Oddities

Because We Can, We Should?

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I'm not into today's CCM. The worship leader at our church must think me a pagan because I have a blank look on my face whenever she brings up the latest hot Christian band and their equally hot quasi-worship song that's blazing up the Christian charts. Who? What song? Let me guess; it has the same beat as all the others….

Today, I had one of those crazy days of endless errands. Oil change, allergy shots, soccer practice, a ten-item grocery list that necessitated trips to three different megagrocers just to get common items any ONE of them SHOULD have had. You know the drill. So desperate for a little spiritual refresher, I turned on the big Christian radio station in town to hear one of the afternoon teaching programs. Instead I got an earful of tedious music. 

Whither the teaching? Well, the station's booted all its teaching in favor of a non-stop music format. I guess every station wants to be just another vapid K-LOVE clone. In some corporate roundtable, station management decided to give the people what they want rather than what is best for them, thinking that 24/7/365 of the Pablum that passes for Christian music today better enlivens the masses than Ravi Zacharias talking about techniques for witnessing to Muslims.

Ugh. Maybe I'll call 'em up and request Keith Green's "You Love the World (And You're Avoiding Me)."

It's symptomatic of a gigantic problem. 

One of the most worldly concepts you'll find in our culture is this idea that "because we can, we should." Name a moral failing or a political ambition and I'll bet "because we can, we should" empowers it. Abortion and fetal tissue cultivation are the sick offspring of that thinking. You can probably come up with a million more.

Christians are not immune to this mistake. In fact, we rationalize a lot of  "because we can, we should" under the guise of redeeming things. Kids love Saturday morning cartoons? Well, let's make Christian cartoons! Your son wants an action figure? Why not give him a brand-spanking new Jesus action figure complete with a whip to drive out moneychangers and a glow-in-the-dark sword that springs out of his mouth to slay the wicked?

Almost all "Jesus junk" hatches from "because we can, we should."

Truth be told, I feel queasy walking into Christian bookstores. They're so utterly derivative and reactionary that if I were an unbeliever plunked down in one, I'd guess the first stage of being born again is losing one's sense of beauty, creativity, and charm.

Yet for all the WWJD paraphernalia floated over here from Shanghai, a more soul-killing expression of "because we can, we should" exists.

Mysecret.tv is a recent addition to the Web. Some Christian organization thought there weren't enough avenues for confession for Christians, Confession or Gossip?so because the Web exists and is (somewhat) anonymous, it's the perfect medium for confessing one's sins. 

Except it's not. Not in the slightest. Instead, Mysecret.tv stands as a warning to us all, the epitome of "because we can, we should"-ism in the American Church.  

The site raises my ire for a number of reasons:

1. It's pornography. Like some lurid afternoon TV talk show, the site parades sin as entertainment. By offering verbal voyeurism (consider the domain name), it's no different than a hardcore porn site. One click and you can read the details of someone else's failure before God. "But doesn't the Bible show great believers failing?" Sure, it does. But if anyone here's calling for adding Mysecret.tv to the canon, well….

2. It usurps the role of the local church. No doubt, Evangelicals have dropped the confessional ball. Too many Evangelical churches would rather judge than offer grace after a confession. But building a site like Mysecret.tv actually circumvents local churches improving their dealings with confession, sin, and grace. It provides a cheap excuse NOT to fix the problem in our local churches. It asks for none of the commitment inherent in a Christ-centered community, cheapening how we relate to each other in an age when real community in the church is already on its deathbed.

3. It asks for no repentance. Enough said. 

4. It offers no grace. Real grace doesn't come with a disclaimer. Jesus Christ gave us a model for how to dispense grace to the repentant. It's the church body of real people who hear confession, cry with the sinner, and offer grace by the Holy Spirit working through people. But Mysecret.tv expunges all face-to-face restorative human contact. Therefore, by removing the links in the chain of how grace should be dispensed, it offers no grace at all.

5. It offers no accountability. After people confess on Mysecret.tv, what follow-up occurs to help them work through the ramifications of their confession? None that I can see.

6. It offers no restitution. How does one walk out the end product of a confession on Mysecret.tv? Well, if nothing is asked of the people who confess on the site, then no restitution occurs. How that benefits the one confessing is beyond me. 

7. It demeans the death of Christ on the cross. If Mysecret.tv angles to be a Christian-sponsored site that takes confessions, yet offers none of the hallmarks of true Christian confession, repentance, accountability, and restitution, then it's not Christian in the slightest. That mocks the Lord.

