Theological Thoughts for Thursday

I’ve fallen out of line with the current trends. I don’t know any of the artists on the top iTunes list. I only know the people in 3 of the posters at the Wal-mart poster display. I haven’t had a car with tricked out rims roll up beside me with a recognizable tune blaring in … ever … in ever.

Now, I’ve never been cool. And I accept that fact, but I’ve never felt how “un-cool” I really am. The kids in my youth group like me specifically for this reason. I am so unfathomably un-cool, that I swing around to the other end of the cool-meter and end up on the cool side. It’s a happy accident that I take full advantage of.

I belong to a denomination that is fighting the battle of cool. The United Methodist church follows Jesus the Christ who lived on earth until about 1,975 years ago. We also form our theology around the thoughts of a man who turned 300 a few years ago, John Wesley. We are painfully un-cool. For a quick example, a recent news article on umc.org was titled Bish Schna Z raps with UM bloggers. I’m not kidding. God, I wish I was kidding.

At least blogging is a start. Bishop Will Willimon blogs and maintains a pod cast - that's vital for anyone who counts reaching youth and young adults with the Gospel.

A number of pastors and seminary students keep regular theological blogs. I enjoy this one.

For a really special look into how un-cool the UMC is, take a quick trip to the United Methodist Church's Board of Communication. This site is almost impossible to use and communicates NOTHING about the UMC. I just think that we can do better.

I think that it should be added to the process of becoming an ordained minister that you must post to a blog once a week.

So many of our church meetings could be done by keeping a community message board active.

We could expand the Sunday morning service experience by posting the scripture and a few questions on a blog the monday before the sermon.

With the internet we could engage a whole new generation. We could wildly improve the results of giving to the advance by creating a site similar to Kiva (which I wrote about earlier) to show people exactly what their second mile giving is accomplishing.

If we adopted a similar system for the Russian church we could challenge the Russian churches to show exactly what they need money for instead of just throwing money at them and hoping for the best.

We could text message scripture throughout the sermon to those with cell-phones (on vibrate) instead of making people pick up clunky old books to read the scripture before the sermon.

We are teaching the most relevant message in the world ... all I'm asking is why we can't teach it in a relevant fashion.