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| Marty Sampson, former songwriter for Hillsong |
COOL OR
CHRISTIAN (excerpt from God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To)
Co-opting
the entertainment ethos as many churches have done, has brought some large
hipster churches to the attention of the mainstream media. And they’re not all
critical.
“The music! The lights!
The crowds!” gushed a reporter on a CNN segment after a visit to an 8,000-member hipster church in NYC. “It looks like a rock concert. And the lines around the block are
enough to make any nightclub envious.”
Sophisticated, men’s high-end fashion and lifestyle magazine GQ
embedded a reporter, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in a Hillsong worship service “to
find out if Christianity can really be this cool and still be Christian.”
Studying the 8,000 attendees entering the worship center, including Justin Bieber,
Akner gave her first impression: “It’s where the cool kids spend
Sunday morning after Saturday night at the club.”
The GQ journalist continued, “the singing is
hot-breathed and sexy-close into microphones.” But she wrote, “It made my body
feel confused.” After listening to the singing for
a while (there’s more music on the stage than anything else going on in most
cool churches), Akner’s assessment was that the songs
had “melodies that all resemble one another,
pleasingly, like spa music.” She admitted to being drawn into the ethos, at least to some
extent, by songs that “call to mind deeply sincere love songs.”
Though not falling on
her knees in repentance, by any stretch, Akner’s over-all assessment was
tentatively positive. She even confessed to wanting to raise her hands the
morning after her visit to Hillsong. But not everybody who comes agrees, and
not everybody stays.
“Hillsong has done for Christian music,” wrote feminist writer Tanya
Levin, former Hillsong Church member now atheist, “what the Dixie Chicks did
for country and western: made it blond, sexy, and mainstream.”
Put another way, they made it seem cool.
CLEVER
DEVIL
Does anyone actually think that if God came down, he would dress that
way, talk that way, sing that way? Would God sing “hot-breathed and sexy-close
into microphones”? Would God our Maker “who gives songs in the night” (Job
35:20) sing those songs in anything that could remotely be labeled “sexy and
mainstream”? None of this is God’s way. It seems blasphemous even to consider
it.
Would God inflect the way some cool pastors inflect? You’ve heard it,
the perpetual up lilt, as if every statement is a question; it sounds so breezy
and urbane, as if to say that you alone have come to pose the questions no one
else is asking. What’s more, by your seeming spontaneity that showcases your cleverness
and wit, you let others know that the answers come easily for you.
God, for whom alone answers do come easily, doesn’t talk that way. His
voice does not sound that way, he does not sing that way. It’s as if we think
he ought to, but there is zero biblical evidence that God, who is “a consuming
fire,” takes a casual, cool, hipster approach to anything. Nor should we.
“Preacher,
give up trying to be cool,” wrote Southern Seminary President Al Mohler. “Cool
changes so quickly… Do what cool can’t do. Bathe your heart and mind in the
ancient Scriptures. Devote yourself to proclaiming the eternal truth of God.”
A
heart bathed in God’s holy Word produces one thing. A heart bathed in pop entertainment
and celebrity culture produces quite another. One cannot have it both
ways.
Even
agnostics Strunk and White, in their classic book on writing, understood that
an affected and artificial tone of voice and manner of communicating was
indicative of pride: “Do not affect a breezy manner. The breezy style is
often the work of the egocentric.” They strongly suggest avoiding “uninhibited
prose” that “creates high spirits.”
The “breezy manner”
sounds suspiciously like the hipster cool voice in the pulpit on the stage.
These egocentric
pretentions place the author, the pastor, or the music leader at the center.
This comes so naturally to the entertainment ethos because that’s how it all
works. The performer on the stage is there to perform, and the fawning crowd are
there to be amused, to take for themselves, to be entertained. It’s how it
works, regardless of the words. Remember, most of us don’t listen to the words.
The focus
of breezy entertainment is me-centered. The focus of worship is God-centered,
and there is no place for breezy when entering the presence of the living and
holy God.
There were versions of entertainment evangelism long before anyone used
the term hipster (a term that may outlive its cool status soon enough). Even in
Charles Spurgeon’s day. “The Devil has seldom done a cleverer thing,” he wrote,
“than hinting to the Church that part of their mission is to provide
entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them.”
A DANGEROUS PLACE
However in step with the popular culture entertainment worship may be,
it is profoundly out of step with the Bible. Like his Father, Jesus was not
cool. The Son of God was so radically out of step with the culture around him
that viscous critics tore off his robes, flogged him until his naked back was
raw and bloody, and then they nailed him to a cross, suspended him in mockery
and shame, and crucified him, the world looking on, deriding and making sport
of him. No, Jesus was not cool. The world hated him.
Holding
the hipster approach to worship and singing up next to the persecuted church further
unmasks the fallacy of cool. It is not cool to be a Christian in Nigeria today,
or China—the list is long. Imagine the bewilderment of any of our brethren in
the persecuted church as they try to get their minds around the notion that
it’s cool to be a Christian, at least cool if you identify with our brand. They
would likely think that it was something else altogether, not the Christianity
they experience. It would seem ten million miles from the cost of following Christ
in their bloody world.
“Consumer-based, me-centered,
music-driven, reductionistic, therapeutic, and theologically vacuous
Christianity,” wrote Gospel Reformation Network Executive Coordinator Jon D.
Payne, “is ten million miles from the real thing. It mirrors the world more
than Scripture.”
There’s little argument that no
single entity has more shaped music-driven, entertainment worship in recent
decades than Australian mega-church Hillsong.
In a period of just eighteen months, there were 760,000,000 downloads of
Hillsong songs, creating vast sums of money for the writers of those songs.
Amidst a wave of apostasy among high-profile church leaders, one of Hillsong’s
songwriters, Marty Sampson, joined in the trend. “I’m genuinely losing my
faith … and it doesn’t bother me.”
It
ought to bother the Church, however, when a key contributor to the lyrical
content of what millions of professing Christians sing in worship says of the
gospel, “it’s not for me. I am not in anymore.”
Dr. Payne helps us connect the
dots. “It’s no wonder, then, why so many celebrity pastors and leaders are
abandoning the faith for the idols and approval of our culture. It’s the
culture, not objective truth, that has been chiefly shaping their thinking all
along.” Pew Research Center findings concur, but it’s not just celebrity
leaders abandoning the faith. In our rapidly secularizing society, there’s a
spiraling decline of people willing to identify themselves as Christians. Especially young people. Which is odd considering the rationale justifying the use of the entertainment ethos is evangelism and church growth. If it's working, statistics ought to be showing an increase in young people identifying as Christians...
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