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Christ Central will be sending members to Nairobi to make a documentary about the shortage of doctors in Kenya. But philanthropic projects aren't the only way this church -- and Brown -- appreciates media. In February, the church put together the NoDa Film Festival at the Neighborhood for free. With a cash bar and neglected, mature-themed films such as Chameleon Street, To Sleep With Anger, various hip-hop documentaries as well as the Spike Lee Classic Do The Right Thing, the festival was hardly a revival night-like venture.
Appreciation for popular culture is by no means confined to Christ Central Church. The respected alternative music magazine Paste, for instance, was founded by Christians who don't see the line between the secular and the sacred as impermeable. "The Church, particularly in the last 50 years, has taken an approach that, 'Hollywood is evil and rock & roll is evil, and we will create our own separate Christian culture,' rather than engaging culture," says editor Josh Jackson. "In reality, Christians still end up watching the same movies and listening to the same music in a lot of instances, but [are] being told that they can't take part in that. There's so many wonderful things going on in our culture that the Church has just ignored."
Evidence of Jackson's faith can't be found within the magazine's pages, and he says Paste is neither a "Christian publication" -- you won't find coverage of one-dimensional praise-music acts like Steven Curtis Chapman or Casting Crowns -- nor does the magazine have any hidden Christian agenda. "We're not trying to do anything other than shine a light on some of the more celebratory pieces of art in our culture -- great music and great film and great books, even video games."
You won't, however, find much coverage of music that glorifies violence or misogyny. And Jackson says Paste's attempts to treat real artists -- from indie singer Cat Power and emerging acts like the Arctic Monkeys and Carolina rappers Little Brother to inventive film artists such as director Wes Anderson and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman -- with respect might result in slightly less snarkiness than you find in other music mags.
Christ Central's Brown says there's nothing odd or wrong with appreciating and promoting secular art. "Part of what it means to be a believer is ... looking at what God has created, at who God has created, and finding and enjoying what is good about it.
"If I go to McDonald's," he continues, "and eat a hamburger, it's not only good if a Christian makes it. It's a good burger. And if a Christian makes it, it could be a bad burger, depending on how well he does it. And so I think part of what it means to believe that there is redemption, and to believe that God created the world, is to look at the redeeming aspect of it, to look at it's beauty."
That doesn't mean he overlooks the bad or the spiritually deficient. "Even in things that are good, there are imperfections," he says. "I think the Church has majored on exposing the imperfections of things."
Is this It?
American churches have always dealt with the dilemma of how to propagate their flocks, says Dr. Bill Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School in Winston-Salem. The competitive nature and variety of denominations means that churches must compete, particularly for younger people. A generation ago, for instance, the drive to engage young people played a role in the development of today's megachurches. According to the Metrolina Baptist Association, the number of churches in the Charlotte area today isn't keeping up with the region's population growth.
But change doesn't come without controversy. Any new approach to theology draws criticism. The very nature of the emerging church trend, however, has been a lightning rod, particularly among conservative evangelicals who believe those churches have "not stood up for certain dogmas ... and that they're kind of soft on certain identifiable Christian beliefs," Leonard says.
Some emerging churches in Charlotte, despite the laid-back atmosphere, belong to denominations that have some pretty conservative underpinnings. The emphasis on openness and dialogue does not necessarily mean these emerging churches are among the ranks of more liberal groups like the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) or Unitarian Universalism.
Watershed is part of the Metrolina Baptist Association's New Churches for the New Millennium initiative. The MBA is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which doesn't believe women should take leadership roles, says homosexuality is wrong ("not a valid alternative lifestyle," in the words of the SBC's position paper) and anathematizes sex outside of marriage and abortion. (Its position is: "Procreation is a gift from God, a precious trust reserved for marriage. At the moment of conception, a new being enters the universe, a human being, a being created in God's image. This human being deserves our protection, whatever the circumstances of conception.")