FUN

Have you ever read a book that gave voice to thoughts you have had with such clarity and power that you wish you had written it yourself? I am in the throes of such a book right now.

Three weeks ago I was having lunch with a church musician friend, Herb Buffington. Together we were lamenting the junk masquerading as church music in many congregations in recent years. Our conversation turned to thoughts about revealing to pastors, colleagues and lay-people the important work of raising standards in these dark and challenging times.

Herb recommended a small book that he had recently read, This Little Church Went to Market. I ordered it from Amazon and have been devouring it for the last few days. I have found it to be one of those books that I would like to buy a 100 copies of to send to colleagues and friends around the country. Though I don’t swing with some of the author’s fundamentalist theology, I find that he clearly and powerfully states the case against the recent wave of entertainment worship and the felt-needs foundation of much church programming and marketing.

You will probably be subjected to a number of thoughts and applications of those thoughts from my present reading project in the coming weeks, but I will start with these ideas...

The author, Gary Gilley, unpacks the development of our American entertainment culture and the evolution of our concept of “fun.” He contends that the idea of fun as a goal or objective is quite recent in western understanding. Most certainly, through human history, there has been joy and exaltation, even ecstacy. But it has only been in the last few decades that amusement for the very sake of amusement has become an end in itself.

In fact, the pursuit of fun as an objective now permeates the worship of the church, our processes of education, the choosing of our national leaders, the assignment of societal values, and our individual measure of self-worth and life-fulfillment.

Gilley quotes Neil Postman from the latter’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, when he says.. “... to enjoy the fine arts required a person to think, to meditate, and to engage the mind and the soul. The new brand of entertainment, increasingly enjoyed by the masses is mindless. It is about gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, reaction rather than contemplation, and escape from moral instruction rather than submission to it.”

From the standpoint of the Church, when we seek to cashier expressions of timeless beauty and worth for the amusements of the day, we distort the Church’s message of love, faithfulness and sacrifice into a form of popular psychobabble that falls short of the ultimate message of salvation by grace through faith.

Though Gilley’s book has been an affirmation and inspiration to me on these topics, more and more writers and periodicals are beginning to consider these them. In a recent article in Christianity Today, Donald Bloesch, had this to say about the back-lash forming over “seeker-sensitive” worship:

“Protestantism is in trouble as an increasing number of business and professional people are searching for a new church. The complaint that I hear most often is that people can no longer sense the sacred in either the preaching or the liturgy... worship has become performance rather than praise. The praise choruses that have preempted the great hymns [in many churches] do not hide the fact that [their] worship is essentially a spectacle that appeals to the senses rather than an act of obeisance to the Mighty God Who is both holiness and love. Contemporary worship is far more egocentric than theo-centric. “

I have long believed that the whole of Church history teaches that fads will come and fads will go. Be those fads contemporary worship, praise choruses, gender-neutral language, or politics of the left or the right, they will in time fade and fall as the ancient liturgy and its solid root in Holy Scripture stands from generation to generation and from age to age.

Soli Deo Gloria,
Bill