13th May, 2006

MARK SAYERS

I am lounging back in my chair as I sip my coffee with my friend and fellow follower of Jesus. Our lunch is taking place in one of Melbourne’s hip inner city latte zones. We are discussing ministry over some Moroccan food. In this cool neighborhood, we do not look out of place, no way! These two pastors look the part! We look nothing like the Ned Flanders cliched image that most non-Christians have of Christians. We have managed to achieve that level of careful dressing so as to be stylish without really trying. “Yeah, these two men of God feel right at home in this cool world.”

PICTURE: Ibon San Martin (www.sxc.hu) ‘Cool!’ Never before has a word been so used but so hard to define. Most of us use this word on a daily basis - we try to be ‘cool,’ yet we cannot define this slippery adjective.

But then everything goes wrong. One of the hip natives of this 'land of cool' plants himself next to us and orders lunch. No stress - our cultural signals will not give away our status as believers in Jesus. Everything is going well until my friend drops the J-BOMB. My friend looks at me earnestly, caught up in our train of discussion, and asks me: “What would it take for people in Australia today to have a real encounter with Jesus?” Our cafe neighbor’s head snaps around like a cobra poised to attack. He looks at us in shock as if we have just flushed his grandfather’s war medals down the toilet. In one swift movement he picks up his lunch and coffee and moves four tables away. Our self perceived ‘coolness’ was evaporated within seconds by our public ‘outing’ as Christians.

‘Cool!’ Never before has a word been so used but so hard to define. Most of us use this word on a daily basis - we try to be ‘cool,’ yet we cannot define this slippery adjective. The first real social explosion of ‘cool’ into the public’s consciousness can be traced back to Norman Mailer’s 1957 article, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster published in Harpers Bazaar.

Mailer described the dilemma facing young people of the mid-Twentieth century, who looked at a culture that promised them a suburban paradise, only to deliver the holocaust - the constant threat of nuclear war and a bleak and soul-less materialism. Mailer loudly proclaimed that the only answer for young people was to become ‘hip.’

Mailer largely borrowed his ideas from the Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. The Beat writers saw that the answer to society’s problems was to learn from those who were on the margins of American culture. They lived amongst and copied the lifestyles of small time criminals, the mentally ill, bohemians and homosexuals. Most of all Mailer saw that the answer lay in imitating the life and spirit of African-Americans. For some time white American artists and thinkers had admired African-American culture, which they had discovered through the jazz subculture. Mailer wrote that the answer to resisting the dominant modernist culture was to learn from the African-American’s idea of ‘hip’ and ‘cool’. To be ‘cool’ was to live on the edge of culture - to reject it by living in its shadows avoiding convention and conformity.

Instead of living out the narrow life-script offered by society, Mailer saw that by being cool humans could re-embrace a deep, primal need for quest and adventure. Many responded to Mailer’s rallying call and the Beatnik movement began permanently etching the idea of cool into the public’s mind.

However, by the late 1960’s big business realised the potential that the cultural idea of ‘cool’ offered in the selling of products. The fashion industry began exploiting the desire of people to be ‘cool’ by encouraging people to differentiate themselves from others by their clothing choices. Advertisers cunningly turned the Volkswagen from a Hitler-inspired vehicle for taking your little fascist to the Hitler Youth rally, into the love-bug car of choice for hippies. Slowly over the last 30 years the idea of ‘cool’ has shifted from something which rebelled against the dominant consumer culture to something which fuelled it. Advertisers had discovered that billions of dollars can be made by exploiting people’s desire for individuality and offering them a chance to commit faux rebellion by make ‘cool’ consumer choices.

Today the original meaning of ‘cool’ has been totally subverted. The ‘cool’ fringe dwellers lauded by Mailer have become the servants of the dominant consumer culture. MTV does not offer us the reality of contemporary African- American life, rather suburban teenagers are bombarded by music videos filled with the cultural cliché of the Gangster rapper. Rappers ‘blinged up’ portraying a tough and rebellious ‘cool’ image while actually being on on the payroll of giant corporations selling everything in their video clips from mobile phones, to opulent jewellery and bottled water. The marginalized homosexual of the Beat generation’s day has been reborn on television in the guise of lifestyle editors telling straight men how to shop and make the right consumer choices. Mailer’s anti–consumerist dream is in tatters. The desire of millions of citizens of planet earth to be cool has become the oil that lubricates the engine of the global economy.

