Tuesday, April 13, 2004 AD Relevance Schmelevance Someone was recently telling me about a Sunday school class they attended in which the instructor encouraged the class to keep up-to-date with all the trendy/Gen-X/Gen-Y/po-mo/whatever music/movies/fashion/slang/whatever out there. The point was that in order to be good witnesses, we have to know all the stuff that the world is into.
Fiddlesticks.
I remember standing with a group of classmates outside the cafeteria one day in fifth or sixth grade. Everyone was discussing what they'd watched on TV the night before. I had watched "The Wizard of Oz," but since it obviously wasn't on the approved list of cool things to watch, and I didn't want to admit that I wasn't cool (though I am sure it was as painfully obvious to the rest of them as it was to me) I lied and said I hadn't watched TV the night before.
Now it's not worldly kids but churchly Sunday school teachers who want to look down their noses at my nerdiness as if I can't hope to make the grade as a Christian if I don't also make the grade as a worldling. That is absolute rubbish and it ticks me off. I do not have to be cool in order to be holy! In fact, trying to be cool will likely keep me from holiness. In my grade school example, trying to be cool led me to lie. And if I hadn't been watching what I liked and lying about watching it, I'd probably be watching what was cool and lying about liking it. The pursuit of coolness would have become sheer, people-pleasing idolatry to me. Also worldly standards are, well, worldly. Why would I want to immerse myself in that? When you drop a white glove in a mud puddle, as Chuck Swindoll says, the mud doesn't get all glovey. For me to pursue coolness would mess me up and make no difference to the cold cool world.
I'm not pretending to lay down some sort of fundamentalist no-TV/no-movies/no-rock music illicit law. I'm just refusing to allow my tastes and interests to be dictated by pop culture. I'm not even going to spend my precious time studying pop culture from the outside like some sort of armchair cultural anthropologist. And if that makes me uncool, out of touch and irrelevant, so be it. Posted by Valerie (Kyriosity) at 4/13/2004 05:50:00 PM
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