The Project returns after a two week hiatus caused by the celebration of some deity’s birth. Surprisingly, a time that is pimped out as a joyous occasion of family and friends, to celebrate the savior of humanity, people are amazingly bitchy. Like most bloggers, I work at menial, entry level, retail job and use my blog to make me feel important. So, I can vouch for the intense frustration and rudeness exhibited this year. I know, like David Foster Wallace preached, I need to avoid my default programming and think why the people act that way and not myself but I want to point out something: we are a generation of food service workers raised on Fight Club. What you imagined on your worst days is our starting point. Just keep it in mind you curse out your server because they are out of envelopes for their gift cards.
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Let’s talk about espresso and cappuccinos again. The reason most church-type bars fail is because they use the equivalent to consumer espresso machine. Try as you might, it won’t taste good. A really good professional espresso machine will run you about 15 grand. This was the crux of my argument is my last Kensington post: the Church unsuccessfully trying to imitate popular culture to draw people away instead of going out and influencing people by living in the culture.
Let’s start with Woodside, and my prejudices. I attended a Woodside service at White Lake a few weeks before starting this project. We got the time wrong, arrived late, but still caught the message. Wasn’t overly impressed, but not immediately turned off. The newsletter was a trip: movie reviews that totally missed the point, a science column that pimped a “creationist USA tour”, and a column to review Christian fiction. I know, I laughed really hard at someone actually wanting to read Christian fiction, too. The newsletter—a whopping 44-pages this month—details the ongoings of the 5 Woodside campuses and various aspects of Christian livelihood. They even have their own TV show, “Get Real: A Christian Take on Current Events” which is pretty self-explanatory. So, walking into Woodside in Troy Sunday I mentally prepped myself for the worst.
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