Special to United Methodist Insight | Sept. 9, 2025
The summer is fast coming to a close, and so it is the perfect time to combine Christian youth summer camp with classic 80s' summer camp horror movies, obviously! Only in my weird Wesley Bros world, the scary villain behind the hockey mask is no murderer, but a cool hipster running a para-church ministry for cool kids called Vibe Lyfe! Loosely based on certain similarly named organizations that send college students into the schools to woo the popular students who become leaders and attract crowds, this little series will explore a big frustration of mine: the drive to lean in hard on American excess and beauty culture to attract little consumers for Jesus.
I am going to do my darnedest to give you a new page a week, along with content to help you explore your own relationship with glitzing up the gospel, and the appeal towards beauty and influence as means of attracting others to our side. This series will also challenge the current positioning in United Methodism, coming from the top down, that we should be defining ourselves as not Baptist, a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the recent disaffiliations. I find this frustrating and quite lacking in vision, and so I am hoping to avoid that trap myself, as I find it so important that we seek what we have in common with others right now more than defining ourselves by which group we AREN’T. At the same time, I get the frustration of demonstrating a so-called better way than Christian nationalism or mega-church attractionalism.
So come for the comics, stay for the introspection, and I hope to see you again on a weekly basis as John & Charles try to navigate their parishioners through Camp Crystal Lakewood!