I could name a half dozen more failings in Mysecret.tv, but its concession to "because we can, we should" speaks for itself. When considering this site's premise, it appears no one asked if it undermines everything the Church should be. They just plowed ahead and slapped it up on the Web. Alakazam, now you can confess to boinking your kid's babysitter and feel better about yourself for doing so. (And yes, all you grammar mavens, I intentionally wrote that last sentence for maximum {read ironic} ambiguity.)

Is anyone else disturbed that so much of what passes for Christianity in America displays the same hollow core as Mysecret.tv? A group sees a need in the Church, but instead of pursuing tough answers that might require a complete overhaul of how our churches live out the Gospel, they settle for the cheap and meaningless—because they can.

Cerulean Sanctum exists to find ways to better our churches and the people who comprise them. For this treason, I loathe cheap answers to the pernicious problems we face as Christians in America. I see a site like Mysecret.tv and my blood boils. When another blogger told me about the site, and I checked it out myself, my jaw dropped at the utter lack of discernment behind this online confession booth.

(If you're a regular reader of this site, you know I almost never single out a particular ministry or program for scorn. I don't like to name names because so much out there needs to improve, even on good sites. I know that Cerulean Sanctum lacks in some areas. I also know I'm not satisfied with cheap and easy.)

I pray this post gets us thinking about finding the narrow path, rather than the wide, destructive one behind "because we can, we should." Too many Christians trudge down that "because we can, we should" superhighway leaving the rest of us to wonder if we're the ones going the wrong way.

Our response to the problems of our day will cost us something precious. When we're not prepared to pay the price, we'll settle for the path of "because we can, we should."

But Jesus won't be waiting at the end of that road. 

The Character of Christian Characters

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Right now, I’m deeply enmeshed in edits for my novel. My whole being seems wired to the craft of writing at this moment, so I’m reading more fiction in order to stimulate my own chops.

So here comes the off-topic, obligatory writing post.

Having been sick most of last weekend, I finished three novels:

Monster by Frank Peretti

Presumed Guilty by James Scott Bell

Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland

The first two are by Christian authors who typically fall into the Christian market. I can’t say anything about Douglas Coupland’s faith, but he sure can write.

I have some pretenses to being a novelist some day. Hoping to be listed as a novelist who is a Christian as opposed to the standard Christian novelist moniker, my current work is aimed squarely at the secular marketplace. However, having a Christian main character forced my book into the Christian marketplace. Any pretenses I had at being a “bridge” author collapsed the second most secular publishers decided to jump on the Christian bandwagon. With the Christian fiction marketing growing faster than any other (and with sales to match), I suspect I’m typecast. “Your character’s a Christian, well, that’ll be great for our new Christian imprint!”

Ugh.

But I digress…

After reading a book like Monster or Presumed Guilty, I’ve finally concluded why I read so little Christian fiction. It’s not that the writing isn’t good (it’s improving daily), or the stories aren’t interesting (the creative dam has burst in that regard), but I just can’t get past the characters.

Every time I read a work of Christian fiction, I struggle immensely with the characters. A secular novel like Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby lives or dies by the quality of its characterizations and the quasi-magic-realism that enlivens that author’s works. Hey, Bob, shake hands with the Lord of the UniverseBut every time I pick up a Christian novel, the same question comes through: Who ARE these people?

I feel like the characters in most Christian novels dropped to Earth from another planet light years away from my normal existence.  They don’t resemble any Christians I’ve ever met in my life. If identifying with the characters grabs a reader, each time I read a work of modern Christian fiction, I’m tempted to haul out my old college anthropology texts to see if they can shed some light on the humans that inhabit these books.

Not to pick on Bell too much, but he writes a pastor’s wife with a semi-lurid past who’s been neglecting her husband in the intimacy department. When she hears he just sold a big book deal worth millions, she decides to slither into her  tight jeans and frilly blouse, then put out a couple of glasses of sparkling apple cider. What she doesn’t know is that her husband’s in a motel room getting a few intimacy lessons from a pornstar.

