I have a new "tagline" for my blog, "Inciting allegiance to Jesus in a society gone mad."  I've noticed that many people have dramatic sounding taglines stressing how important their blog is...I'd like to make the case for why my tagline shouldn't be interpreted to fit into such a category (by the way, many people conversely have overly-humble sounding taglines that stress how utterly postmodern they are).

If you knew me well, you'd know that I think intentionally cheesy things are pretty dang funny.  The operative word is intentionally. My tagline is a bit funny to me because it sounds so darn dramatic, thus qualifying as intentional cheese.

Beyond the humor of it (though many of you might not think it's all that funny), the tagline is pretty descriptive.  I think it is our job as Christians to incite allegiance to Jesus Christ.  Notice that I don't advocate rebellion against the world.  It is one's allegiance to Christ that should cause one's subversiveness.  I think the church of my generation (I'm 29) sometimes blurs their counter-cultures, linking allegiance with Christ with elements of style.  Notice also that I'm emphasizing the distinction between the church and society rather than our commonality.  This is intentional.  I have more in common with the Anabaptist branch of Christianity than any other branch, and this tagline expresses some anabaptist influences. 

Finally, I do think the world has gone mad.  Allegiance to Christ is sanity.  The funny thing about that is to the world, Christianity seems foolish (at least it should if we're doing it right).

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Mark Van Steenwyk ("Van S") is founder of Missio Dei, a missional house church movement in south Minneapolis. He is also the co-director of Mission:Think, an organization that exists to help the church faithfully engage the North American context. Mission:Think is sponsoring a conference on Christianity in a Consumer Culture in April 2006. Mark has been married to Amy since 1997. They don't have kids...yet. Mark blogs here.