The Homogenization of Ideas

Many years ago, when my life was more about music than about books, I met a girl — name truly forgotten — who had written a children’s musical that she hoped I could help her get published. Despite the fact that I worked in the broadest sectors of the Christian music industry, my interest lay more in breaking new territory for contemporary Christian music, not in the choral music product market.

But then I listened to the tape she gave me.

Without any formal musical training, this girl had conceived an entire cantata for children — theme unfortunately forgotten also — that was truly awesome.

I made an exception and got to work on collecting contact names for choral publishing companies I was already in working relationship with, and some expressed interest in pursuing this talented young woman further.

Provided she was willing to relocate to Nashville.

This is the part of the story that amazed me, and one which I fought tooth and nail at the time. “What good does it do,” I asked, “If everyone in the industry is waking up in the same town, driving on the same freeways, shopping at the same malls, walking in the same parks, going to the same churches, and dare I say listening to the same music? Isn’t this going to lead to music that all sounds the same?”

Nobody listened. In the end she decided it was too big a move that was not guaranteed to offer sure returns. Your loss. My loss. Kids who would have learned and performed her musical; their loss. Don’t know what happened to her.

The other night we were listening to overseas radio stations online. Norway. The Netherlands. England (but not the BBC which is geo-blocked in Canada). The one thing we noticed was the decisive absence of the telltale Nashville influence. The American guitar-based country sound — that permeates rock and other genres here whether we admit or not — was replaced by the Euro music sound of keyboards. It was a nice change.

The more southern U.S. the sound — apologies, Third Day — the less I like it. In a shrinking world, we still get to hear too little of what is a staple musical diet for audiences in Europe. Geo-blocking of internet radio and YouTube music videos is not helping. I’d like to know how much of that blocking is European-driven, and how much of it originates with the American offices of multi-national record companies.

The Christian internet of which I am a part is no different. Justin Taylor or Kevin DeYoung writes something and Tim Challies and Zach Nielsen link to it, and then all the Challies wannabes link to it on their blogs. Sixty gazillion Christian blogs all carrying the one story of the day and the same blog referrer advertisement for the $1.99 eBook download of the day.

Yes, people exist on the fringes, and bloggers like this one who try “marching to the beat of a different drummer,” but ultimately, we witness the homogenization of creativity and the homogenization of thought on a daily basis; people striving to carve out an individual  identity, but essentially all waking up in the same town, driving on the same roads, eating in the same restaurants, and playing the same four chords. So to speak.

Why Your Pastor Is Name-Dropping the Man of Steel Film

There’s been a fair bit of outcry over the solicitations many Evangelical pastors have received to included a shout-out to the new Superman movie, Man of Steel in their Sunday sermons.  Skye Jethani’s piece yesterday convinced me to give this some attention.  If you don’t know what’s taking place:

MinistryResources.org …  contracted with Warner Brothers and DC Comics to create a ministry resource website for the upcoming Superman film Man of Steel.

Well, first he sets the stage:

Since The Passion and Narnia, numerous other films with far less Christian content have tried to sneak into the pulpit including The Road and Evan Almighty. Marketers know that even an indirect endorsement of a movie by a pastor during a sermon can be one of the most effective means of motivating consumers–it’s as close to God endorsing a film as they can get.

It’s also true of books and music; but for the most part, the best thing your local Christian bookstore can hope for — if you still have one — is that it’s a Christian book or a Christian CD that your minister is recommending. Not the latest flick at the local movieplex. Skye reaches a crescendo in this paragraph:

But pastors can’t be naive to think Warner Brothers/DC Comics is trying to aid the church with their Man of Steel Ministry Resource website. They’ve created Man of Steel sermon outlines, sermon video clips, and offered pastors advanced screening tickets for one reason–money. They’re looking to hijack pulpits to push their film and boost box office receipts. On one level I can’t fault them for trying. It is a savvy, if cynical, marketing tactic. What really bothers me, however, is that a decade after The Passion and Narnia, studios still see sermons as worthwhile product placement opportunities because apparently it works.

Yes it works. Offer a pastor a tie-in sermon outline and you make him happy for a week; teach him about the possibility of complimentary movie tickets and you’ve got a friend for life. Yes, your pastor may have taken a bribe.

