The church of the future?

Here’s an interesting piece about the community that has grown out of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. While it has some of the heavy breathing about conservative Christians you’d expect to find at Salon (“Within this movement lies something as old as America itself, and as terrifying and alluring as anything Orwell predicted”), the author seems to get that this kind of tight-knit community is filling a void in many people’s lives, especially those who’ve come from broken homes, or have had problems with drugs, or generally don’t fit in with our idea of respectable church folk.

Now, personally, there’s a lot about Mars Hill, at least as described in this piece, that I find objectionable and even a bit creepy. The combination of hipster culture and dispensational theology for starters. Not to mention the strident anti-feminism and the emphasis on obedience (at least as quoted in this piece, Mark Driscoll, the head pastor, seems much more a law than gospel kind of guy).

But at the same time, it’s pretty darn difficult to imagine a mainline church mounting a life-changing project like this. It’s easy for mainliners to use the things they think are wrong about conservative evangelicals as an excuse for not learning from them. Not that I’m eager to run off and join an intentional community, but something like Mars Hill seems to be in an entirely different league from shallow self-help prosperity gospel tripe or your standard megachurch. Lots of young people in particular seem interested in a faith that is demanding and requires commitment and transformation. If the more traditional churches don’t think about what that might mean for them, other churches will pick up the slack.