Never underestimate the power (nor importance) of "cool", or at least “decent”.
My family lived in a big apartment complex while pastoring a very traditional congregation that had been hemorrhaging people for years. Leading by example, I worked to get our apartment friends to visit our congregation, but very few ever visited twice. They'd come to our apartment to seek spiritual answers or Bible study and they'd ask for prayer and pray for me, but our congregation was a one-shot event for them. Then I heard a shocker that froze my blood: People I’d shared Christ with were now attending church – elsewhere. It was a good congregation—good solid teaching, great ministries, rapid growth—but it wasn't ours. That hurt.
I eventually asked about it. God spoke through their words: "We like you and your teaching, but everything else is so unfriendly and boring. We found a church that's actually cool, and we like it. It speaks to us on a lot of levels." BAM.
That seems rather carnal if you're secretly shallow and more into religious appearance, but pretty deep if you really wanna reach people.
There are a lot of churches out there in any given town who all believe the same thing, who all teach biblical truth very well, who hope to expand the Kingdom, but why do people choose one congregation over the other? I think it's what I've now heard called "the Cool Factor."
For the church, the Cool Factor is about nurturing the kind of bond with people where they are secure enough to drop the old barriers and open themselves up to being taught God's Word in new, creative, relevant ways. It’s not about giving up theological distinctive, but about how they are presented. What the Cool Factor looks like will vary from congregation to congregation and community to community, but it's gonna be a presentation that consistently grabs the attention of a person and creates a dialogue between the church and the unchurched.
Remember: It’s not theology OR “cool” methodology. That’s a false dichotomy. It’s about the marriage of truth with relevant presentation. That’s cool.
