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Wednesday, January 04, 2006Get your Worship on!Today during lunch, I'm watching Avatar:The Last Airbender; as it is a great show, and so what if its for kids and on Nickelodeon, its still good; when I see a commercial for Worship Jams. Apparently Jock Jams and Monster Jams were such great sellers, that they decided to tone it down a notch and sell to that every growing young Christian market. Which is fine, kids needs songs about Jesus. What has been bothering me lately has been the new trend of making Jesus cool. I don't think its just the idea of middle-aged people yelling out words like "X-treme" and "radical" (who even says that anymore) to kids who are secretly laughing at them. I usually enjoy that. And I think the message that kids can still have fun and be "cool" and follow the Lord, is definately an important one. But the more and more I think about it, I just don't think that Jesus was cool. Well, maybe he was cool in his time (you know, before anything was invented except for water, fire and the wheel) but he definately wouldn't be cool today. In fact, if you walked Jesus into any highschool in America, I guarantee you he would be arrested. Think about it, you're a school security guard and a guy walks up, with long hair, wearing a robe and sandals, and of middle eastern descent, with no valid ID, a really weird accent and tells you he's Jesus. Are you going to believe him? Hell, I doubt Jesus would even be able to get on an airplane with a short haircut and in a business suit. And let me tell you this, body cavity searches are not cool. Jesus cannot skateboard, would not carry an iPod (who would need one with that heavenly choir following him aroung) and he would totally rat you out to your parents if you got home late. Jesus is not cool! So ok, we get it. Church can be fun. What it cannot be is rockin', jammin' or totally x-treme. No church I've ever been to has been fun, but I'm sure there are some of them out there. One of the things I hated most about church when I was growing up was that it was just not fun. Even when I went religiously (oh, see what I did there) it still wasn't fun. From Jr. High through high school I basically went because it was full of hot girls. Churches need to rely more on the personal relationship between a person and God, and not try and make Jesus "that cool old guy on the street that always buys us beer". If kids want parties, excitment and activity, there are plenty of options for that out there. They need a place quiet from the hubub of the world, a place for inner contemplation, not more fodder for their already overfed ADD. When I was younger, we didn't strive to make what we were doing "hip", we we're proud to be Christians in a secular world. The fact that we stood out from the crowd helped us feel we were making a stand, like Daniel and the lions. Making Jesus cool does not teach children why its important to love God, it just gives them something a little more honest to follow the crowd with. And if following the crowd is what we are trying to teach children, then consider that a lesson learned.   
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