A Young Pete Seeger Sings a Song from the "New Land of Israel"

The incomparable Pete Seeger passed away, Tuesday. He's known for his political ideas and protest action, but in the fifties he was part of the four-part folk group known as The Weavers. This group popularized songs like "Goodnight, Irene," and "On Top of Old Smokey." (The latter is, now days, mostly forgotten except for the melody which is known to us in the annoying form of, "On top of spagheeeettiiii, all covered with cheeeeeese...")

Most of their old tunes sound a little antiquated to my ears, but I really enjoy this recording of them singing "Tzena, tzena, tzena." I found it while cruising through YouTube looking for folk songs a few years ago, and I return to it often because it's fun and truly unique.  What's interesting in this video is hearing the bass singer, Lee Hays, introduce it is a song from "the new land of Israel." It's hard for someone my age to think about a time when that country was considered "new." Of course, Israel is an ancient nation, but in the early fifties people were still getting used to the idea of seeing it on a map. Some people still have a hard time with that, but, like Pete always said, there's still a chance for peace, and that's true even in the middle east.

Watch the video, get cultured, and don't miss out on Seeger's fantastic banjo playing. This is actually a great piece of music.

May Our Jaded Hearts Be Healed

I've mentioned these guys before. I love the way they experiment with music and the way their lyrics often come straight from Scripture and always minister to my soul.

This song in particular, from their album, Ghosts Upon the Earth, is so beautiful. So, so beautiful.

We live in a world of division and strife and pride that condescends and marginalizes others. Our churches are rife with division and strife and prideful condescension. There is good in the world, and our churches do much good in the world too. But. Until Jesus Christ returns to restore all things, our jaded and weary hearts need healing and hope.

To me, part of the message this song speaks is, Don't bicker about theological tripe and other such nonsense derived from generational differences, cultural differences, political differences, lifestyle differences... Being "right" is nothing without love.

"Church Bells"

Let church bells ring

Let children sing

Even if they don’t know why let them sing

Why drown their joy

Stifle their voice

Just because you’ve lost yours

May our jaded hearts be healed

Amen

Let old men dance

Lift up their hands

Even if they are naïve, let them dance

You’ve seen it all

You watch them fall

Wash off your face and dance

May our weary hearts be filled with hope

Amen

On Death

Death. You hear it in song lyrics.  You see it in movies.  You learn about it in church.  For years, probably since high school, I've pondered the philosophical definition of death.  I don't think songs and movies and church all mean the same thing when they say, "death".

You die, and that's it.  That's the impression I get from culture.  I find myself thinking this way often. I can't pinpoint exactly how this idea got in my brain.  I grew up Christian.  It's not taught there.  Often songs, movies and literature reference an afterlife.  But the concept seems a permeating assumption in much of culture today.

I wonder if many are confused when they hear Christians talk about death. Talking about the wages of sin being death.  About the death of Jesus. About having power over death. Even with being a lifelong Christian I sometimes have to think really hard to remember what all that lingo means.

An Iris bulb growing.

It means that death does not cause a ceasing of existence.  Not spiritually. Not even physically (eventually). Death in Christianity means sin and therefore separation from God.  It means the opposite of goodness.  It means sickness, angst and destruction.  It means brokenness in all of the natural world and all of our relationships.  

It means that at the end of what we think of as life a person ceases to be on Earth. The physical body and the spiritual presence separate.  In the future, in heaven, our physical body and spiritual presence (soul/spirit/whatever you call it) will be joined again. 

Jesus was fully God and fully human and as fully God was without sin and as fully human was still subject to death.  Death is a byproduct of sin, not of perfection.  Since Jesus died but had no sin-causing requirement to do so, He overcame death.  Three days after the separation of His physical body and spiritual presence Jesus was resurrected.  Jesus' body and spiritual presence were joined again.  Just as will happen to all humans in the future.

