel has forever tainted me. My eyes were literally watering and I couldn’t have stayed in the bar any longer than I did. I actually couldn’t drive home my eyes were watering so bad.

Am I really so sheltered? Or is the bar scene just not for me.

What really made me wonder is the question of faith. I knew at least 20 people in that bar from Bethel, some in varying degrees of intoxication and lung cancer. I knew another 20 indirectly from some friend or another and could reasonably assume they were connected to some faith community. Like I said, I’m just getting used to the idea that Christians can drink alcohol, but there does come a line when it’s no longer responsible. I can only guess more than a few were crossing that line.

It reminds me of Jesus Sound Explosion and the recovering evangelicals Mark Curtis Anderson describes. I felt like I stepped into a chapter in that book. With so many connections to different faith communities at one time or another in that room, I wondered how many still had faith. I certainly can’t judge from a few drinks and a cigarette, but I couldn’t help but wonder. How many had become ex-evangelicals like Anderson? How many were simply disillusioned with the church but still had a deep-rooted faith in God? How many were feeling the same culture shock I was and were simply doing a better job hiding it?

It felt like different worlds colliding. The squeaky clean world of Christendom with the seedy underbelly of reality. With so many twenty-somethings gathered in one room with some sort of spiritual connection, it felt a bit like church. Except for the Marlboro branded incense.

To really drive the dorky feeling home, it wasn’t just the drinking and smoking that made me feel like I was 12. The trendy clothes, hair cuts, and accessories made it painfully obvious that I buy my clothes on clearance at Target and have no fashion sense whatsoever. Even my recent rock star haircut didn’t stand a chance.

A conversation on sermons a few weeks back raised the question about their importance in church services. Today an article by Philip Yancey made me wonder about the history of the sermon. His introductory comments in a review of American Sermons hinted at the history of the sermon, indicating that the Puritans elevated it to the form it is today, and that Catholics and Anglicans at one time de-emphasized the sermon (Anglicans reduced it to a quarterly occurrence).

Obviously this entry isn’t full of rigorous academic research, but I am curious about sermon history now. It’s probably one of those things I’ll never get around to looking into, but I’m still curious.

Oh my gosh. This is great. A delicious parody that seems to nicely tie in with my thoughts of late: “A Message from Pat Robertson and the ‘Vote No On Jesus’ Campaign” (link via Knightopia via Veen.com).

My favorite line: “‘Tax-And-Spend Jesus’ wants us to believe that our hard-earned money should be pumped into godless public schools and the sinful homes of single-mother welfare queens.”

Some of these thoughts about church have been prompted because I regularly attend church and care about it. But also because I’ve been working on a brochure about church planting, and in doing so I interviewed nine different church planters from across the country. Here’s a few of the things they said:

“I’m only 28, the youngest pastor in my district. The closest person to us is 50. … I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like in 30 years when all the head pastors in our area turn over. We have a lot of giants in the faith, but who’s going to be those that step into those positions? … Which one of our generation will step into that with no pay? We’ve focused a lot on money and prosperity, who’s going to answer the call?” – B.J. Hart from Atlantic, Iowa

“I don’t dress up for church whatsoever. I stopped wearing a shirt and tie and became myself and the church started growing. … It’s not about me being the big kahuna. I’m just the small cheese. … You’ll lose a whole generation unless ministers are willing to stop hiding behind a false sense of holiness, a false sense of religious pride. I blow it every day, I mess up all the time. I’m so far from being perfect. But I love the Lord so much.” – B.J. Hart from Atlantic, Iowa

“Normally when people go to food drives it’s junk stuff. We buy turkey and stuffing, women make the pies, we get green beans, christmas candy, goodies — name brand. When you’re poor you always buy the cheap chips. Why would you want to be blessed with cheap chips? Buy the name brand. You can eat Oreos or you can eat Hydrox. We don’t want to do the least amount we can do, we want to do a litttle overboard so people feel completely overwhelmed.” – B.J. Hart from Atlantic, Iowa

OK, B.J. said all the great stuff. He was really excited and kept going for about 40 minutes. I asked maybe four questions in that time. The other pastors said good stuff, too, but B.J.’s thoughts seem to fit best here.

From talking to all the pastors, I felt an incredible sense of excitement. God is working. He’s planting new churches and doing amazing things. I don’t know how these pastors do it, they work extra jobs to make ends meet and pour their lives into their church. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if all Christians were as focused on serving God. Instead we’re distracted by things like career or family, and serving God often takes a backseat.

Certainly we can serve God in those things, and those things aren’t bad, it just seems like we settle down to our own family and our job and we lack a broader vision of what God can do.

Today I’ve been reading Red Moon Rising, a phenomenal book about the 24-7 prayer movement. One of the things that struck me is how God likes to do things his way. For all the planning, organizing, and scheming we like to put into things, God often has other ideas.

Rather than putting together a brilliant military strategy, the Israelites shouted at the wall of Jericho and were victorious. What the heck is that? You see it time and time again in Jesus’ ministry where he makes absolutely lousy p.r. moves.

Now I sound completely contradictory. As excited as I am about doing the best that I can and complaining so much about how churches screw things up, now I talk about how God doesn’t care so much about our best. I know, I don’t get it either.

I think the important part is obeying God. He wants us to do our best, to put everything we have into whatever we’re doing, and bring the best of the best to everything we do. But at the same time we need to realize our best is crap. God’s going to work through us inspite of ourselves. God will work through the 40 minute sermon, even if it puts me to sleep. He’ll work through the half-hour session of thoroughly modern worship, just like he’ll use the hymns that seemed to stand as filler in my church between the announcements and the offering. He’ll use the liturgy, and he’ll use the rambling prayer.

I don’t really get it, but I think it’s kind of cool. God doesn’t follow the marketing rules that would seem to guarantee amazing success. He has other ideas. Sometimes I think the church needs to latch on to that. Sometimes I think I need to latch on that, especially when I complain about things.