He ends with a call to action:

Maybe it’s time for pastors to speak up and tell studios and companies like MinistryResources.org that we don’t appreciate attempts to leverage worship gatherings for product placement and marketing. Maybe we need to be more vocal about the holiness and separateness of preaching. Maybe the church should be an oasis from the incessant consumerism of our culture, and perhaps our gatherings should look more like a house of prayer than a den of thieves.

If you share this point of view, join me in sending a kind but honest email to the folks at MinistryResources.org (click here) to request that they respect the church, its ministers, and the sacredness of the pulpit by not trying to manipulate them for marketing purposes. Share this post with your colleagues in ministry, and let’s see what happens.

UPDATE: I wrote this as a comment a few minutes ago, but then decided to add it here as well.

I noticed after I posted this that I was unusually light on post tags, the little keywords under the title that sometimes draw visitors here via search engines. For one of them, apparently I typed, “bribing Evangelical pastors.” Looking at that right now, it sounds like something that would happen in the third world, but instead it’s happening here; which makes me wonder how the story would play out if repeated in the third world: “…Hey have you heard, pastors in America are being given bribes to include commercials in their worship services for the latest movies…”

Media Determines Message

When I started on Twitter a few months ago, my goal was to mirror the subject areas I write about here, since there are the types of things I’m truly interested in. But the 140-character maximum is truly limiting. Yes, I can simply link people back here, and I’ve done that; but in terms of having original content on the blue bird website, my thoughts go in a different direction, and some of these could never be fleshed out into full blog pieces. 

Here’s how the first few months have looked from oldest to newest, and not including some great re-tweets by others or quotes:

• First Tweet: So here we are, another voice spitting into the wind. God bless this Twitter feed and all who sail in her. Or something.
• I’m now receiving much classier email spam. The Russian girls who wanted to meet me have been replaced by people with stock market tips.
• Watching the show His Place on Cornerstone Television — it’s still on — and wishing I’d stayed in TV production.
  http://hisplace.tv
  
• Arriving late to the party, but finally discovering and really appreciating The Voice version of the Bible.
  http://hearthevoice.com
  
• If you want to make an impact with your charitable giving you should give to people doing ministry without the prospect of a weekly paycheck
• Everybody loves the bookstore, but nobody buys any books.
  http://edgecitycomics.com/comics/march-17-2013/ …
  
• I think all the people I’m following are male. In a ‘recommended for you’ list today, only three of 30 were female. This is different than blogging.
• Need encouragement? If you blog, read all the stuff in your spam filter. Those guys love you.
• “At or during which time water vapor condenses and precipitates downward from the upper atmosphere,such precipitation flows intensely and unabated.”  (figured it out?)
  
• I’m organizing a travel tour thing beginning in a Wesleyan college in western New York & ending in Jerusalem. I call it the Israel Houghton Tour.
• When shopping at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop, always double-check which side of the shirt the buttons are on. They mis-filed one!
• I think there should be a rule that for every book an author writes for the Christian market, they have to do one aimed at non-Christians.
• Keep waking up at 4 AM. Is mentally reciting the books of the Bible (alphabetically) helping me clear my head, or making my brain even more awake? Not sure.
• The next generation won’t be so concerned with mastering ‘knowledge,’ they will merely have to master ‘search.’
• My sister-in-law thinks that Facebook exists for the sole  purpose of posting pictures of food; specifically every lunch and dinner, both home and out
• Three conversations recently with people who assured me they’re attending church regularly, but when asked couldn’t remember the church’s name.
• In theory anyway, birthdays not ending in a ’0′ or a ’5′ are less traumatic.
• Worship leaders naturally find their spirits lifted by new songs; church congregations are naturally averse to learning new songs.
• Is always having music playing in the background all about our love of music, or does it say more about our fear of silence?

Some of this reminds me of the SNL segment, “Deep Thoughts With Jack Handy.” You can’t do a lot of depth in 140 keystrokes, so by definition things sound pithy or even trite.

Still, I finding this particular social media animal to be a good fit. I get to interact with the thoughts of people I truly respect, as I noted in this quotation which is actually my brother-in-law’s profile:

• I’m not on Twitter because of what I have to say, but because it allows me to eavesdrop on so many interesting people.