One way I remember this is contemplating nature.  Summer, fall, winter, spring.  It's a cycle of life, death and rebirth.  I moved into a house once during the winter.  Everything in the yard was "dead". Come spring, all of these flowering bulbs started sprouting out of the ground.  It was like these flowers had lived before, died and then were resurrected.  Death isn't a cessation, it's a separation, a separation that will one day no longer exist.

Even Worship Songs Need Good Writing!

Question: Since our worship songs generally consist of more than "na-na-na-na," doesn't the meaning of a worship song matter?

Question: Since the meaning of a worship song evidently matters, shouldn't we try to get it right?

But we don't always get it right.  Consider these examples.

Natural and Legal Metaphors Mixed Up

My personal favorite is this line: "And like a flood his mercy reigns."  Do we really want to proclaim the message that God's mercy governs in the manner of a natural disaster?  (And if a flood governs like a king, I wonder what sort of weather events legislate like a parliament.)

Perhaps we could use on our overhead projectors on Sunday mornings the alternate spelling that actually makes a little sense: "And like a flood his mercy rains."

They're not the same thing.
(Pictures from Hobbes' Leviathan and from Edal Anton Lefterov.)

Plain Old Bad Grammar

And then we have this one: "And if our God is with us, then what can stand against?"  Why don't we give that preposition an object?  The Bible does (Romans 8:31): "If God is for us, who can be against us?"

I can't see what good the bad grammar does in this situation, unless it creates the illusion of good poetry.  But this would only be an illusion.  Of course, poetry doesn't always have to follow the rules of grammar.  But it takes more than bad grammar to make good poetry.

Adding "us" on the second repetition of the final line would not sabotage the meter: We already stretch "against" to occupy the space of about seven syllables, so we can afford give the space of one syllable to "us."  Nor would adding "us" ruin a rhyme (if there is a word that rhymes with "against," you won't find it in this song).

Biblical Oddities

"Days of Elijah" is such a nice song, but often a painful one for me.  If David (instead of, say, Ezra) is "rebuilding a temple of praise," I wonder when the first temple of praise was built.  I've heard this altered to "building a temple of praise"; I like that; I understand it.

For years I was annoyed by the line about "the days of Your servant, Moses, righteousness being restored."  One Sunday morning last summer I realized that this actually makes sense as part of the biblical narrative: Some of the righteousness lost when Adam sins is restored in the Mosaic law, especially the Ten Commandments.

Still, I wonder how many people are actually thinking about two Bible characters and more than a thousand years of biblical history when they sing that bit; maybe we could just sing "And these are the days of your servant, Josiah, righteousness being restored."

Et Cetera . . .

Some worship songs I'd do better not to mention are, it seems to me, much, much worse in theology, poetry, etc.

And hymns aren't excluded.  I would need another blog post (or another dissertation) to analyze the unbiblical dualisms and Platonisms that appear in some hymns.

Giving Our Best to God

We should be giving our best to God.  If you're like me and you don't sing very well, then go ahead and sing; for you and me, maybe bad singing is the best we can do if it's all we have.  But the Church has more than bad poetry, bad spelling, bad grammar, and bad theology to put in our worship songs.  We can do better.

In particular, these songs I've mentioned are nice songs!  I don't want us to stop singing them.  But can we maybe sing them a little better?

Lessons from Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

As our nation celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this coming Monday, it is a good time to look back to one of King's most powerful writings, his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  While sitting in jail for peaceful protest in 1963, King received a letter from local Birmingham clergymen who opposed his methods.  King responded with a letter even more poignant and perceptive than his usual.

Last year, I wrote about lessons we should all learn from this letter, particularly in light of our role as Christians in our acrid present-day political atmosphere.  Here are those six lessons:

1. Recognize the good will of those who oppose you.

2. Sympathize with your opponent before attacking them.

3. We are interconnected, whether we like it or not.

4. Be moderate.

5. Don't be moderate in everything.

6. Hold the church accountable...in love.

But please don't just take my word for it.  Go read the original letter here.  Then, go read my full posts on these lessons, Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.  Then, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., go in peace.

