How To Put It Back Together (pt 2)
What To Do When Following Jesus Doesn't Taste Like Ice Cream
“Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” - Ephesians 4:15
In my last post I suggested that the machine of “Christian” personalities and products is built to split people in two.
If that’s so, what do we do with that?
First, let’s diagnose the problem a little more clearly.
Musical artists, as well as authors and probably many pastors, all feel an immense tension where commerce intersects with - not just their creative work - but the creative work they make about their faith.
Of course it’s weird. Now there’s monetary value assigned to what you think about God.
If you say things people would like to hear about God, stuff that makes people feel good, you are likely to sell more of your product. And of course, the opposite is true, when what you create talks about the aspects of the Christian life that are more difficult, well, that’s going to be a harder sell.
This is not rocket science. There’s no broccoli flavored ice cream. People want what tastes good.
The catch is that the Christian life doesn’t always taste like chocolate.
It’s dying to our self and loving our enemies. It’s forgiving when we’ve been really hurt, and turning the other cheek instead of fighting back. It’s not hiding from our own suffering, and being present with the suffering of those around us. It’s being quiet, or raising our voice when God’s the one who’s silent.
Following Jesus is a beautiful life, but it’s not easy and it doesn’t sell a lot of t-shirts.
Spotify doesn’t pay artists virtually anything. No, we survive by selling t-shirts.
For the Christian musician / author / pastor / podcaster / etc, the easiest way to make money is to highlight the very true parts of the Gospel that speak about victory, dancing on graves, miracles, healings and our eternal future with Jesus. Such glorious and wonderful things.
But to only tell these parts of the story is like turning on the movie right where Luke blows up the Death Star and then saying that Star Wars is your favorite movie.
If you haven’t watched the whole thing, the ending carries no weight. You won’t even know what it’s really about.
This is the ultimate criticism of the lowest common denominator of “Christian” music, movies, books and teaching. It’s all victory with no battle. All healing and no suffering.
It’s a way to make a quick buck, but it’s not sustainable, because inevitably real life will interrupt the narrative at some point. Death, cancer, abuse, scandal, war, failure, just to name a few. It won’t take a very strong wind to blow down the house of a victory-only theology.
Then at some point, if the songs are claiming to be true but aren’t telling us the whole truth, we will stop listening.
(That’s called a half-truth, by the way, which is also commonly referred to as a full-lie.)
And so we have multiple generations walking away from the church - and from Christian media - with the resounding message that they see it as fake.
Yes, there are exciting bumps on this chart and that chart and that’s great, but pull back the camera and the trends are overwhelming:
The church has not been telling the whole truth so, en masse, people have stopped listening.1
Christian music fans were shocked by the news of Michael Tait’s actions and behavior. But read the comments under any of the articles or posts about it - nobody outside CCM seemed to be surprised. The world has seen CCM, and really much of the “Christian media complex”, as fake for quite a while now. They don’t understand why it took the rest of us so long.
I wrote in my last post about the life raft God gave me of a circle of friends, and a season of work, where I could make a living with the skills He gave me, but had time to heal and learn and grow a little bit.
I’m also thankful that the lifeboat eventually landed on a shore of a little corner of American Christianity that has a real appreciation for art and conversation and deeper questions. It’s not the mainstream, but it’s incredibly supportive and has allowed for me to have a family and make a few mistakes and grow to be a person who can create lots of things and pour into many other artists - now hopefully becoming the kind of artist and leader I hoped I would have been when I started 25 years ago.
So now, as someone who’s been cared for by so many in this community, and has put a lot of years and heart and energy back into it, I think I sit in a place where I can offer some thoughts to the artists, the audience, and the industry that is served by this machine, but that also sustains it.
To my artist friends:
Not trying to quote dc Talk here, but one thing I’ve learned the hard way, is that while spitting yourself in two and living with a secret is terribly dangerous and will inevitably be found out, it is still incredibly wise to discern what is public and what is private.
These posts you read are my writings, not my journals. They’ve been poured over, highly edited, and refined again and again. My songs are not first drafts, unless I got lucky. I work on them for weeks, maybe months, until they’re as good as they can be. You probably do, too.
Part of how we serve our audience is creating what they come to us for. Just because I get into Irish disco next week does not mean I should get mad at them for not liking my Irish disco record.
The same is true as I work out my faith.
I have questions and struggles. Things I’m processing and wrestling with God about. There are pieces of that relationship that feel appropriate and helpful to share, and I hope to do that in a beautiful, edifying, or often even challenging way.
