Column by David Rempfer

If you are reading this newspaper and you have ever been to a boring church service, please raise your hand.

If we’re being perfectly honest about this, there should be hands raised all over campus right now. Most of our generation has deemed the ide How To Get Back With Your Ex After 3 Years as of church and religion as irrelevant; we could probably use the words Bigfoot, dinosaur, and communion in the same sentence without changing our tone of voice whatsoever. It feels especially true here in the Bible Belt, where there have just been too many churches hosting too many services over too many years that felt too ridiculously irrelevant for us to care too much.

The mentality is something like this: If a church doesn’t have something to say that matters in my everyday life, why should it be given influence in any day of my life?

While that’s a fairly convincing thought, before we completely discard the notion of church, let’s just suppose for a moment that we either found or started a church that actually spoke to the issues we college students care about, and did so in a legitimate, non-judgmental, non-religious fashion. (I know that as far as most of us are concerned, I’m already speaking of the neighborhood between Neverland and Hogwarts, but bear with me.) Let’s imagine there was a church where you could legitimately say, “Here’s my question about God,” and get a straight answer from somebody, with no punches pulled, no strings attached and no offering plates passed by for payments for the answers.

Here’s the good news: that challenge is being embraced by a church just a few miles from UK.

For some quick background, this church just threw down with an Easter series called “EPIC,” which launched with an 8-minute, guitar-shredding opener that wove through AC/DC, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine and a few others that never slowed down. Yes, in church. Shortly after that, the whole month of July they ran an entirely music-centered series called “My Generation,” where each of the last four decades took a turn at the focus of the talks — and of the musical performances, which included Beyonce’s “Crazy In Love” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” with a full-fledged dance number.

This nearby church, Quest (www.questcommunity.com), is launching a new series called “UAsked4It” this Saturday and Sunday to mark the opening of a new building. The series started with the idea to post a Web site where any person could come and submit any question they wanted the church to answer — no holds barred.

Going live late in the summer after a two-week, 1,200 question bombardment, www.UAsked4It.com obtained a massive spectrum of questions, ranging from “Can you lose your salvation?” to “Is divorce ever okay?” The site then flipped from a question submission Web site to a voting booth and, to this day, people are still voting to pick their desired topics from the list of semifinalists. To give a few examples from the list, there’s drinking, divorce, how the world will end, what God says about other religions and a PG-13-at-best sex question and answer week.

Yes, this church is legitimately letting us pick their topic.

As if that wasn’t enough, Quest is also throwing down their fourth annual concert event called “Questapalooza” (www.qpza.com), a huge, low-admission-fee party that the whole city — and especially all of UK — is invited out to. The field next to the auditorium will be jam-packed with carnival rides, inflatables, BMX stunt bikers, rock climbing, funnel cakes, the finals of a Lexington-wide American Idol contest called “The FAME,” a $1 raffle to win a 5-day all-expense-paid Caribbean cruise, fireworks and concerts by the winner of “The FAME,” Group 1 Crew, Jars of Clay and Third Day.

With “UAsked4It” exploding out of the gates and “Questapalooza” bringing a 12,000-person party to the city of Lexington, I’d venture to say that it already looks like Quest has invited UK to anything but just another boring church service — and it sure won’t be going in a list with Bigfoot any time soon.

How To Get Back With Your Ex After 3 Years