Evangelicool!

Seattle's alt-weekly The Stranger recently published a really interesting cover story by Erica Barnett about the rise of evangelical hipsterdom in that city.

They tend to meet in unconventional venues—theaters, warehouses, coffee shops—that lack the trappings of traditional churches and make younger worshippers feel at home. They use creative approaches to worship and spiritual reflection—such as pop music, dialogue (rather than sermonizing), and meditation—and lack a strong hierarchical structure. They generally start out small—often as an offshoot of a larger, more established congregation—and then grow rapidly, like Mars Hill, or multiply, as Church on the Hill plans to do. They believe in being engaged in, rather than separate from, the culture at large, as a way of both remaining relevant and winning new converts to Christianity.

The article's biggest strength is its choice of subject, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill, who is, um, kind of a nutjob. Barnett mostly lets Driscoll's own words demonstrate as much.

"Seattle logic [says] two consenting adults can have sex whenever they want," Driscoll booms, sardonically. "This is what happens when you walk away from Scripture: You walk away from what's right and wrong." The next thing you know, he says, "You've got a rainbow on your camel. You've got pink taffeta on your toga. You've got a church float in the pride parade." Pacing the stage restlessly ("I've had a lot of Red Bull"), Driscoll continues. "The people of the church are so confused. They think that in tolerating [homosexual] behavior, they're being like Jesus. Your banners, your floats, your buttons—they're not good. It's just like letting cancer come into a body... until the cancer consumes the body and kills you... We will extricate the cancer, and if that person who has the cancer is repentant and wants to kill the cancer, then we'll welcome them back. But they have to accept that anything but one man, one woman, one God, one life, is sexually immoral.

Driscoll is loud and a bit slovenly and frequently hilarious; he uses humor to draw facile comparisons ("We all discriminate. I double-dog dare you: Don't recycle. You'll have hippies in your garbage: 'I found paper!'")—and make claims that put him far outside the mainstream—that go down easy among his young congregation. He has reportedly lost some female congregants because of his statements about the role of women in marriage ("God made the man and put him in charge and gave him a job description... and the woman was made to help him...Women will be saved by going back to that role that God has chosen for them."); in the church ("Every single book in your Bible is written by a man... Priest[hood] is reserved exclusively for godly men."); and in society ("There is no occasion where women led a society and were its heads and the men complied and followed. ... It's a matter of Biblical creation.")

As counterpoint, Barnett interviews United Methodist minister Rich Lang, who I've been lucky enough to see speak at a church conference a few years back; he stunned the audience into silence by chewing us out for having so many SUVs in the parking lot...but he's such a compelling preacher that by the time he was done he recieved a well-earned standing ovation. Lang provides a voice for progressive mainline Christians like me, who are dismayed by the dressing up of archaic evangelical theology in horn-rimmed glasses and thrift-store t-shirts. (The website for Lang's congregation, Trinity United Methodist, provides some of his really great essays and sermons, including one of the best condemnations of Bush policy on theological grounds I've ever seen.)

Barnett could be criticized for painting with too broad a brush. She doesn't seem to quite know her history and terminology--for example, that emergent churches are a post-evangelical phenomenon, not post-mainline--which is actually pretty important for understanding the social dynamics at work. She quotes Jason Hudson of Church on the Hill preaching about what Christians should do when they find themselves in positions of power and suggests that his sermon "echoes" dominion theology--in fact to me it reads like a partial refutation of dominion theology--I'd have to hear the rest of the sermon to be sure. And for Barnett to talk about the "emergent" movement without talking about the legitimately progressive voices within that movement (Brian McLaren being the most prominent) is a pretty severe oversight.

Still it's really nice to see The Stranger at least TRYING to cover religion in a way that warns us of its most dangerous manifestations but doesn't depict Christianity as a monolithically conservative entity.

Hey Portland dudes, I'm curious, how does this article jibe with what you've seen going on down there in places like Imago Dei?

UPDATE: The Stranger published my letter to the editor, thus marking the first time I've ever called someone an asshole in print! Totally embarassing, especially because I didn't say what i meant. What I meant was that the emergent church couldn't fairly be called theologically liberal, but that it does somewhat trouble the left-right binary models of politics and theology, and has led some participants to relatively progressive/moderate positions on various social and economic issues.