skinny jeans and carhartts, further explanation
I suspect that some of the nuance in my metaphors on my post “take off the skinny jeans and put on your carhartts” was missed(see latest comment on it for reference). So I wanted to offer a few further thoughts on what was intended in my post.
I’m not using skinny jeans and carhartts as actual reference to a way of dressing. Rather they both serve as metaphors to an approach to church planting:
Skinny jeans are an object of fashion and that is their primary concern. I am using this as a metaphor to an approach of church planting that targets as its first action making the church gathering fashionable, much of the discussion with this centers on how we dress, what our music sounds like, what kinds of logos we employ, what the gathering space looks like and what preaching style is used.
Carhartts however are an object of labor. Not many wear carhartts as a statement of fashion, but rather because of their durability for hard labor. I intend this to be a metaphor for a different type of church planting. One where instead of worrying about what our church gathering looks like we ask “how can we serve?” Instead of coming in and making a bunch of publications for our totally hip new gathering, we seek to serve rather than to be made known. We ask the questions of what the neighborhood is going through and what it looks like if the gospel is being lived out in that context and we start to do that.
Both these approaches (of which my apparel references are metaphors for) are intended to reach people who don’t yet know Jesus. However in my observations and experience, when you take the skinny jean approach most of what you end up doing is rearranging Christians from another church. And even if we do win people in this way, through what have we won them? The hipness of Jesus? There’s a saying about what you convert people with is also what you convert them to. I don’t want to and don’t believe it good to convert people to the fashionable Jesus with all the right cultural sensibilities, because that doesn’t sound to me much like the Jesus of the bible. And even then this approach involves an assumption that what’s really keeping people from believing is the relative hipness or un-hipness of our church gatherings, with most of my friends this is far from the primary issue.
And this is why I say take off the skinny jeans and put on the carhartts. We want to skip the hard work and go straight to the window dressing. You can do both, but one of these approaches will always be the dominating approach.
