Stephen King, Starbucks, and American Christianity (Part 3 of 4)

[This is an article that I've chosen to break up into several days due to its length.]
Just this week (Tuesday, February 26), Starbucks closed all 7,100 of their stores across the country for three hours in order to re-train their employees. From the massive publicity generated in the media beforehand by such a move, I assumed that the training had to do primarily with coffee. Yet when I spoke with Starbucks employees here in Clarksville and in Nashville on Wednesday, I discovered that the training was more about connecting with the customer…returning to their roots of being a friendly, neighborhood coffee shop.

Howard D. Schultz was recently appointed (or anointed, whichever way you want to look at it) as the CEO of Starbucks. In February of last year, Schultz wrote a (now well-publicized) memorandum complaining of the Starbucks experience being “water[ed] down” from the company’s former (and smaller) days. The idea behind the unorthodox move on Tuesday was to return to the company’s purpose and passion for the customer. Even though unsuspecting customers complained outside locked doors and to newspaper reporters, I suspect that Starbucks will be glad they did what they did…as will we.

So what?

The “so what” is that maybe that’s what we ought to do. “Close and lock the church doors!?! Keep potential church members on the sidewalks to complain?!?” Not exactly, but certainly we should give some serious thought to the “watering down” in America of the Christian experience…and we should do whatever it takes to return to Christ’s purpose for His church. We must protect the “saltiness” of the church!

Surely we have to take some ownership of the problem when the largest religious shifts in America are away from affiliation with any religion or faith tradition. Whether we like it or not, we are “guilty by association” (in the eyes of outsiders) when Christians, church leaders , or churches dishonor the Lord. Every pedophile priest has an impact on what people think of the Christian faith. Every rogue pastor is a bad advertisement for our faith. Every hypocritical “Christian” paints a picture of Christianity in someone’s understanding.

“But I can’t be responsible for what everyone else does!” And that’s true, but it means that we have to be all the more intentional about demonstrating integrity in our lives consistently.

As to churches and denominations, believe it or not we’re facing struggles these days with “church leaders” (if you can call them that) who’re challenging the idea that a person must be a follower of Jesus Christ to be a member of a local church. I have no doubt that many people sitting on the pews of our churches week after week are unregenerate, but do we really want to openly suggest that conversion is a dispensable part of our faith?!?

Stephen King said, “Organized religion gives me the creeps.” But was he talking about the structures and pillars of authentic faith…or the people who’ve forgotten to practice what they preach? We must possess what Bill Hybels calls “high potency” in our faith! If there’s one trait of my generation (I’m a Gen-Xer) and those coming behind me, we can spot a fake a mile away. Much of what parades itself around as Christianity is a deplorable distortion of biblical faith and hardly “the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3).

To be continued...