There are other parts of my spiritual or human relationships that are not for anybody else. They need to stay between me and God, or at home in the kitchen, or out at Radnor Lake with a few close friends.
Part of how I keep myself whole, as an artist and a person, is by understanding what is helpful to share, and what needs to stay at home.
To those of us listening, reading, and watching:
As an audience, we need to stop falling for the idea that any of these people are better than the rest of us. They are not. Their cars are messy, their marriages have fights, and they have doubts about God, too. If they don’t, they’re lying to you or themselves.
They’re very talented, and that’s awesome. That does not make them more holy.
As for the songs, books, and content they make…
Let’s not settle for one-dimensional stories, characters, or images of humans.
We need to “watch the whole movie” and be willing to engage with more than just the happy endings and the victories of the Gospel story. We need to seek out songwriters, authors and creators who are doing full, rich, truthful work - and vote with our dollars so that the radio stations, book publishers and movie studios are willing to invest in them.
(To be fair, I think some book publishers are making huge strides in this area right now.)
Let’s not settle for the last five minutes of the movie. The party without the school year.
A half-truth is a full-lie.
We the listeners, they the artists, and the Gospel all deserve better.
To my dear friends in the industry:
Might I suggest the first step to healthy incremental change could begin by creating systemic opportunities for mentorship?2
I started when I was 17. Tait got signed in his early 20’s. Most artists are done with their careers by their mid-20’s.
Our careers are usually over before our prefrontal cortex has fully developed.
We need mentors.
Healthier people will make better decisions and better art. They won’t be as isolated, will have stronger marriages, and will be more likely to stay in the church.
Right now, we find talented kids, take them out of the place where they were flourishing, put them in a room with some dudes my age to write their hit with (for) them, then put them on the road opening for people my age, disconnected from the community where they made the art that got them noticed in the first place.
“Now do it again, but bigger.”
We are not, as a community or an industry, creating places where younger artists are safe to grow, develop and build community - nor are we getting out of the way and making room for them to build careers. There’s a lot to be said here that’s inside baseball, and there’s huge need for industry-wide investment in a more nurturing and sustainable system, but it starts and ends with this:
We need mentors.
This machine could be built to nurture people
if we build it that way.
This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few days, ready to post, but this morning as I’m sending this I have a few other thoughts... I don’t really know what to say, but am sharing in the grieving with so many dealing with the sudden floods in Texas a few days ago.
I was actually in Kerrville, exactly where this disaster happened, two days before. I stopped there after I dropped my daughter off at a camp half an hour away from the ones we’re seeing on the news. On the banks of a different river in the Hill Country. She’s still there now and I’ll go back to get her on Friday. (We are thanking God they are safe and seemingly still having fun, hopefully unaware of all that happened just down the road. Prayers very much appreciated.)
I spent three days on a little solo writing retreat at Laity Lodge, at the headwaters of the Frio River, outside of Leakey, TX. It’s hard to even comprehend now, but it was an incredibly sweet, quiet, refreshing and productive time. Sitting out by the river, on the porch as it rained - which it did quite a bit even then - and taking in just how peaceful it all was.
Two days later that river, too, would rise 15 or 20 feet all of a sudden and… I don’t even know. It’s hard to imagine it, or put it into words.
But it brings home what we’ve been talking about here.
As followers of Jesus, we must have language for grieving and sorrow and suffering at the ready. We need to sing those songs on sunny days, because we need them in our bloodstream when moments like this come.
That’s not being Debbie Downer or lame or too serious. This is the Christian life. To walk in full knowledge of the brokenness of the world with our eyes open.
And in moments like this, in the absolute depths of grief and rage, when there will NEVER be a satisfying answer for why something like this would happen (See my earlier post) - This is when we need our songs of joy and deliverance.
This is also the Christian life. To walk with hope in the valley of the shadow of death, and to know that death is not the end.
God, we do not understand. Comfort our friends who have lost so much. Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy. Come back soon.
This is an obnoxious generalization, yes, but I’m speaking of macro trends. There are, thankfully and wonderfully, millions of examples to the contrary.
If you have funding, I have ideas.
Oh, that's a really interesting observation. Sort of like how everybody becomes a career coach while they're in between jobs... Hmmm... And yet, the need persists, as do the resources (human and otherwise.) In your opinion, have you seen it done well?
As a spouse of someone for 40 yrs that found out he is quite like MT, I never considered the huge role CCM played in making him the person he is today. Thank you for the ideas!
Ancient Catholicism has brought me comfort in spite of these times.