Kyle Idleman – Gods at War: The Video

The Gods at War video curriculum is a six-week, interactive, DVD-driven Bible study for small groups that can be offered in a 90-minute weekly format, or if the group is time-constrained, in a 60-minute weekly format. The video clips themselves run 22 – 30 minutes. The curriculum is based on Idleman’s sophomore book with Zondervan by the same title, though the curriculum offers its own Follower’s Journal which retails for $9.99 US; therefor it isn’t necessary that group members read the book, although some will want to.

The Gods at War video teaching series is one of five major DVD-based church resources released from City on a Hill Productions to feature Kyle Idleman, teaching pastor of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky; however unlike the Not a Fan and H₂0 group studies This one abandons the cinematic style that had him teaching on location and doesn’t have any scripted dramatic vignettes or story line. Instead, the teaching is interspersed with documentary style interviews with five individuals who have wrestled with various ‘gods’ in their past: Pleasure, love, money, power and self.

One of those interviews is with the late Chuck Colson, and that, as the saying goes was worth the price of admission. It’s a story about the lust for power that everyone needs to hear, not just Americans. But two of the interviews are with individuals, a woman and man respectively, who wrestled with same sex attraction and sexual addition and infidelity. For that reason, I suspect the DVD series may be a little to edgy for more conservative churches and/or certain teen groups. The intention is that for discussion purposes, small groups would split up into male and female subgroups, and in that context these portrayals are real, and honest, and probably a best fit for generating conversation.

The curriculum package retails for $59.99 US and contains a sample of the 208-page Gods at War Combat Journal — also available separately — which was written by Southeast’s Ross Brodfuehrer and offers two phases of processing the video material; as well as a 44 page leaders guide with discussion questions. The DVD also offers a 15-minute message from Kyle to group leaders with tips on managing discussion in a small group format, which should be required viewing for people using any DVD curriculum to lead a Bible study.  

The curriculum kit should not be confused with the Pastor’s Kit which retails for $29.99, not reviewed here, which is for pastors who want to teach through a six-week series on Sunday mornings and contains much shorter video clips.

With the Not a Fan book and video series still riding high on national sales charts, many churches looking for something else may want to move on to Gods at War. The book covers similar themes to Pete Wilson’s Empty Promises and Timothy Keller’s Counterfeit Gods, but the video series is more distinct. While I missed the movie treatment of previous City on a Hill series — I referred to H₂0 as Alpha Course meets Nooma — I think this series has to potential to promote life change even among those of us who would never think that idolatry is a factor in our lives, even if its expression in our lives is more subtle than those in the featured interviews. 

Watch the series 2-minute trailer here.

Have Resources, Will Share

The next time you’re in a Christian bookstore — if you can still find one — walk by the music department and check out the variety of CDs in the contemporary section. While music labels have severely cut budgets and curtailed new artist development, new titles and new bands arrive each month and — partially thanks to social media that is part of the technological wave undermining those very music departments — find their way to an audience.

I owe my Christian heritage partially to bands and soloists like the ones you see on those racks. I’m not saying I would not be where I am today were it not for the whole CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) scene, but truthfully these guys mentored and shaped my faith in a variety of ways.

Today, I am more than happy to share new artists with others, though my greater passion has switched to books and online resources.

Oddly enough, it’s only recently that I connected the dots between my desire to “spread the word” about Christian print and music products and my blogging. Shortly after discovering CCM, I started writing record reviews for both print and secular publications. Then I started a radio show. Then I got into the Christian bookstore industry, though I came at it sideways as someone who was more of an alternative to traditional retail than someone who later became a part of that industry.

As a worship leader, part of my mandate was to introduce local churches to new worship leaders, new worship styles, and most importantly new worship songs. I came directly off leading worship in several churches into blogging, where I now get to reach the greatest audience and create awareness for the broadest number of causes, opinions, events, movements and resources.

And I write book reviews here. Which means I’ve either come full circle, or I haven’t gained any ground at all. In person, I probably have a credibility gap because I treat every book as if it’s the best thing I’ve ever read. But that’s what passion is; I think some people don’t allow themselves to be infused with passion about different things, places, ideas, institutions, events, etc.

I say that I only connected those dots recently. Part of that was the realization that I was also a passionate evangelist for a soft drink. I don’t know if you can buy Brio in the U.S.; heck, I’m not even sure if it reaches all of Canada. I tasted it for the first time more than two decades ago at an Italian restaurant in east Toronto. It’s sort of similar to Coke or Pepsi, maybe a bit more bitter. It goes great with pasta, lasagna, or pizza.  Non-alcoholic. As you can see, we’ve purchased it over the years in a variety of formats.

