Bye-Bye, First BaptistThe truly hip church rejects the old naming conventions.

Progressive churches are choosing hip new namesThe corporate world has gone granola. Business executives prefer the term community to customer base, and companies extol their "holistic" products. In the current commercial zeitgeist, where millions of consumers are flocking to Facebook and paying higher prices at Whole Foods for farm-fresh cheese, buzzwords like organic, communal, relational, and viral are part of the everyday lexicon.

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And Christianity isn't immune to these cultural fads. As people head to church this Christmas, many will be sitting in new churches that have abandoned the traditional nomenclature process, which gave us the First Parishes/Assemblies/Fellowships of the world by identifying the physical real estate the congregation occupied or the particular stance it held. Instead, they'll gather to celebrate the advent season in a church whose name expresses universal concepts of community over creed: REUNION, Common Ground, Mosaic, The Gathering, The Table, and Portico.

I grew up the son of a relatively hip evangelical minister—a denomination I dislodged myself from in college—so I've always had an interest in how pop culture and church culture intersect. Yet as a business reporter, I was skeptical of a religious movement that mimicked the vernacular trade of marketing gurus. But instead, I found myself approving of these chicly named churches' adoption of a contemporary cultural craze. Sure, it's trendy to extol community, organic growth, social justice, and going green. But these concerns were always supposed to be at the forefront of the church's mission. The early Christians formed networks of small groups, pooled resources, and established what amounts to an early form of welfare for the poor. In short, they were social activists. Which would seem a contrast to the individualism of numerous mainline Protestant denominations and many of the consumer-driven evangelical organizations. By participating in the popular movement toward stronger community bonds—starting with their names—these younger churches are returning to their roots.

During what REUNION Christian Church calls its "gatherings," the pastor, Hank Wilson, proved deft at weaving in elements from pop culture without seeming trite or like he's pandering. The worship team played a Death Cab for Cutie song in between sets of contemporary praise ballads. He played a clip from Good Will Hunting to illustrate a point about intimacy. And when Wilson referenced a dated Saturday Night Live skit of Eddie Murphy channeling Buckwheat, he had a solution for all the young congregants looking lost: "YouTube it."

In an e-mail, Wilson told me, "The church should stick very close to pop culture because that is where the people are. … I hope when people think of Reunion, they will think of a community [that] is trying to live differently inside of our culture—not separated or at war with it—all for [the] purpose of pointing people to Christ."

This perspective might seem radical since it requires a straddling of the imagined fence between the sacred and the stylish. And, of course, there are fundamentalists who shy away from pop culture, considering the influence of rock music, MTV, and the like inherently corruptible. But many churches have long tapped into cultural currents to remain relevant with the masses.

Christmas was originally a pagan holiday before it was successfully usurped by the church. Famous American evangelist Billy Sunday used two cultural entertainments of his day to woo crowds: baseball and the carnival. He even hired a circus giant to serve as an usher during one of his camp meetings. The Salvation Army—perhaps the denomination that best personified a taking-it-to-the-streets mentality in the 19^th and 20^th centuries—turned the drinking song "Charlie Champagne" into the soul-stirring "Praise His Name, He Sets Me Free." (The line "Here's to good old whiskey, drink it down" was transformed to "Storm the forts of darkness, bring them down.")

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