"What Would Cool Jesus Do?"

"The book on Hillsong, however—the other book, lowercase b—is that they’re the real article: the world’s first genuinely cool church. “The music! The lights! The crowds!” begins an incredulous woman narrating a CNN segment on Hillsong NYC in smarmy CNNese. “It looks like a rock concert. And the lines around the block are enough to make any nightclub envious.” The chyron reads “Hipster preacher smashes stereotypes.” They call Pastor Carl a hipster—ABC actually said “hipster heartthrob”—and Carl says he doesn’t know what that means, and he wears a motorcycle jacket when he says this.

Like everyone else at Hillsong, Pastor Joel is unwilling to acknowledge that there’s something going on here, vis-à-vis the hat, vis-à-vis the entire fashion-forward, Disney Channel teen, aggressively accessorized aesthetic of the place. It is a non-issue to him. Yes, he tells me, sure, he likes clothes. But that’s the end of it. What he means to say is that lots of people like clothes…and anyway, why am I asking him? I should ask Pastor Carl about the clothes, he tells me. What Pastor Carl does, he says—that’s intentional, and then he laughs. So I did, I asked Pastor Carl, and he said he really doesn’t think about it, okay maybe he does sometimes, but hey, he asked, turning it around, what about me? Aren’t I thinking about it when I show up to an interview in my whole head-to-toe Gap thing? My whole neutrally attired thing? That was a decision, too, Carl pointed out, wasn’t it?...

all around the church, that is the story the congregation tells from beneath their hats: that finally there are clergymen who look familiar, who offer messages that relate to their actual lives, who accept that they’ve lived in New York long enough to know it won’t fly to smear gay people, or tell women to go home and have kids, or expect young, bright, beautiful, maybe-cool people to dress humbly and plainly and ignore the thrills of modern life in a mega-city. This church is the one, finally, that really is different. All are welcome here in their rubber pants...

I came back the next week and the week after, and one Sunday morning after what I had thought would be my last time in church, I woke up and felt a strange and unexpected bodily need to put my hands in the air, this need to be in a room where people frantically worried about the soul, to hear from Carl that he most definitely had answers to all the questions... Over the course of my time with Carl, what was most striking to witness was how grateful people were simply to be asked how a struggle is going, how good it feels to have someone to share in the pain of the answer."
http://www.gq.com/story/inside-hillsong-church-of-justin-bieber-kevin-durant?mod=e2this

I haven't believed in God since I was 8 (the Christian God, particularly the genderless loving figure of my mother's alternative-y Presbyterian church) but I have been thinking a lot about the value and benefits of spiritual communities and the special kind of nurturing that happens in those spaces. And I've been thinking about human needs, and how our society is structured to meet those needs. There is something important about spaces for emotions and philosophies and identity and reflection.