In which our regular writers toss around
subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: You sent me a horrible parody of a contemporary evangelical church service, IC. You’ve got to know I couldn’t
leave that alone. I’m still brushing my teeth to get the taste out of
my mouth.
But when they’re snarking the modern eleven
o’clock church meeting on YouTube, and especially when it looks horribly
familiar to most of your audience, you’ve almost got to
concede we evangelicals are done like dinner. And it appears we cooked ourselves.
Does this travesty seem familiar to you?
Immanuel Can: You seem more
shocked about it than I. There’s a reason why the piece is funny so many
people; it’s recognition. The jokes reflect the current reality of many, many
evangelical-type churches.
A Bar Set Woefully Low
Tom: You know, I have
seen this sort of thing at the “cooler” youth conferences years ago, and I do
recognize the tropes from visiting the occasional larger modern evangelical
churches; not quite megachurch size, but five hundred-ish. And I’ve seen some
smaller local churches try to imitate it with the badly out of tune youth group
guitarist, his mother on piano and a drum machine. But even the scale of the
parody tells me that what they’re making fun of is big bucks and way more
common than I’m likely to regretfully concede. This is the new reality,
is it?
Care
to describe the video for those reluctant to click through, IC?
IC: Yes, it’s the new reality; but not all that new, actually. It’s
megachurch programming circa the 1980s, just pulled up to the present day ...
unsingable, performance-based music, non-worshiping “worship”, the
continuous “cough-up-the-cash” subtext, the all-too-hip twenty-something “pastor”
guy in jeans, and so on. Above all, it’s the passive audience instead
of the living local body.
Tom: And all super self-consciously
delivered. As you say, a performance.
IC: Really, what they’re doing in
the video is what many present-day evangelical churches are attempting to do,
hoping to do, longing to do. As you say, many are not very good at
it, but in their fondest dreams, they would aspire to
achieve a performance just that cheesy, and with all those elements in
place — but this time, taking them all seriously.
And quite sad it is for all of us that the bar is set so woefully low.
“Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That”
Tom: Now, I’m sure the argument can be made, and IS made, that “There’s
nothing anti-biblical about that.” I mean, sure, it’s not to our taste. It
seems corny to us, and mannered, and trivial, and cringe-inducing to be
associated with. It panders to a single, very narrow church demographic of
mainstream middle-agers. It leaves the elderly out in the cold and the young,
genuinely hip kids crawling under their seats in embarrassment. I mean, as
performances go, there’s absolutely nothing here that the world doesn’t do better.
But, you know, it’s not outright, glaringly wicked or anything. It has that going for it.
Still, I don’t get why exactly we are competing with the entertainment world at its own game. This is not our strong suit.
IC: I’m not so sure
there’s nothing wrong with it. For one thing, it means that so long as we’re
producing that sort of nonsense, we won’t be focusing on producing anything
that IS biblical — like edification, discipleship, giftedness, fellowship
or worship. We are often too casual about the morally-bland stuff, forgetting
that even morally-bland stuff holds down the position of something more
important that ought to be there. The wicked is the first enemy of the
good: but its second enemy is the trivial.
Tom: Oh, I agree, but
I wanted you to come out and say it. I have been hearing an argument my
entire life that goes something like: “There’s room for a great deal of
autonomy in the local church”, and it’s not untrue. The New Testament gives us
a great deal of room to maneuver in tailoring what we are doing to the culture
and times in which we live, so as to meet people where they are. But that
latitude is not unlimited: the fact that we are free, for instance, to do the
things a church is supposed to do (teaching, prayer, breaking bread, fellowship) in a different order, or at different times, or with a different emphasis, does
not mean we are free to alter the essential character of what we are doing,
which is what happens when you turn communal participation into professional
performance.
What We Lose
IC: Yes, it really
is. So what would you say gets lost if a church goes performance-based?
Tom: Well, to be fair,
the various gifts given by the Holy Spirit to the members of the audience we
used to call a congregation are not “lost” per se.
But it’s clear they are not utilized when the saints are gathered. They would
only be in use during the week at home. But it seems to me that such gifts are
likely to be used less there too — if only because hiring professionals to
do everything in your church setting cannot fail to send everyone else the
message that professionals are required for spiritual things that matter.
And then there’s the matter of lost time. Every guitar solo or musical interlude is lost
time. Every song that’s performed rather than participated in is lost time.
Every minute that’s spent on attracting new paying customers to the spectacle
(which is a costly undertaking, folks) is lost, lost, lost time …
and money.
IC: Yes, it is. And I really wonder how many of the people who attend these performance-focused
churches are spiritually full, satisfied and growing? I suspect the numbers are
not high. I’ve been a member of such a church, and I can tell you that behind
the scenes it’s a spiritual desert for anyone who has moved beyond the very
early stages of Christian development. There are limited leadership and service
opportunities, no focus on higher knowledge, and little emphasis on the
importance of individual-believer growth. In short, very little to sustain the soul.
The whole focus is really on keeping the leaders in leadership … not
much else.
