"The point isn’t that the song isn’t about human love; it is that the raw longing it expresses---the fear, for instance, that I may not be able to love and be loved—is exactly what faith is about."
What is popular music doing in our Sunday morning worship service? I’m thinking of a couple of recent examples: Lynn singing Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” a few months back or Sean singing Marc Cohen’s “The Things We’ve Handed Down” on Father’s Day. What does it mean to have recording artist level renditions of pieces like this rubbing shoulders with hymns, choir, scripture readings, and prayers?
To me it’s as simple as this. We believe and say that faith changes our lives and meets us closest to home, with the things that matter the most. We come to worship and plop ourselves down and take inventory: this is the me that’s here today, feeling tired or burned out in this way, or excited and thankful in that way, or upset in a some nameless way. This is where I need God to meet me. Popular music, at its best, has a way of putting a finger on exactly some such conditions. It blurts out or embodies some elemental moment in life. Its power is to represent that experience so we freshly recognize it in ourselves or are stunned to see it revealed so nakedly in another. We lose track that the faith whose expression has been encased in the form of the church’s greatest hits, its oldies, is directly related to those moments, not some special “made for church” problems.
Talk about being saved may have walled itself off in a narrow precinct policed by ideas of judgment and afterlife. But Aimee Mann takes us straight out of that ghetto:
You look like... a perfect fit,
For a girl in need... of a tourniquet.
But can you save me?
Come on and save me...
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone.
'Cause I can tell... you know what it's like.
A long farewell... of the hunger strike.
But can you save me?
Come on and save me...
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone.
We can get caught up and embarrassed with the thought “This song is about romance, or sex and the only way it is slipping into church is that we are closing our eyes (and plugging our ears) to the obvious and talking loudly and nervously about metaphors." The point isn’t that the song isn’t about human love; it is that the raw longing it expresses---the fear, for instance, that I may not be able to love and be loved—is exactly what faith is about. On the most encompassing level we can know. It may not only be about what Aimee Mann is singing about. But it’s not different from what she’s singing about. Frederick Buechner said vocation is about finding where our deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest need. We Jesus trailers think faith is about where God’s best news meets our most honest selves. Music like this helps us bring our most honest selves to that appointment. A piece of music like this lays it out there: “this is the way it is with me.” At least sometimes. Like any prayer or sermon, it might not be dramatically true for everyone on that day and time. But it is an example of how we honestly are. And it poses the good question: what does the rest of what we are doing and saying here have to do with that?
Oh, and why not just play the Aimee Mann CD on the sound system during church? I wouldn’t rule it out—and most churches don’t have any good alternative. But that’s the consumer mode that is popular music’s normal setting (and ours). It’s a special gift to have Sean and Lynn, who can share it on the same musical level but with a heart for the connection we’ve just described, as an act of worship and community. Is popular music infecting our worship? I see it the opposite way around. I can’t hear Aimee Mann’s song ever again without thinking she’s in church. I think she's singing our song.
To me it’s as simple as this. We believe and say that faith changes our lives and meets us closest to home, with the things that matter the most. We come to worship and plop ourselves down and take inventory: this is the me that’s here today, feeling tired or burned out in this way, or excited and thankful in that way, or upset in a some nameless way. This is where I need God to meet me. Popular music, at its best, has a way of putting a finger on exactly some such conditions. It blurts out or embodies some elemental moment in life. Its power is to represent that experience so we freshly recognize it in ourselves or are stunned to see it revealed so nakedly in another. We lose track that the faith whose expression has been encased in the form of the church’s greatest hits, its oldies, is directly related to those moments, not some special “made for church” problems.
Talk about being saved may have walled itself off in a narrow precinct policed by ideas of judgment and afterlife. But Aimee Mann takes us straight out of that ghetto:
You look like... a perfect fit,
For a girl in need... of a tourniquet.
But can you save me?
Come on and save me...
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone.
'Cause I can tell... you know what it's like.
A long farewell... of the hunger strike.
But can you save me?
Come on and save me...
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone.
We can get caught up and embarrassed with the thought “This song is about romance, or sex and the only way it is slipping into church is that we are closing our eyes (and plugging our ears) to the obvious and talking loudly and nervously about metaphors." The point isn’t that the song isn’t about human love; it is that the raw longing it expresses---the fear, for instance, that I may not be able to love and be loved—is exactly what faith is about. On the most encompassing level we can know. It may not only be about what Aimee Mann is singing about. But it’s not different from what she’s singing about. Frederick Buechner said vocation is about finding where our deepest gladness meets the world’s deepest need. We Jesus trailers think faith is about where God’s best news meets our most honest selves. Music like this helps us bring our most honest selves to that appointment. A piece of music like this lays it out there: “this is the way it is with me.” At least sometimes. Like any prayer or sermon, it might not be dramatically true for everyone on that day and time. But it is an example of how we honestly are. And it poses the good question: what does the rest of what we are doing and saying here have to do with that?
Oh, and why not just play the Aimee Mann CD on the sound system during church? I wouldn’t rule it out—and most churches don’t have any good alternative. But that’s the consumer mode that is popular music’s normal setting (and ours). It’s a special gift to have Sean and Lynn, who can share it on the same musical level but with a heart for the connection we’ve just described, as an act of worship and community. Is popular music infecting our worship? I see it the opposite way around. I can’t hear Aimee Mann’s song ever again without thinking she’s in church. I think she's singing our song.
S. Mark Heim is the Chairman of the FBC Council and Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology and Andover-Newton Theological School. He is author of Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends and, most recently, Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Eerdmans, 2006).