The church in the West, and particularly here in Australia, has taken the mission to become ‘cool’ to heart. Churches are re-branding; ministers, worship leaders and youth pastors are dressing cooler, and youth services are attempting new levels of ‘coolness.’ If you don’t like that particular flavour of ‘cool,’ many emerging churches can offer you a kind of bohemian ‘cool’ in order to suit your taste.

However there is a problem with churches and individuals attempting to become ‘cool’ as a missional strategy. When we try to become ‘cool’, we only make an attempt to re-dress the superficial to put on a new coat of paint. Sure, it will probably mean our churches might attract a whole host of Christians who are looking for a ‘cooler’ expression of church, but we will fail to address some of the core reasons why Christianity is struggling to impact post-Christian culture.

One can’t help but wonder whether behind the attempts to be ‘cool’, there is not really a desire for church growth and mission, but rather a deep-rooted feeling many Christians have that we are social misfits. We know that at the moment, Christianity in the ‘cool’ game is ‘out’. This makes us feel socially alienated, we feel left out and unappreciated. Young Christian people particularily feel socially rejected by a culture that tells them that their self-worth is in being ‘cool,’ hence the massive movement to rebrand ourselves, our churches and our ministries.

When it comes to the pursuit of ‘cool’, a cautionary tale can be found in the 'branded' airline called Song. The airline was launched in the US to much fanfare due to it's revolutionary and cutting-edge use of ‘cool’ imagery and branding. The airline used the latest cabin entertainment technology, evocative and stylish advertising and ‘hip’, attractive and bubbly staff. On the surface the airline looked the coolest around, yet Song forgot that it is not just about looking good in a competitive post 9/11 US domestic airline business. People wanted ulitmately to get from A to B safely.

The airline was a failure and was subsumed into another carriers' fleet. Today's hot brand is tommorow's style embarrassment. Maybe we need to learn from Song airline’s mistakes and concentrate on our core business. The terribly uncool business of preaching good news to the poor, of releasing the prisoners, of helping the blind to see, of freeing the oppressed and announcing through our word and action that God is now acting to bring about his plans to redeem the earth. Maybe cynical, suspcious, post-christian, unchurched people don’t want us to be cool, maybe they want us to do what Jesus commanded us. Then maybe they will listen.

Recently I had a time where I felt that I was very far from God. During this wilderness I was invited to speak at a large church’s youth service. The young people put on a pretty ‘cool’ service. The kids moshed, jumped and breakdanced while a DJ mixed for the punked-up worship, and video and multimedia images were used to create just the right atmosphere. I got up to speak and did my usual ‘cool’ preaching schtick-dropping references to TV, music and popular culture. When it comes to preaching up a storm for the kids, I thought I did pretty well. This was as cool as church could get. However the darkness that had been hanging over my life still hovered above me.

As I headed for my car I was stopped by a man in an electric wheelchair. He wanted to talk to me and although I wanted to just get home, I sat down to listen to him. Due to an accident in his youth he had acquired a brain injury that had robbed him of the use of much of his body. Through his grey beard he spoke to me in a stammered speech that was almost inaudible. For 20 minutes we sat there as he shared with me how he viewed his life as a miracle of God. He could have spent his whole life in a coma, but he felt that he had been saved by Jesus and he was desperatley thankful to have the life he had. As he spoke, I inexplicably felt my own darkness lift. I thanked him for minstering to me. As I got into my car I watched him drive off slowly in his wheelchair down a deserted alley-way covered in trash and graffiti. This man, according to the harsh and marginlising standards of our culture was not cool. He was old, poor and disabled, everything we deeply fear. Tears streamed down my face as I realised that I followed a magnificently uncool God who looks not at how cool we are, but at the beauty in our hearts.

Mark Sayers is the director of the Hub, an initiative of Tabor College Victoria with the aim of providing research, commenteray and insight into today's culture and the pertinent issues affecting the lives of young adults.

~ www.hubbubcommentary.blogspot.com

~ www.tabor.vic.edu.au

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