Is the Church Trying to Be Fashionable?!

Excepting the radical edges of church life (the pendulum effect), in the main, curiosity, resistance and opposition comprise the natural consequence of being the "Church" in this world. John Stott even entitled his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Christian Counter-Culture. He writes, "The followers of Jesus are to be different--different from both the nominal church and the secular world, different from both the religious and the irreligious." (The copyright on his book is 1978). What we are seeing come to fruition today is a church who has not only heard, but has unfortunately succumbed to the siren call of our culture. Where do you and your church land? Tullian Tchividjian has provided a quiz to determine that. Please check out his blog at New City Church.

The Unfashionable Quiz (Revised)

In bringing my forthcoming book, Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different, to the finish line, I added this “quiz” at the very beginning. What do you think?  

YOU MAY BE TOO FASHIONABLE IF . . .

      1.  You can look around at church and notice that everybody is basically the same age and they look and dress pretty much like you do.
2.  You can’t stand singing a worship song that was “in” five years ago—much less singing a hymn from another century.
3. You believe social justice is more important than evangelism OR evangelism is more important than social justice.
4. The church you go to is so dimly lit during worship that you can’t see the person singing next to you, much less the person singing across the room.
5. You’ve attended a “leadership” conference where you learned more about organization and props than proclamation and prayer. 
6. Your goal in spending time with non-Christians is to demonstrate that you’re really no different than they are and to prove this you curse like a sailor, drink like a fish, and smoke like a chimney.
7. You’ve concluded that everything new is better than anything old OR that everything old is better than anything new.
8. You think that the way Jesus lived is more important than what Jesus said–that his deeds were more important than his doctrine.  
9. You believe that the best way to change our culture is to elect a certain kind of politician.
10. The church you’ve chosen is defined more by its reaction to “boring” churches than by its response to a needy world. 
11. You’ve decided that everything done by the church you grew up in was way wrong and you’re now, thankfully, part of a missional “community” that does everything right.
12. The one verse you wish wasn’t in the Bible is John 14:6 where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me.” That’s way too narrow!