Tom: Well, let’s talk
about leadership opportunities: Every message from the same paid guy is a
message no other gifted man in that church will ever have the opportunity to
prepare. And having the same pastor message after message, week after week, is
like coming here every morning for your entire spiritual diet. It gets old
pretty quickly, no matter how spiritual the writer is. No one man was ever
intended to provide all the spiritual nourishment for our spirits.
IC: I totally agree. Once the “professionals” start doing it, most
other people end up sitting back.
Tom: And service
opportunities? Oy. Handing out pamphlets at the balcony door does not require a
spiritual gift. Sure, you’re “serving” after a manner of speaking, but not in
any way that requires a special giftedness from the Spirit of God.
IC: Anything else?
Pastoral Pet Peeve of the Week
Tom: I wanted to come back to your point about a lack of focus on higher
knowledge. I think that’s true, not least because the introductory and musical
portions of the gathering take up so much of the allotted time. To get into
anything more serious than the pastor’s Pet Peeve of the Week seems outside
their purview. And from the YouTube clips I’ve seen of these sorts of
video-friendly pastors in action, they’re long on application and very thin on
explaining the reasons why we should be behaving or thinking this way or that
way, which are fundamental to acting from spiritual conviction.
You’ve lived this: is that a fair
characterization?
IC: Yes. Part of the
problem is that their experience is very limited, and very weird. What I mean
is that often they have gone pretty much straight from high school to seminary,
and after that into the Twilight Zone that is the life of the average “pastor”.
They’ve rarely made a paycheque, have always been paid for, and
know very little of the real world. So they’re poorly positioned to do
the kind of teaching you’re talking about. They tend to be strong on things
like literary structure and rote doctrine, but weak on practice and real-world
discipleship challenges. At least, that’s what I’ve noticed.
Tom: Rote doctrine?
Really? It’s these very guys that seem to be caving on rote doctrine all over
North America.
IC: Well, the role of
a pastor is a political one, and their “practice” is all a matter of keeping
various groups of people — local leaders and religious-program consumers,
really — happy. Such doctrine as they have was handed to them by other
people and then studied academically. It was not discovered by them in the flow
of real life, and they don’t know how it applies because of that. So imagine
this: if you’re a man who finds he’s got every practical daily use for
politicking, and no practical use for doctrine, then if the two ever conflict,
which one is likely to win?
Conflicts Not Easy to Resolve
Tom: I agree. They are presented with conflicts that are not easy to resolve. My mother once told me I could be a little rough on pastors, and that some of them are good people. This
is not always wrong. When you actually meet one of these young eager beavers
out of seminar, they don’t necessarily appear to be bad guys. I doubt very much
they are the “fierce wolves” about which Paul warned the Ephesian elders, primarily because they’re not
fierce enough to qualify. But whatever their conflicts, they are a product of
passively accepting and then willingly perpetuating a system that was never the
Lord’s intention.
Unfortunately,
the sort of intellectual contortions that enable them to choose the life of a
cog in the “pastoral” machine despite significant time in the scripture also
make them both predictable and easy to parody, as we’ve been watching here.
There are exceptions, of course, but if you watch this video, you may well
recognize some of the technique.
IC: Absolutely. The
reason the patterns of mannerism and style exist is that they are playing a
role, not acting out of the truth of their personalities. You see, when you
act out of your own personality, you manifest individual traits. But
they don’t do that … instead they’re caught up in role-playing: in
re-enacting the media persona of John MacArthur, or Matt Chandler, or Andy
Stanley, perhaps. Or maybe they’re digging up their own imagined modern version
of Spurgeon or Finney. But it’s not them. It’s a role. Get them off the
platform, and they instantly talk like real human beings again. Put them up
there, and they turn into an actor. And that makes them easy to mimic.
Tom: Now, I’m sure
that can happen to anyone who preaches or teaches, not just men who are paid to
do it full-time …
IC: Yes, it can. But there’s a special danger when you see yourself as
a public figure or figurehead. Unfortunately, that’s what a “pastor” has come
to be, in our thinking — the church figurehead, the guy it’s all about.
Failing On All Fronts
Tom: At any rate, if this video is any indication, the stereotypical
pastor is easy to parody — not to mention the stereotypical leader of the “worship team”, which back in less pretentious days
we used to refer to as a “lead vocalist”.
Because I lack your direct experience with this format, before
we wrap this up, let me ask: How do you find the unsaved feel about this sort of thing?
Does it “work”, or do they see right through it? Are there any positives
to be said for it?
IC: You’ll know that few unbelievers ever come to a church service
these days. But in the few cases I know of, it’s the love of the Christians
that they notice, not the slickness of the program. I’ve actually never heard
of an unsaved person bothering to admire that. And I’m not surprised: for as
you say, the world always has better in that department.
Tom: The question I’ve got then, is why? This stuff doesn’t make for
greater edification, or better worship, or even a better testimony. It doesn’t
serve the purposes of God or man. What’s the point then?
IC: Right. The church is not a variety show. Because of our
overexposure to media, performance-church has been normalized for us; but it’s not normal. It’s not healthy. It’s not
edifying, and it’s not biblical. The parodies should be teaching us something,
namely that there’s something quite “funny” — in both senses of that
word — about what we are now so used to doing.
And maybe we should take the hint and
quit it.
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