A Relevant
Font Font u By Aaron D. Wolf
“Your font just isn’t relevant.”When Professor Worldly Wisdom told me that, I’m pretty sure I felt a tiny, hot vein pulse on my forehead. How can a font be not relevant? I wore many hats at our small evangelical church, or what I like to call the Willow Creek Mini-Me Clone Church: worship leader, elder, and bulletin maker.We couldn’t afford an expensive video projector for our song lyrics, so worshippers had to rely on our little bulletins, printed on a folded 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of warm, friendly canary-colored paper from Kinkos. But I had committed a mortal sin according to the Canon Law of Cool Churches. I’d used an unfriendly Gothic font. Dr. Wisdom, a professor at Fancy Pants Evangelical Seminary (names have been changed to protect the guilty), was our consultant, a guru who was explaining why our church wasn’t growing. He started out,“I’m an unchurched guy who’s been invited by one of your people. I come in here and sit down and open up this bulletin and BAM! You hit me with this churchy font. And I’m already uncomfortable.” His point was that everything counts when you’re programming a service “because lost people matter to God. Are you willing to risk one soul coming to
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Christ because you like German fonts?” Many moons have passed since that frustrating day. Today the Way of Willow (the philosophy of the gigantic Willow Creek Community Church of Barrington, Illinois) has infected formerly traditional churches of every stripe. Now, many churches—even Lutheran ones that for centuries had traditional worship and a common liturgy with only minor changes over the years—feel compelled to follow the thought process outlined by Professor Worldly Wisdom. Perhaps you’ve seen this, and if it was at a small church compared to Willow Creek (twenty-four thousand people attend on weekends), the experience might not have been pretty. It’s one thing when the praise band is made up of a host of trained, skilled musicians. But when Pastor Lutefisk and four other middle-aged men and women and their guitars and Clavinovas struggle through such contemporary classics as “You Are My All in All,” a song that is almost fifteen years old, you might find yourself asking why you bothered to get out of bed on a Sunday morning.
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