From the New York Daily News:
The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn is spending $60,000 on a new ad campaign billing the Son of God as “The Original Hipster” — an ad that features Christ in a pair of red (and untied!) Converse sneakers poking out from under his robes.
The goal is a resurrection even niftier than Jesus’ original one: getting young urbanites to stop saying “P-eww” to the pews.“Why is that an image of Jesus in Converse sneaks so shocking to us?” said Diocese spokesman Msgr. Kieran Harrington. “The Church is countercultural. … The Church is accepting of all people.
“What is a hipster? It means a lot of different things,” Harrington added.
Read the full story here. I have to say, this gives me a throbbing headache on about 1,000 levels. Talk amongst yourselves.
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Oh, please. I wish I’d never heard the word “missional” in my life. It’s right up there with “synergy” and the use of the word “dialogue” as a verb.
Does the Catholic Church — or any main line Protestant church, for that matter — really want to market itself as “hipster”? It’s not that hiptsers wouldn’t be absolutely welcome in my church. But there’s something in hipster culture that is diametrically opposed to the Christian outlook, it seems to me. Hipsterdom buries any vestige of earnestness and genuine, heartfelt passion under layers and layers of irony, and somehow it manages to commodify what might once have been a sincere quest for authenticity and turn it into something materialistic and self-absorbed.
I think I would want to go to church to get away from edginess and cynicism and to find beauty in the eternal, as well as generosity, good will, and community–not things, I think, that are generally valued by so-called hipsters.
That’s funny, Greg – when ECUSA takes out ads we call it evangelism. I’m pretty sure if we did somerhing like this it would be trumpeted as innovative youth evangelism, with some words like “missional” and “seekers” thrown in for good measure. Must be one of those irregular verbs: I spread the Good News, you evangelize, he/she/it advertises.
Bill Dilworth
Adam – go see what the Rev Susan Snook is doing at Church of the Nativity in Arizona – new church plant – all ages. You need to visit some place like the church she serves. They are all over.
Maybe instead of shaking our heads, looking down our noses and making mock, we’d like to address what WE’RE doing as a Church in terms of creative evangelism? I am painfully not aware of these things and would love to be educated.
Well, Bill, they spent money on advertising. Not quite the same thing as spending money on young people.