When the conversation comes up — which it doesn’t very often — I can be counted on to recommend people stop by the local grocery store that carries the plastic bottle second from the left. We buy it even if we already have a few on hand, so that the grocery store’s computer will show the inventory as active. I order it in Italian restaurants that carry it.

The difference between Brio and the stuff I write about here, is that in the latter case, I make the conversation happen. I like Brio, but I don’t overflow with it as a topic like the drink itself does — it’s highly carbonated — when you pour a glass. In the case of my faith — especially in the case of Jesus I — I do in fact overflow and will steer the conversation in that direction.

Shouldn’t we all?

While I enjoy connecting people to life-changing resources, our ultimate goal is to connect people to a person.

What do you share with the people you come in contact with? What’s the first thing you think about each morning? What do you talk about when it’s your chance to control the conversation?

Week in Review

Americans have reached a point where it seems inevitable that their evening network newscast is going to contain a weather story. The overall tenor of the reporting seemed to be inclined to telegraph that this week’s tornado in Moore, OK wasn’t the end of natural disasters by any means; this type of intense storm with catastrophic damage is the new normal. As the week ended, parts of the northeast, especially in mountainous areas, experienced snow to kick off the Memorial Day weekend.

As we mentioned in the link list on Wednesday, the name “Crystal Cathedral,” officially speaking, is no more. We knew that the church itself was being renamed Christ Cathedral, but learned this week that the congregation it once belonged to, now moving to the former St. Callistus Church, will operate under the banner Shepherd’s Grove. Like the weather story above, this one would seem to be nearing toward a conclusion, but like the soap opera it is, there seem to be new installments around every corner. Hopefully, this is a new beginning for what has been a long, sad story over the past five years.

I decided to give the new Anne Heche comedy Save Me at least ten minutes this week, and ended up staying for an hour watching both episodes. Anne plays a woman who has a near death experience, and then is able to receive messages directly from God. This is hardly family fare. While the lead character’s husband is having an affair and her daughter is in a “neighbors with benefits” relationship with the boy next door, both of those story lines were inching toward something redemptive, though are still rather edgy for an 8:00 PM time slot. Church people were as realistic as we can expect from television. On the other hand, Anne’s character seems able to invoke lightning strikes somewhat at will, something not covered in most books about the gift of prophecy; neither can you walk into most churches and simply wander upfront and sing with the worship team. At least the early episodes weren’t an outright mockery of Christianity. For the record, co-executive producer Mark Driscoll is not the same Mark Driscoll known to readers of this page.

What Not To Post Online During a Crisis

When tragedies happen, you want to post something like this:

not something like this:

Michael Frost was kind enough to post on Twitter: ‘John Piper should sack whoever writes his tweets for him.” giving Piper a pass on the responsibility. Tuesday night the post had been removed from JP’s feed. 

UPDATE 5/24/13 — Piper explains why the Twitter posts were removed.

Save Me from Save Me

Just a little over a year after ABC-TV gave us Good Christian Bitches  which got abbreviated to GCB at the same time as the Southern Baptist Convention offered an alternative name Great Commission Baptists; NBC-TV is just days away from the launch of the four-week miniseries Save Me. The series stars Anne Heche as a woman who, after nearly choking to death on a sandwich, takes on a prophetic role as a direct pipeline to God. Sitcoms Online reports the series will air for four weeks, as of now, from May 23 through June 13.

And so it begins again. Lately the hallmark of mainstream media’s portrayal of Christianity has been slightly more accurate in terms of theology, or at least in terms of what we could term megachurch culture, with shows like Sisterhood blurring the distinctions between drama, comedy and reality TV. But the characters all tend to be slightly over-the-top representations, and many times the humor is at the expense of those who seem to be afflicted with faith. A two-minute preview of Save Me reveals a show that is mostly uses a religious framework to advance a script that might have developed just as well without dragging God into it.

Still, we don’t wish to judge a program we haven’t seen so we’ll have to wait for  May 23rd at 8:00 PM Eastern. But we couldn’t resist the post header above. Truly, I hope we’re not saying “Save Me” in the first five minutes.  Watch a preview on YouTube. (Language issues.)

What if What Happened in Boston Was a Weekly Occurance?