Not Always What We Say, But How We Say It

During church services on Sunday mornings I occasionally imagine what one of my non-believer friends would think were he sitting next to me. How would he react to the worship music, the presentation style of the pastor, the substance of the sermon or the attitudes and actions of those around him? I consider how his experience of church would impact his impression of Christianity in general. To be honest, I often find it difficult to imagine him staying for the duration of the service. So much of what happens in an American church would strike him as inscrutably alien and, frankly, silly. That’s not a criticism of churches, but a genuine worry nonetheless.  I worry whether a good many of my friends would reject church for trivial reasons, reasons they feel are relevant and persuasive despite my objections. I suspect that they would demur on aesthetic grounds, to the music, perhaps, or to the church’s strange adornment. Most of all, I worry that they would find troubling the particular manner in which Christians occasionally speak. While their skepticism of church and Christianity would be ill founded, I can’t deny that at least some of my well-educated and otherwise open-minded friends would avoid church for the same reason they avoid other people or people groups: because of certain oddities in their dialect.          

            

Let me give you an example. We’ve all heard or perhaps even used the term “it’s a God thing”; it’s ubiquitous in some evangelical circles. I must admit that I cringe at hearing it, not because I doubt the intentions of the person speaking or because I doubt whether God actually presided over the issue in question in all of his omnipotent sovereignty, but because I cannot help but hear the phrase as my non-Christian friends hear it. To them – and perhaps to me, as well – the term reduces what is purportedly a matter of tremendous cosmic significance to a benign colloquialism. Strictly speaking, very little in this universe isn’t a “God thing” – the question of the nature of evil notwithstanding – and so it’s something of a platitude. It’s also a phrase completely at odds with secular cultural conventions, which is to say it’s not cool. In fact, it’s painfully uncool and I suspect most of us know it. It invites ridicule - rightly or wrongly – and to what end? “To praise God,” you might answer, “to give Him the credit He deserves.” Indeed, but in the absence of any narrow biblical prescriptions concerning how to praise Him, ought we not find less irksome methods of praise when in the presence of non-Christians? Do the negligible benefits of employing dubious theological platitudes warrant compromising our witness as Christians?

            

To the example above add a list of other phrases, such as “God showed up” and “on fire for Christ,” both of which are perfectly valid expressions of profound encounters with God, but perhaps not the best means of conveying those experiences outside of an exclusively Christian context. Perhaps we ought to monitor and modulate our speech around non-believers who we know will find those types of utterances offputting.

            

Some of you will no doubt feel I’ve overstated the matter – perhaps so. I am certainly not suggesting that we ought to pander to the culture and refrain from saying anything deemed “uncool”. The central claim of Christianity, Christ and his atoning death and resurrection, is widely regarded as uncool and yet we are theologically committed and eager to announce its truth to the world. I merely mean to stress the impact that theologically trivial issues such as our voluntary habits of speech make upon non-believers, habits we aren’t biblically obligated to observe and which may color the cultural reception of our message. What may edify among the body of believers might harden the hearts of those who need to hear our message most.

Ancient-Future Biblical Authority

TheOoze.com is, or rather was, a sort of website for postmodern Christianity and/or for the emergent church. Since my bachelor's thesis at Dallas Baptist University was about postmodernism and on biblical inerrancy, it is only fitting that I would eventually have something published at The Ooze.

The ideal opportunity came when Kurt Willems wrote a piece on "Postmodern Biblical Authority?" for The Ooze. The Ooze published my reply, "Ancient-Future Biblical Authority," in July 2009.

The Ooze is no longer online, however, and my article is nowhere to be found. But it ought to be somewhere. So now it can be here. My full article is copied below. (I have updated the link in the second footnote, and added some pictures.)