Now I don’t know about you, but I read that and just scratch my head. Never mind that pastors all across this country are supposedly struggling with the issue of how to keep from succumbing to the temptations of the pornstars they counsel. What’s the deal with the tame response of a wife trying to save her marriage? I can’t speak for every Christian woman out there, but is that realistic—even in the slightest? Tight jeans and a couple of glasses of fizzy apple cider? Now one could assume that Bell’s not trying to titillate here, so he plays to the censors and keeps it tame. But then the husband’s out having an affair with a pornstar, so what’s the titillation factor on that one?

This illustrates the problem of plastic characterization that’s the bane of most of the Christian fiction I read. The people in these books don’t talk, pray, romance, play, or act in any way that seems real.

In contrast, when Coupland talks about the peace his protagonist’s made with her loneliness, man, I’m right there inside her head:

We cripple our children for life by not telling them what loneliness is, all of its shades and tones and implications. When it clubs us on the head, usually just after we leave home, we’re blindsided. We have no idea what hit us, We think we’re diseased, schizoid, bipolar, monstrous and lacking in dietary chromium. It takes us until we’re thirty to figure out what it was that sucked the joy from our youth, that made our brains shriek and burn on the inside, even when our exteriors made us as confident and bronzed as Qantas pilots. Loneliness.

Now you may not agree with all that, or fail to identify with each point, but I’ve got to believe that some of that got through and resonated on some level with you. More so than a wife hoping to spice up her marriage with a bottle of sparkling apple cider.

The curse on all Christian fiction is not that Christians are a diverse lot and not every characterization is going to work, but that Christians are a diverse lot, yet we seem to be ashamed of our own diversity. We don’t tend to enjoy living all that much, either. There’s dying to self and then there’s asceticism.

If I wrote that pastor’s wife, I’d have her go out and buy a fake fur, a bottle of good port, and then have her greet the husband holding two full glasses, wearing the fur, a smile, and nothing else. Why? Because it’s more real, more alive, more human. And most of all, it’s more joyful.

But here’s where the shame at our diversity comes in. As real as that might be as I choose to pen it, too many Christians would howl. And they’d probably howl as much about the port as they would the naked pastor’s wife in a fur. Others would have no problem with a scene like that. But to make all characters palatable to all persuasions of Christians, we have to whittle them down until they’re unrecognizable.

What that leaves is characters who are curiously two-dimensional, free of zest, and who epitomize a sort of barrenness that should never be part of a grace-filled life. Worst of all, it salutes characters who were more interesting prior to meeting Christ than afterwards. What a sad statement to make!

Perhaps we Christian readers are too easily offended. I know so many Christians who watch a show like Desperate Housewives on TV, then turn around and shout out, “Well, I never!” when reading a Christian work that deals with the same content, albeit with true redemption offered. Maybe we like plastic characters who endorse our particular brand of Christianity, even if we ourselves don’t resemble those characters.

Several Christian novelists read this blog, and if you’re reading this now, I hope that I haven’t offended you in any way. Truthfully, I feel for the situation we’re in, always trying to please all of the people all of the time. I know that I’ve struggled with that immensely in my novel, where the characters enjoy wine with a meal, have never read Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye, enjoy dancing, and grow in the Lord by ditching sanitized Evangelical stereotypes of what two twenty-something Christians must be.

We can do better if we move beyond appealing only to the widest audience. Christian fiction is growing, but if we’re to truly write redemptive works, we’ve got to take more chances. The call is out to be “grittier,” yet Presumed Guilty is as gritty as it can be, while still giving us characters whose Christianity is so odd that we can’t relate at all. Nor do we need to foul up our Christian characters until they’re just one smidgeon away from being considered unregenerate. Just make them real people, even when they’re facing unreal circumstances.

Calling a Truce in the Worship Wars

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WorshipOver the last year, one topic has arisen on more blogs than any other: proper worship. The tenor of these posts is typically aimed at how to do worship right, with the writer explaining why his/her token method of worship is THE ONLY KIND THAT WORSHIPS GOD IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH. Like so many aspects of the Faith, we’ve turned worship into a tangle of pointing fingers. Rarely do we claim any higher ground than to contend that our higher ground is loftier than someone else’s.

Yiddish speakers have a name for this: Oy Vey!

There’s no better place to start than the battle between modern worship choruses and classic hymns. Nothing will split a church faster than forcing people to take sides on which is better. Advocates of modern worship choruses tend to be younger, middle class, with less history of long-term church attendance, and a greater affinity for Third Wave and Megachurches. The Vineyard churches get a lot of press—good and bad—for being the nexus for the trends in church music today; a Vineyard moldy oldie like John Wimber’s “Isn’t He” is a classic example of a modern worship song. The Pentecostal church I attend favors this kind of music, and as the drummer on our worship team, it’s what I’m used to playing for church music.

