Pastor Daryl shared this email today in his blog about a response to Lifepoint’s recent mailer to the community:

I found your flyer adorned with a picture of a used-up roll of toilet paper still on its hanger in the mailbox of my weekend getaway in Wilmington, and I think it is, without a doubt, the most vulgar invitation to a church service that I have ever received.

Your targeted demographics, I’m sure, are rock ‘n’ roll airheads who have the crude sensibility to think that your disgusting graphic and its message are cool.

We are certainly living in strange times when a “church” has to resort to bathroom humor to attract worshippers. If this is what Christianity has fallen to– dumbed-down to– in its desperate search for new converts, then it is not worth . . . well, it’s not worth a roll of toilet tissue.

I can just imagine your tacky services with rock and roll “praise” singing, feel-good fellowship, banal and semi-illiterate, insufferable sermons. No dignity. No poetry. No intelligent theology. No majestic, traditional hymns. Nothing of any taste or culture.

“Come, Lord Jesus,
Our guest to be,
And let us rock ‘n roll with Thee.”

Is this your mantra?

When it comes to Christianity, the Lifepoint Church must be the pits. I shall save your advertisement to illustrate the revolting shallowness of contemporary worship services in an article I am writing that contrasts Christian Humanists with Christian Fundamentalists. I believe your church falls into the latter category.

Now lets suppose for a moment that we are what this gentleman thinks we are and that our target demographics are rock ‘n’ roll airheads who have the crude sensibility to think that your disgusting graphic and its message are cool. If we don’t target them, who will?

If you’ve ever read through Luke 15, you find the story of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. Jesus is talking to a crowd of the good and the bad, the religious and the sinner, the “saved” and the lost. The “correct” crowd had no concern for the “uncorrect;” the lost were doing anything possible to crowd around to hear Jesus. Jesus’ message was: “My Father loves the lost and nothing is too extreme to bring them back to Him. He’s always looking for them, waiting for them and ready to run to them the second they take a step in His direction.”

The wicked tax collectors couldn’t get enough of Jesus while the Pharisees schemed to kill him.

Now I’m assuming that this gentleman would classify himself as “Christian.” I’m further assuming that he would agree with Luke 15’s premise. If my assumptions are correct, might it not be imprudent to so maliciously slander us in an attempt to reach the rock ‘n’ roll airheads who do not know Jesus?

Call me crazy, but if I don’t know Jesus and this gentleman is selling his version of him, I think I’d pass…

[Wow! I just read Vince Antonucci’s post today called “Lost.” He nailed the sentiment better than I.]