Hipster Church

At first glance it would be very easy to dismiss this book. (Don’t worry, there is a second glance below.) Millennial hipster decides that the church of his childhood is boring and decides to start a Cool Church (called Eucharist!) which does Cool things with Cool people. No boring oldsters here! First step: move church to Sunday afternoon so we can all sleep in! I’m not making that up; that is exactly what Makins says. Afternoon church makes it easier to go to those all-night parties with cool emo music and fights breaking out on the dance floor which Makins begins the book by describing.

But wait, there’s more! “A steampunk-themed summer camp, which featured an ‘Imagination Train’ maintained by a bunch of twentysomethings in thrift shop overalls.”  (Note “thrift shop”—these Hip Millennials only wear overalls ironically.)  Or, “One Sunday, we took photos of every congregant with their hands covered in fake blood in front of a large golden halo. Then, hoping to spark conversations about faith, we pasted eighty of the photos onto an old fence at our city’s Art Crawl event under the title Sinners and Saints.” 

But, alas, constantly thinking of hip new things to do is tiring, but when they save on the planning and repeat an event, nobody comes. Sometimes you just get tired. That’s especially true the Sunday after Christmas. So, let’s have Nap Sunday! Instead of that sermon thing, everyone can just stretch out and take a nap!

You see, people don’t want all those old denominations and theological debates. Everyone should be welcome at church. Everyone! Well, almost everyone. One year, the church rents an old gothic cathedral to use on Sunday afternoons. Being young and hip and cool, they do all sorts of young, hip and cool things in this 150 year old building. Predictably enough, damage was done. Repeatedly. Eventually, the church which owned the building kicked them out. And in one of the uglier moments in this book, Makins explains the problem with the church from which they were renting space:

They had witnessed congregational decline and a loss of cultural influence while being stuck with an expensive and impossible-to-maintain building, which drained them of resources. Was it any surprise that the added discomfort of our young congregation finally broke the camel’s back? I had hoped they would be able to respond to these challenges with courage and imagination. I wanted St. Barnabas to welcome a young church and her chaos, but after 150 years of stability, how would I feel if I was of the generation that witnessed members die off and watched youth walk away?
There’s a good chance I’d also cling to the little bit of security I had left.

Everyone is welcome at church as long as you aren’t old and think 150 year old church buildings are worth preserving. If you are like that, well just die off and let the millennials take over. (By the way, the anger dripping in this passage is a mere trickle compared to what shows up in the chapter on the professional church plant advisors.)

The church struggles. One day a newer, hipper church starts up, but it is a bit different. It is cleverly named “New Church”! It is like a church for, you know, grown-ups. People start switching churches. As one of the switchers tells Makins, “It’s nice to see some of our old gang here. It feels like Eucharist was high school and New Church is university!” Makins talks about how angry and bitter he became until he broke down and realized how wrong he was to feel that way.

It is that sort of moment that shows the book deserves the second glance. While Makins all too often can’t get out of his own way and drifts back into Rebellious Hipster Mode, that is not the story he wants to tell. He wants to tell the story of how he discovered The Church.

The popular vision of the church is that it is that building in town where people dress up and go on Sunday. Even Christians, who often say that the church is really the people and not the building, all too often think of church as that institutional structure. Makins is unravelling that image. Go back to the yarn and start over.

What is the church? It is a community. With Christ as the Head, it is the worldwide community of people who are acting as God’s agents on earth. What Makins discovers is that local manifestations of that worldwide community don’t all have to look the same. They don’t all need to sing the same songs and meet at the same time and have the same type of sermon. They don’t need to all agree on the secondary matters of the faith. They don’t even all need to have polished Sunday Services:

I am of the firm opinion that, every now and then, church should suck. The music should be out of key, the sermon meandering, and the chairs uncomfortable. That is our reminder that church isn’t a Sunday show—just another product to consume—but a called-out community of people following Jesus together. That’s easy to forget if church is “good” every week.

As Makins discovers, when Paul compares the church to the human body, he really did mean that hands and feet play different roles. A millennial hipster church doesn’t have to look exactly like the Lutheran church of his youth. It can indeed do things differently.

I don’t think other congregations should necessarily do what we’ve done….
I get it. Eucharist is freaking weird. Not every church should be a foot like us. I’ll go one step further: most churches shouldn’t be like us.
But we should be like us.

That doesn’t mean the Lutheran church of his youth got things wrong. Eucharist is a foot, but the Church still needs those hands too.

Although he doesn’t mention the passage, what Makins discovers over the course of this book is that stripped to its essentials, a church looks something like this: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42) Christians gather together for teaching, fellowship, bread-breaking, and prayer. Note that nothing in that passage dictates the form of the fellowship or the teaching. If Eucharist wants to have Nap Sunday, why would anyone outside that local congregation object? If the church down the street wants to play hymns on an organ in an old building, why would anyone at Eucharist object?

The subtitle of Makins’ book captures both the good and the bad of this book: A Young Community’s Quest to Reclaim Church for Good. There is something refreshing about Makins’ story. There is something incredibly good about the way he points attention back to the fundamentals of what a church actually is. Many people would benefit from rethinking the nature of the church instead of just the details of the church they attend or used to attend.

But, unfortunately the tone of the book will mean this book gets a much smaller readership than Makins’ message deserves. Makins doesn’t just want to talk about the Good. He wants to Reclaim the Church. Reclaim it from Whom, exactly? With a bit more charity to the types of Churches and Christians which anger him so much, Makins would have had a much stronger claim on their attention.