________________________________________

ANCIENT-FUTURE BIBLICAL AUTHORITY: A REPLY TO KURT WILLEMS¹

by Mark J. Boone

WILLEMS' TIMELY PIECE

Kurt Willems' article "Postmodern Biblical Authority?"² is engaging, well-researched, and timely. Willems asks the right question: What account of Biblical authority is appropriate for the post-modern era? He answers that Biblical Christianity and postmodernism can converge on the Biblical narrative's authority in the lives of believers. The believer must immerse himself or herself in the Biblical narrative, let his or her life become the application, expression, and continuation of the narrative.

Willems is also right to criticize what he calls fundamentalism for its hyper-literal reading of Scripture and its attempt to justify Scripture on wholly objective, universal, and non-Biblical grounds, a move that risks setting up Reason as an authority over Scripture. But Willems leaves huge stones unturned, for he gives no account of that "traditional biblical authority" which the Enlightenment tried to do away with. A pre-modern account yields different, but compatible, answers to the question of Biblical authority. It also answers a question of interest in any era but especially important to the postmodern: Where is the meaning of the Biblical text?

Willems' remarks suggest the legitimacy of looking to the pre-moderns. Postmodernism conceived as Lyotard's "incredulity toward metanarratives"³ is specifically a rejection of the modern metanarrative. If we are serious about rejecting modernism, we are within our rights to consider pre-modernism a live option; at the least, we owe the pre-moderns and their insights a fair hearing. Some of these insights are common to postmodernity; some are uncommon, but commensurable.

ANCIENT HERMENEUTICS

Where better to start than Saint Augustine: philosopher, theologian, mystic, and priest—at once among the last Church fathers and the first medievals? Let's take a look at four elements of the patristic hermeneutics represented by Augustine in his Teaching Christianity⁴ and in Book XII of his Confessions.⁵ This hermeneutics ties together Biblical meaning, authority, and application, both the human-composed elements of the text and those written by God, those characteristics of the Bible loved by fundamentalists and those loved by postmoderns.

Saint Augustine

First, the most basic kind of Biblical authority extends to the text's original meaning; it is the authority of the Bible's human authors, who always speak truly: "let all those depart from me who deem that Moses spoke things that are false" (Confessions XII, chapter 23); "let us so honor this same servant of yours, dispenser of this Scripture and filled with your spirit, as to believe that when he wrote these words by your inspiration he intended that sense in them which supremely excels both in the light of truth and in the fruit of profit" (chapter 30). The authority of the Biblical authors gives us the rule of faith: the command to love God and neighbor (Teaching Christianity Book I, chapter 35) and the tenets of basic orthodoxy—truths given in Scripture and acknowledged by the Church as fundamental for Christian faith (Book III, chapter 2).

Second, the meaning of Scripture transcends what its human authors intend, meaning no less than what its divine author intends. Thus Augustine prays: "while every man tries to understand in Holy Scripture what the author understood therein, what wrong is there if anyone understand what you, O light of all truthful minds, reveal to him as true, even if the author he reads did not understand this . . . ?" (Confessions XII, chapter 18).

Third, what the human authors say is our guide in exploring whatever Scripture says beyond their words. The rule of faith guides our interpretion of Scripture; when we encounter a passage whose full meaning we do not understand, we must look in it for an expression of the rule of faith (Teaching Christianity, Book II, chapter 9). We don't go searching for meaning in the sacred text without keeping the original meaning on hand as a compass.

Fourth, the truth in Scripture must be lived. John J. O'Keefe and R. R. Reno explain how important it was to the early Church to live Scripture; The rule of faith "has a behavioral as well as doctrinal component"⁶ and "was a rule for life as well as a rule for reading Scripture and interpreting its meaning."⁷ The sacred meaning of Scripture cries out to be lived. As Willems says, the Biblical narrative has authority in the life of the believer.