On the other side are those who advocate the old hymns. These folks tend to be older, were raised in the church (usually in a conservative congregation) and tend to be from churches that are either wealthy/upper-middle class or dirt poor. On the Web, most of the Reformed bloggers are fans of the old hymns; they tend to be the most vocal critics of modern worship choruses, too. I grew up in the Lutheran church (and spent time in an old-fashioned AoG and modern Presbyterian church who supported the hymns) so my history is also with the hymns.

If you listen hard enough, you hear the arguments pro and con for one side or another, but I want to cut through the rhetoric and tackle the common talking points we hear on the Web.

Modern worship songs are theologically shallow.
Yep, many of them are. The hymn supporters get a point there. Unfortunately, they lose it, too. The problem? The hymns we commonly sing today are a tiny fraction of all the hymns that have ever been written. Only the best have survived the test of time. In defense of the modern worship song camp, time will have the same pruning effect on worship choruses. A hundred years from now, we may still be singing some of them. Chances are that those that will have survived will be the ones that have the deepest theological meaning—just like the old hymns.

Now this doesn’t excuse shallow lyrics and brain-dead melodies in today’s worship music, but we need to apply standards fairly. There have been many hymns that were popular in their day, but have since vanished from our Sunday repertoires because they weren’t all that deep. They played into the era’s popular music styles, corresponded to theological fads that have since passed away, or weren’t all that great to begin with. Sounds a lot like modern worship songs and the deficiencies noted by those folks who love to criticize them. Outcome? Draw.

Worship music (and the people who write it) must reflect our doctrine.
Oh really? Let’s look at the facts.

  • If we believe that the only source of revelation is Scripture, then we must oppose singing “How Great Thou Art,” “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” “This Is My Father’s World,” and a whole host of other hymns that have lyrics that support the fact that God’s creation speaks—apart from the Scriptures—attesting to His glory. If we’re part of that group of Christians who believes that it’s all going to burn one day anyway—so why not cut down the rainforests now—then these hymns must also be verboten. That’s a tough loss; a lot of people really like those hymns.
  • If we believe that Christian mysticism is just another word for apostasy, then we’ve got to cut out hymns like “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” by Catholic (uh oh, there’s another problem) mystic Bernard of Clairvaux. That puts a serious damper on Good Friday services, now doesn’t it? Clairvaux also wrote the popular hymns “Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee” and “O Jesus, Joy of Loving Hearts.” Too bad. He and all the other mystic hymnwriters are out.
  • If our eschatology is not postmillennial, then we must no longer sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and just about any hymn that came out of The Salvation Army movement. That’s a big chunk of hymns in the 1865-1890 timeframe, too.
  • If we’re Reformed and reject books written by Arminian authors, then in order to remain consistent we should also reject hymns written by Arminians. This is particularly painful since that means all hymns by Charles Wesley have to go. Considering he wrote more than 900, that’s a big loss. Say goodbye to “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” and “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” We also have to reject “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” because not only did Wesley write it, but George Whitefield changed it so that it was no longer Scripturally accurate to the Luke 2 passage Wesley based it on (because nowhere does it say that the angels were singing.) The two fought bitterly over the change, and we can’t be supporting two Christian brothers fighting, now can we?
  • If we’re Arminian and can’t stand what Reformed hymn writers have to say, then we’re probably Dave Hunt and could care less what this blog has to say about anything anyway, nevermind my comments on hymnody.
  • If hymns written by the unconverted and apostates are out, then we need to delete “O Holy Night” from our Christmas services. The lyricist was a Catholic who later renounced Christianity and became a Marxist, while the music was written by a Jewish composer. That song contains political overtones, too, by dealing with the then current issue of slavery. We all know that politics and hymnody should never mix.
  • If we oppose Catholic theology, then besides all the Bernard of Clairvaux hymns we must stop singing, scratch everything written before the Protestant Reformation. Wow, that’s a lot of hymns we need to chuck!

