how evangelicals lost me, and why I might go back (pt3)
Today’s post is on “Failure to be the change”, part one was on “Worship“, and part two was on “Apologetics”
A few years ago I went to a Passion concert thingy. It was back when Louie Giglio was still the 7:22 guy, and Passion was a once a year thing. They had recorded this CD (which I think they still do every year?), and had this big ‘ol concert release party. I think I was a freshman, but our band leader got us in so we could see what real (good… because we weren’t good) worship bands sounded like. It was a good time, but Louie gave a talk that week about waves.
Looking back, where I would normally sigh and shake my head at most of what I heard throughout my high school years, that talk still stands in my mind. Louie talked about an issue that the church as a whole has struggled with for quite some time, the failure to change. Louie talked about three types of groups, which I’ll go into breifly here. First you have those who stand on the shoreline, clinging to their old ways and watching them get battered by “the waves of change.” You could call those guys the fundies. Next you have these wave riders, those who catch a wave and ride it into the shoreline, where they either sit and cling to what once was, or swim out and catch the next wave, rinse and repeat. This second group is representative (in my view) of much of the evangelical church, very reactionary, always looking for the next big thing, which ends up being something that swept the parent culture years ago.
The third group consists of the wave makers. The guys who are on the forefront of change. In other words, not the Church.
Now, I fully understand that you could argue that there are wave makers in churches, but when you look, they are really only wave makers within the church, and really don’t reach out beyond those confines. In other words, they’re not changing the world. In essence, those “wave makers” and what they create are simply reflections of the parent culture, really, they are delayed reflections at best.
Take, for instance, the christian music industry (is it a party foul to bring them into the equation… maybe that’s a little too easy), most of what you see is simply rehashed crap that has been making its way through the popular culture for years. Of course, you also have the simple crap that isn’t really a rehash of anything… just crap. Even within emerging communities, the church seems to be influenced by the culture of the day (in our case the trend towards postmodernism), instead of creating the influence of the culture.
An old youth pastor of mine is doing a VLog (please forgive the crappy music and cheesy title screen) on the Obama generation, I guess I’m considered part of that generation, so I’ll speak for them for a moment. We’re not into simply accepting and adapting to change, we’re into being the change.* Simply jumping on board a train that’s already moving isn’t going to capture the heart of any new generation, but creating/being an agent of change will.
How does this play into the latter part of my title, “Why I might go back”? To find agents of change stifled by the system that will join when large, but fail to embrace when they are merely ripple waiting to pick up strength. I want to find the wave makers we have hidden away and told they are crazy, and I want to join them. I’m not a great wave maker myself, but I want to do whatever I can to help those who are.
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*I understand that Obama hasn’t been the level of change we had hoped, campaigned, and voted for. Please leave that topic for another discussion.
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