This hermeneutics acknowledges the authority of the Bible's original meaning, but it is open to meaning that transcends it and emphasizes the relationship between the two. It is also swift to apply the meaning of Scripture in the life of the Church. But Scriptural authority in its most basic sense safeguards our participation in the Biblical narrative. Without the authority of the human authors of Scripture, "faith will start tottering," "charity itself also begins to sicken," the authority of the Biblical narrative over the lives of believers is undermined, and the life goes out of the Church (Teaching Christianity Book I, chapter 37).

ANCIENT AND POST-MODERN HERMENEUTICS

This hermeneutics achieves several postmodern desiderata. First, the entire world of the Church becomes, in a somewhat Derridean fashion, the interpretation of the text. There is no external referent to which the Biblical text refers and upon reaching which interpretation ceases. The life of the believer is immersed in the text. The very life of the Church is its ongoing act of interpretation.

Second, the Biblical narrative will not be made to fit inside our minds or be justified by our intellects. Merold Westphal in Overcoming Onto-theology explains that two of the reasons the Christian narrative is distinct from the modern meta-narrative are that it does not seek to be legitimized by science and that its origins are in revelation rather than autonomous reason.⁸ Augustine's hermeneutics likewise begins with the Biblical text. It sends reason on a mission to understand what is learned by faith, rather than prove faith in the court of reason as a prerequisite for belief.

Jean-Luc Marion (picture from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Marion)

Third, the sense of the Bible is not limited to the intent of its human authors. Jean-Luc Marion, the preeminent voice on Christianity's relation to postmodern philosophers such as Heidegger, Derridas, and Levinas, says that the Biblical text "escapes the ownership of its literary producers in order to be inspired, so to speak, by the Word" (Christ).⁹ Biblical meaning transcends that of its human authors. Marion and Augustine both remind us that only God knows the full meaning of the text.

"FUNDAMENTALISTS" AND POSTMODERN CHRISTIANS: ESTRANGED BRETHREN

In acknowledging the authority of the original meaning of Scripture, this ancient hermeneutics also satisfies a major concern of the "fundamentalists" Willems mentions, for it relies on the fundamental authority of the authors of Scripture. The doctrine of Biblical inerrancy seeks to preserve this authority. The central thrust of The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is the attribution of infallible authority to the intent of its human authors.¹⁰

In other words, the first element of patristic hermeneutics is an overriding goal for the inerrantist, and postmodern Christians emphasize its second and fourth elements. The hermeneutics of the Church fathers unites these elements together with the third. The original meaning of Scripture and that which transcends it are meant to be pursued and lived together.

The Biblical narrative's authority over the life of the Church is real, and Willems does well to acknowledge it; it is also well to acknowledge the authority of Scripture's original meaning; it is best to acknowledge the unity of both regions of authority. In this process there is room for friendship between postmodern Christians and fundamentalists, estranged Christian brethren whose reconciliation is long overdue. Reconciliation will not be easy, but we both share in the hermeneutical heritage of the Church fathers, and a way forward together is possible if we listen to them.

NOTES

1. The title "Ancient-Future Biblical Authority" is influenced by Robert E. Webber, especially his Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999). 

2. Kurt Willems, "Postmodern Biblical Authority," TheOoze: Conversation for the Journey, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thepangeablog/articles/unpublished-papers/postmodern-biblical-authority/ (October 29, 2008).

3. Jean-François Lyotard, Introduction to The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.

4. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, translated by Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1996).

5. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, translated by John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960).

6. John J. O'Keefe and R. R. Reno, The Sanctified Vision: an Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 124.

7. Ibid., 128.

8. Merold Westphal, Introduction to Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), xiii-xv.

9. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, translated by Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 156.

