Many don’t want the church to be like a sceney bar or a stylish boutique. They want the church to be the church: an institution that embraces awkward people, confronts sin, transforms lives, subverts the sovereignty of self, serves others and provides meaning more substantial than the ephemera of fickle fads.

Do people want Christianity to be cool? What happens when churches become too driven by the desire to be trend-savvy and culturally relevant? Can a church balance hipster credibility within an orthodox tradition?

These were questions at the heart of my book “Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide,” which released five years ago. The book seemed to fascinate reporters, with outlets like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and NPRcovering what they saw as a deliciously paradoxical story.

“If the evangelical Christian leadership thinks that ‘cool Christianity’ is a sustainable path forward, they are severely mistaken,” I wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, The Perils of ‘Wannabe Cool’ Christianity. “As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don’t want cool as much as we want real.”

Five years later, has the cool-church movement done anything to reverse trends of declining church attendance, particularly among young people?

Most evidence suggests the answer is no. Recent Pew Research data showed across-the-board declines in Americans who identify as Christian and dramatic increases in those who are “unaffiliated” with religion, particularly among younger adults.

Research also indicates that millennials do prefer “real” churches over “cool” ones. Contrary to the belief that churches must downplay their churchiness and meet in breweries or warehouses in order to appeal to millennials, a 2014Barna study showed that millennials actually prefer church spaces that are straightforward and overtly Christian. The same study reported that when millennials described their “ideal church,” they preferred “classic” (67 percent) over “trendy” (33 percent).

More evidence for the unsustainability of hipster Christianity comes by reflecting on what happened to some of the key figureheads and churches I profiled for the book.

Rob Bell was one of seven “Hip Christian Figureheads” featured in the book, and I also wrote about his then-church Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich. In the early 2000s, Bell was an evangelical luminary and the poster boy for cool Christianity (“he puts the hip in discipleship,” wrote Andy Crouch).

Since then, Bell has quit pastoring, moved to California, palled around withOprah Winfrey and become anathematized by many evangelicals on account of his evolving views on hell, gay marriage and “zimzum” theology. In the last five years, Bell went from megachurch pastor to no longer attending organized church at all.

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