The False God of “Cool”: Image Consciousness and the Church

This isn’t about looking cool or being prominent. It’s not about how many people go to our church. If many come, we can rejoice; if few come, we can also rejoice. It’s not about us and our importance: it’s about Jesus. This means we can be generous and non-competitive with one another as Christians. It means we can support one another in our common mission.

It also means that we can begin to deal with our idols. Letting go of attachment to our image or prominence as leader or church is one of the toughest things to manage in the Christian life. We are inherently conditioned in this culture to want to be prominent, important, or influential. We are conditioned to want to be cool or attractive or valued by other people. We are conditioned to go viral for any reason at all. Attention is better than inattention, even if the attention comes for ignoble reasons. When we get those image/acceptance “strokes,” we feel great. When we are disliked, when we make mistakes, when we are uncool, when we feel boring, when the culture pays us no attention, it’s easy to feel depressed or down. Even if we are trudging along being faithful to God and doing what is right, it’s easy to think, “Gosh, I must be doing something wrong.” And so rather than confront our false gods, we soothe ourselves by doing something that will make us feel cool or relevant or important again.

Confronting Our False Gods

The problem is, the Gospel is not really cool. It’s about how life comes from death. It’s “take up your cross and follow Me.” It’s accepting that God uses unlikely people. God uses uncool people. God uses people that others dismiss or think are “beneath” them.

In heaven, it probably won’t be the megachurch pastors, the bloggers, the writers, the famous singers leading the pack. It’ll probably be the homeless man who gives his last penny to help someone in worse trouble than himself. It will be old lady who prays for her community faithfully every day and shares what little she has. It will be the disabled person who the world dismisses but who shares the Gospel with people all around her. It will be people like that, people we least expect.

For, as the Magnificat says (that hymn of praise by the most unlikely bearer of Christ ever, the Virgin Mary):

He has brought down rulers from their thrones
    but has lifted up the humble.

–Luke 1:52

So, am I saying that we need to be frumpy and withdraw from the world and have no engagement with the culture? No, that is another kind of image consciousness. That is being so obsessed the culture that we completely reject it.

God calls us to a tension. Engage, but hold loosely. Engage, but don’t idolize. Engage, but don’t make it about the false idols of image.

Instead, we must realign our sense of what is most important in God’s kingdom. We must reengage with what is distinctive about the Christian faith. In God’s kingdom, the way down is the way up.

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”–Mark 10:42-45

Servanthood is valued more than power and prominence. Church is not image and a product to be consumed. It’s not a competitive need to be the most cool option in the neighborhood. No, church is Jesus and His disciples, reaching out in love to this world. It is often uncool by the standards of image.

It doesn’t matter if you have the latest clothes or hairstyle. It doesn’t matter your age, education, or gender. It’s doesn’t matter if you take the hottest “selfies”–or don’t. It doesn’t matter whether people think you’ll ever amount to anything.

Rather, the kingdom of God is God taking the weak things of this world to shame the strong. It’s life through the cross.

And the cross is meaningful and has an unexpected power. It’s awe-inspiring. But it’s not cool.

Where do you see image consciousness in your life of faith or in your church? How can you let go of those idols?

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