10. The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (Chicago: 1978).

The Year of Small Things (Or, how Christian teaching gave my dissertation and my life more meaning)

2013 was a year of doing small things. I served as a music minister in a small church, I played concerts in small venues to small audiences, I taught a couple of small classes to undergraduates, and I struggled over the daily small tasks of dishes and laundry and tidying up. 2013 was also the year I finished my dissertation -- not a small thing as a personal accomplishment -- but quite a small thing in scope and significance and in the smallness of its mundane requirements. Writing a dissertation involves toiling away over small tasks: 1,000 words here, 1,000 words there; hours poring over an obscure book, trying to find that one important piece of information; the annoyance of organizing and re-organizing; the victory of a complete paragraph, a complete page, and finally, slowly, a complete chapter, all culminating in a small volume on a big shelf, in a bigger library of thousands of obscure works that only a handful of people will ever read.

I am not trying to downplay my work here, but in the grand scheme of things, a dissertation just doesn't seem that important -- and all these small things stood out this year against that "Grand Scheme." Death and loss marked this year, and perhaps because of that death and loss, my mind had difficulty focusing on the small tasks necessary to my everyday life as larger questions about "Life Purpose" and "Eternity" and "Making a Difference" clouded my brain.  I wanted to exchange these small things for big, important ones. I wanted to know that when I died, God would say to me, "well done, good and faithful servant."

So I turned, as I so often have, to the Bible, searching, frantically for that parable of the good servant, and here is what I found:

“Again, it [the kingdom of heaven] will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag,[a] each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

“After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ (Matt. 25:14-21)

The only requirement of these servants was to invest what they had been given -- even if it was small. (If you read the rest of the story, you'll see that the servant with only two bags also received praise). All that was necessary was faithfulness in the small things. I felt my frantic mind calm as I understood that the right thing for me to do that day was to go back to my office and type my thousand words and conduct my research with diligence; for it was that faithful work on the small things to which I had been called and which would give my life meaning.



The importance of these small things became a theme for the year. My "epiphany" came in the summer, during the depths of my dissertation drudgery. In September at church, we did a series on work and faith, where I was reminded of the significance of my daily work for the building of Christ's Kingdom. And this Christmas, I remembered the small things again, in the prophetic words of Micah:

    But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah,

out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel,

whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.” (Micah 5:2)

I had often heard people comment on the significance of the insignificance of Jesus's tribe and His poor teenage mother and the dirty manger and the lowly shepherds, but this year it struck me in a fresh way.

Christianity is not a good choice of religion if you value grandeur or status symbols. Instead, Christian teaching points to a God who values the small, the lowly, the insignificant; "the foolish things of the world to shame the wise...the weak things of the world to shame the strong...the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him" (1 Cor. 1:27-29).


This year I learned that, though it may not feel like it, each tiny, faithful, quotidian act is like a small, messy point of color in an impressionist painting that will, in time, reveal itself as a masterpiece called The Kingdom of Heaven. And you'd think (or maybe only I would think) that each dot would represent the work of a missionary or a minister or maybe a well-known Christian songwriter or author, but I'm starting to believe that those smudges of color comprise, miraculously, faithful music practices for our tiny congregation, a cleared out dishwasher, a painstakingly-graded student essay, a note of encouragement, a paragraph of thoughtful scholarship, a meal, a cup of coffee, a conversation -- a blog entry, perhaps.

God takes these small acts of work and service and makes them part of the biggest, most important thing of all, so that no moment, no life can be wasted for those who truly seek to glorify God in all they do.

Here's to a 2014 of small things.

The Other Problem with Christian Music (That No One Will Talk About)

You've probably read articles about what's wrong with Christian music. In one popular post, Michael Gungor explained why music on Christian radio stations seems so corny. In another, Switchfoot pointed out that C.S. Lewis didn't talk about Jesus in his fiction, reminding us that not every piece of Christian expression needed to be a Sunday School lesson.

These articles are spot on, but they miss out on one important point: Christian music, in its current state, is popular. Very popular. No matter how repetitive, dull, and unimaginative it is, a lot of people want to hear it because they actually like it.

