FYI: the hipsters are already hating on your church of the future.

I spent far too much time laughing at http://www.stuffchristianculturelikes.com/ and http://stufffchristianslike.blogspot.com/ this week.

But only after the sting wore off.   Jumbotrons?  Leading worship barefoot? Coffeehouses? Bono?   That stuff signaled a quality church in 1999, when I was in college.

And Twitter?  Apparently, only old people twitter — which is a low blow to someone who started Twittering this year.

All that to say, it strikes me that my generation has reached the point of put up or shut-up about relevance.  Are we better at putting the gospel in current context? Or just part of demographic destiny? Because it sure seems a lot of energy goes into criticizing old people, and claiming some kind of victory when they die or retire.

Is today’s church better at being relevant?  Mostly in the sense that teens who drank deeply of Nirvana’s angst, recoiled from the failings of Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell,  and saw John Piper on a jumbotron at a Passion Conference are now five years past Seminary.  They merely replaced a decade of Kennedy-era seminarians.

So please — please! — don’t spend too much time debating whether tomorrow’s  churches should be Purpose Driven or Acts 29.  It’s a generational fight, one that Boomers will lose by about fifteen years.   Churches for disco fans are nearly incomprehensible to fans of U2, and the younger ones will have the pleasure of the last laugh.

But I have some bad news for all my aging friends in flannel:  you’re doomed to lead churches full of Backstreet Boys and Hannah Montana fans.  You will be judged on your ability to interact with that culture, while the winner of the battle between the church of the 90s and the church of the 70s will still be a decade (or more)  behind.   The only worthwhile fight is one that helps churches live out the gospel, together, in their own communities, at the edge of the present.

I hope history shows that we did it better,  not that we just came later.

Do congregations make good decisions?   Rick Warren says, no, we’ve just imposed American democracy on church:

“what do the words committees, elections, majority rule, boards, board members, parliamentary procedures, voting, and vote have in common?  None of these words are found in the New Testament! We have imposed an American form of government on the church and, as a result, most churches are as bogged down in bureaucracy as our government is.”

Maybe you’d respond like Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  But political democracy isn’t all that encouraging, is it?

In his book, the Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan argues that systematic bias means democracies have little hope of making “optimal” or wise decisions.  Popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, emotions, and personal biases combine to make voters consistently wrong about some issues, and they elect leaders who share those views.  So democracy will do what voters want, but when the question involves biases, the bias will win out over wisdom.

If congregationalism is just “church democracy,” and if democracy makes the wrong decisions, why do we hold to congregationalism?

Toward a Great Commission Resurgence identifies six “distinctives” of Baptist churches :  regenerate church membership, believer’s baptism by immersion, the priesthood of all believers, congregational church polity, local church autonomy, and liberty of conscience.

One of these, I note, is almost never debated in Convention life.   “Your church membership is unregenerate” is a real insult.  The lines of “autonomy” and “liberty of conscience” are hot topics.  “Your church lacks congregational polity” seems to be the reason Dr. Mohler allows for more levels of theological triage; truly tertiary topics are cheapened by the comparison.

But let’s stop and think about the basic idea.  “Congregational polity” implies that a congregation makes decisions.   And by elevating it to “distinctive,” Baptists appear to say that a congregation makes better decisions.

But is that true? Do congregations make better decisions?  Do they even make good decisions?

I just finished the 2nd of 3 annual conventions as a member of the  Southern Baptist Convention’s Committee on Order of Business.  The Committee is charged with setting a schedule for the Convention, and handling motions made by the Messengers.  Unpacking the whole convention will take weeks or years, but here are few thoughts:

It’s a battleship, not a race car. The annual Convention is the largest parliamentary deliberative assembly in the world.  After a hundred years of Baptist fights, for theological and practical reasons, it’s designed to prevent emotional, quick decisions that could be permanent.  The messengers can do almost anything, but the bigger the change, the harder it is to do it at a single Convention.  The power to act quickly has been given to trustees and agencies in their own spheres.  It’s a feature, not a bug.

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The Wall Street Journal has this interesting article about church “franchises,” based on “brand” models — the pastor is at one location, and appears at the franchises through DVD or video-link.    The focus of the article is Flamingo Road Church, in Florida (f/k/a Flamingo Road Baptist Church), “loosely affiliated with the Baptists.”  Flamingo Road hopes to have 50 churches and a $150,000,000 budget.   That would be equal to the entire 2008 Lottie Moon offering given by 42,000 SBC churches.

We’ve discussed this model before, but this article focuses on international franchises.  Are we on the verge of a global, branded evangelicalism?  Is that a good or bad thing?

A new study finds that $40 billion is being stolen from charities each year, on the order of 13%. Most likely culprit? “A female employee with no criminal record who earned less than $50,000 a year.” On average, she steals less than $40,ooo.

The most costly embezzler? Male executives earning $100,000 to $149,000 a year.

But won’t your audit catch it? No. “Most of these things are not caught by routine audits,” said Gary Snyder, who tracks nonprofit fraud in his newsletter, Nonprofit Imperative. “They’re usually done by someone in the financial area — the treasurer, the bookkeeper, the signer of checks — who knows how to avoid getting caught.”

If your members can’t trust the books, they won’t give — for good reason.  Good stewardship means understanding that audits aren’t enough to form a basis for the kind of trust that propels an effective ministry.

Caelan Cross, son of SBC-blogger Alan Cross, will be having a lymph biopsy this week. Please pray that it is not a return of cancer. More here.

Update: Cancer free!  Hallelujah!

Just what Baptists have always suspected:  dancing in the church causes big problems.  Like radical Islam.     From Mark Steyn, in the Wall Street Journal.

A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the U.S. had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:

“The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .”

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colo., in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colo., in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” written by Frank Loesser and sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in the film “Neptune’s Daughter.” Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11.

I’m used to a fair amount of e-mail paranoia. The next great computer virus is coming. Madeline Murray O’Hare is back from the dead. Proctor and Gamble’s got a satanist logo. But then I go to Snopes.com, and it’s always wrong, wrong, wrong.

So, I expected the same with this: “There will be a new Children’s movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud athiest who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis’s Chronical’s [sic] of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot. This is just a friendly warning that you sure won’t hear on the regular TV.”

But, lo and behold, Snopes says it’s true. “Pullman left little doubt about his intentions when he said in a 2003 interview with <i>The Sydney Morning Herald</i> that ‘My books are about killing God.’”

An interesting trend: people are demanding more transparency from those they do business with. http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/transparency.htm

“Leave it to an ever growing number of whistleblower sites, leaked emails, activist portals and disgruntled consumers to name and shame corporations for stupid, unlawful, unclean, greedy, unethical, despicable behavior.”

The rising generation expect more and more transparency from those they follow.  Is your congregation meeting this need ? Should it?