Noah Beck writes at The Christian Post:

I genuinely empathize with the victims of the Boston bombing. They were killed, maimed, injured, and/or forever traumatized only because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As they gathered to compete in or watch the marathon underway, they were – like all terrorism victims – the epitome of innocent.

But imagine if this happened again next week, at a pizzeria, killing 15 diners. And again, a week later, on a bus, killing 19 passengers. Then, at a discotheque, killing 21 teens. Then, at a church, killing 11 worshipers. And so on, with a new bombing terrorizing us almost every week.

Israelis don’t have to imagine. They just have to remember. Between 1995 and 2005, each year saw an average of 14 suicide bombings, murdering 66 victims. 2002 was the worst year, with 47 bombings that slaughtered 238 people. That’s almost one Boston bombing every week. Adjusted for population differences, Israel’s victims in 2002 amounted to the equivalent of three 9/11s in one year. And these bombing statistics don’t include all of the shootings, stabbings, and other violent attacks by Palestinian extremists during those years.

Most Americans (and Europeans), who enjoy lives of far greater security, can barely recall such attacks because they usually received only scant and perfunctory media coverage, if they were mentioned at all. A few particularly gruesome attacks (like the Netanya Passover bombing that killed 30 and injured 140) were prominently reported but most attacks were barely and inconspicuously noted, and many smaller but horrific attacks went entirely unreported…

Continue reading here

The article concludes:

With so many constant threats, it’s a miracle that Israelis can maintain any semblance of everyday sanity, much less win Nobel prizes and get more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any country after the USA and China. How do they do it? If you talk to Israelis, their approach seems to be a proud and stubborn refusal to let terrorism change their lives…

Theology Lite: Max Lucado on Pretzels

So there I was driving home and listening to one of six Christian radio stations I can now get in my car, when Max Lucado’s Upwords radio minute came on.  This is essentially a sponsorship opportunity for radio stations; a vehicle for them to sell additional advertising.

Now, I don’t want to seem ungrateful for all the books Max has written and the contribution he’s made to Christian literature, in fact I’ve given a few favorable reviews here.  Furthermore, I especially like Max on video. I think the warmth and tenor of his personality comes through the camera better than through the printed page, though, I must confess, I now read his material hearing his voice in my head.

But as I listened to Upwords, I thought, “As fluffy content goes, this is more fluffy than usual.”  So I looked to see if the text was available online to share here, and it was:

Years ago I was traveling with my daughter, Jenna.  When I realized she and I weren’t seated together,  I asked the fellow sitting next to her to swap seats with me.  Surely he’ll understand, I thought.  He didn’t.  I was left separated from my 12 year old on a long transatlantic flight.

I began plotting how I’d trip him if he dared walk to the restroom during the flight. I turned to intimidate him with a snarl and saw, much to my surprise, Jenna offering him a pretzel. What?  My daughter was fraternizing with the enemy! As if the pretzel were an olive branch, he accepted her gift and they both leaned their seats back and dozed off.

I learned the lesson God had used my daughter to teach me. All of us are here by grace and, at some point, all of us have to share some grace. So the next time you find yourself next to a questionable character, don’t give him a hard time—give him a pretzel!

That’s the full text.

Now my goal here is not to take this apart letter-by-letter, punctuation-mark by punctuation-mark. (We’ll leave that to discernment ministry bloggers.) I did make note — especially if I’m ever near him on an airplane — that Max was considering tripping this stranger, and that even in the final paragraph, he still ranks as a “questionable character.”  Of course this is the same man who recently, in his book Grace, confessed to a week of drinking beer out of a paper bag in a convenience store parking lot, and an attempt to bribe an airline official.  Truly, I’m not making that up.

No, I was just concerned that the whole broadcast was a tad light, as in lite. No Biblical text, though I suppose that’s not the goal of Upwords. No deep theology. Not even a teaser for an upcoming book.  (This story is in fact from an older book, The Great House of God.)

I guess I have no major complaint other than perhaps I’d like my sixty-seconds back.  I do think the radio airtime could be better used. I think that Max himself could use it better. Especially in view of the program’s mandate as outlined on his website:

In 1991, Max Lucado was presented the idea of developing a radio broadcast that focused solely on Jesus Christ.

Perhaps there’s a philosophy to this radio vignette; possibly Max builds a listener following and then hits the spiritual home run on Fridays, or at the end of the month.

I just think people are tuning in for something more substantive than pretzels.