If you ask me, every song on Christian radio sounds the same. The guitars all use identical, "safe" overdrive settings while playing a I-V-VI-IV chord progression. The drums and bass are always doing the same 4/4, quarter note pulse, devoid of syncopation. The vocals are loud and overbearing, as if every syllable needs to be a tidal wave of feelings.

And it works. These sorts of Christian bands sell millions of albums, and their fans can't understand why someone like me wants to hear anything different. How is this happening? It doesn't have anything to do with the church - the problems with Christian music are just an outcropping of the poor state of the music industry.

I watched five minutes of one of those "sing-off" TV shows. (I can't stand them.) The singers were obnoxiously loud, and the songs couldn't have been more derivative. Sadly, it was exactly the sort of over-produced, "Radio Disney" style of pop music that I hear from the top Christian groups. (And I turned it off just as quickly.) When given a choice, this cheesy music is what most consumers will want to purchase, rather than listening to someone like Willie Nelson or Carol King. Music lovers are, and have always been, a minority group with a small impact on record sales.

In mainstream music, I hear great bands that never have the success of boring, pop groups. As a music lover, this frustrates me to no end, but it's always been this way. The cast of Glee has had more hits than the Beatles, for example, because corny music always outsells the good stuff. In the Christian music industry we see the same thing, but since the playing field is smaller there's even less of a chance that you'll ever hear interesting music on those religious stations.

The people have spoken, and they want terrible music.

(Sorry, it's not nice to leave you with such a depressing blog entry on a cold, Monday morning. Here's a cat trying to play the drums to cheer you up.)

The Surfing Violinist and His Interesting Travels

A friend of mine who works in video production in India asked me to take at some work from The Surfing Violinist. I normally hate watching videos online (why can't everything be a 3-second .gif about cats falling down?) but I checked it out, and I'm glad I did.

These videos tell the story of a family moving to India and dealing with a fascinating and different culture. The humorous, fast-paced storytelling appealed to my easily bored, adolescent mind, and the other stuff appealed to the side of me that watches documentaries. I'll try and post more videos since there are many of them and a new one is made each week, but you can subscribe to them on your own, here.

Enjoy.




If you have an attention span like mine, then watch this while it loads:

New Year's Resolutions... Maybe there's something to them after all.

Lots of folks think there's nothing special about making resolutions on a specific day of the year. There is some evidence, however, that suggests there just might be something to aligning our new commitments with the calendar; that rhythms and, dare I say, liturgies, are a part of the way we work. Check out this short dry-erase video that talks a bit about why. (Aren't dry-erase vids the funnest?)

Did you make resolutions this year? What have you resolved to do differently in 2014?

10 New Year's Resolutions for Churches Everywhere

If I had one wish that I could wish this holiday season, it would be for all the churches of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace, and that they would take these ten resolutions to heart:

1 - I will not confuse furthering my political agenda with preaching the Gospel.

2 - When someone's opinion angers me, I will calm down and buy them a coffee instead of arguing with them. I will listen to their point of view and kindly consider it, rather than treating them as an enemy.

3 - I will create a positive impact on my community, rather than being known as a sanctimonious isolationist.

4 - If someone is confused about God, I will allow them to search for answers rather than insisting that they believe blindly everything that I tell them is true. (In other words, I will minister like Jesus, and not like David Koresh.)

5 - I will allow the church to be a place of beauty by encouraging works of art and new music so that people will understand the power of redemption just by being there.

6 - People who visit my church are as messed up as I have been in my life, and I will treat them with sympathy rather than forcing them to live up to my expectations.

7 - I will create a place where everyone in my community can feel safe and accepted, even if they do not believe as I do.

8 - I will do as much charity work as I can and be as kind to others as possible so that even my strongest critics will be forced to admit that I am a force for good.

9 - Tradition will not be valued over truth. (Honestly, I really wish that more churches still used organs, but I don't complain about it. Much.)


10 - I will err on the side of love, and will not pride myself on how well I push away those people who make me uncomfortable.