At issue here is that the same people who are unwilling to stop singing the hymns listed above are the same people who rant and rave against writers, pastors, and whomever doesn’t toe their doctrinal party line. That’s profoundly hypocritical no matter how we look at it. It’s even worse when we apply those filtering criteria to modern worship songs and their writers, while giving the hymns a pass. Yet we seem to do it all the time. Call it just another case of selective memory on the part of Evangelicals. Just be consistent—that’s all I’m asking for here. If we can’t be, then we need to stop judging other houses because we can’t get our own in order.

Too many of today’s worship songs sound like nothing more than “God is my boyfriend” songs.
You know what I mean, the “I love you, I love you, I love you” kinds of worship choruses that never point out who the “you” is. We could be singing them to our sweetheart or to God…who knows?

This is a favorite argument among hymn supporters and there’s a legitimate beef there. However, my experience is the amount of these kinds of worship choruses is highly overinflated by those who oppose them. I looked through all the worship choruses I’ve played in church over the span of three years and only one or two fit this accusation. If you ask me, this argument is a non-starter.

If there’s a legitimate beef against “God is my boyfriend” worship music, it’s actually the modern worship chorus fans who have a better case against the hymn supporters. Any perusal of hymns written in the hundred years between 1800 and 1900 shows a fascinating tendency of hymn writers of that era to portray an overly feminized Jesus who resembles a sort of sensitive 1980’s man. Hymns like “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling,” “In the Garden,” and “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” were often criticized in their day by clergy who believed they were softening the manliness of Christ. When compared with hymns that came a hundred years before them, it’s difficult to argue against that criticism. Later Church historians can point to these and other hymns of their day as one of the sources for the long-term feminizing effect on the Church in this country, a problem cited by many of the same people who sing those very hymns and defend them tooth and nail.

Our worship needs to be Scripturally based.
Do we really believe this? I mean truly? If so, where are the loud crashing cymbals, tambourines, and dancers?

Praise the LORD! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his excellent greatness! Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!
—Psalms 150:1-6 ESV

Some would argue that this doesn’t represent a New Testament worship sensibility. However, if you do worship-related keyword searches on the New Testament, there’s not a single Scripture that would imply that the early Church negated psalms like Psalm 150 above in order to dial down to some different form of worship. The early Church worshiped in the temple, right? Would that worship not include Psalm 150 styles of worship? Unlikely.

I hear far too many Christians negating the kind of worship styles that their brothers in Christ might use. Whenever I hear some stone-faced believer saying that his church doesn’t provide “entertaining worship,” I look at Psalm 150 and ask myself how it would be possible for those worshiping with trumpets, dance, cymbals, tambourines, stringed instruments and pipes not to find that stirring!

True worship involves ________.
That’s a pretty big blank. Some things that can fill that blank include:
* Our minds
* Our emotions
* Our cultural identities
* Our confession before God
* Our personal histories

No matter what we put in that blank, true worship involves our whole man, driven by the Holy Spirit alone. When we read this oft-quoted passage

But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
—John 4:23-24 ESV

we use it to justify our particular form of worship without asking if it means something totally different. Truthfully, worship that is done in spirit and in truth is worship that proceeds from the Holy Spirit alone. The Holy Spirit is the one who enables us to know God, and knowing God is what leads to true worship. Jesus’ rebuke of the woman at the well for discussing the means by which people worship is the whole point here. The focus is not on externals, yet so often this is all we can note when we hold our own ways of worshiping up as the only way, while deriding those who worship in ways we don’t understand.

Is it possible to worship the wrong way? I believe it is. Like I’ve said a trillion times here, discernment is always needed. The Holy Spirit will not guide true worshipers into worship that is not true. But the Spirit is not so concerned with the cultural trappings, which is why a lot of us are going to be shocked when we get to heaven and see forms of worship that are not familiar to us culturally. Our worship wars are based on cultural trappings more than anything, and that’s too bad because that’s a very narrow slice of reality that we bring to worship. The true worshiper of God is content in all worship environments that are driven by the Holy Spirit. Such a worshiper is equally at home with an a cappella choir, an amplified worship band, a pulse-pounding black gospel group, a classical quartet, or any other musical expression that is fueled by the Holy Spirit.

Worship isn’t just about music, but you would think it was all that matters from all the furor over its musical aspect. I’ve talked only about music in this post, but all of worship incorporates this same common sense. Worshipers with hearts focused on God, worshiping by the Spirit, can sing (and dance) to any kind of music and God will be pleased with their offering.

Why do we strain so hard to define what is appropriate? We want to honor God. We want to do the right thing. But the right thing is focusing more on God and less on our methods.