Songwriting -- Canto I: The Struggle

I've had a dream of mine come true -- at least partially, but even the part that has come true astounds me. So in gratefulness, I'm going to document it here.

I refer to songwriting. I'm privileged to lead worship approximately once a month at my church and last Sunday four of the songs we (not just we the worship group, but we the congregation, you understand) sang in worship of our Lord were of my own making -- and in the context of my struggle to have my music recognized by my own church, that is nothing short of amazing to me. I dreamed it long ago. It has happened. Got to say thank you.

It may be a bit silly of me to try a thing like songwriting. 'Why?' seems like an appropriate question. Well, if you've spent any time reading this blog, or if you know me from elsewhere, you'll know I tend to try to swim upstream. If the trend is one way, I will try to buck it if I can. So probably that's in the mix. It's a challenge. Probably also I'm admirer of good music (a loaded phrase, laden with objective and subjective overtones) and I want to produce some, too. The inclusion of the 'too' in that last sentence, reveals a competitiveness, godly or not, that also drives me. On top of that justice also drives me. I recently watched a talk by Bret Victor, a noted software developer,  (I gather that if you are an iPhone user, you see his work all the time) who says that life is not as much about following your dreams as having strong principles, which, when they are violated, drive you to do something about it and correct the situation with whatever creativity you have. Church music is my situation. When I see it, a voice in me says, "There's something we lack in our songs, something missing, something that is slipping away, or some way in which we have stagnated by not having original new songs" and I must do my part to try and rectify that.

There. I've just articulated more about my reasons for songwriting than I've ever done to myself before. Conscious choices, in black and white. But it wasn't always this way. When I started on this particular journey I was the starry-eyed admirer of Vineyard worship and the wealth of new music which came forth from this movement, which I joined and have stayed with (long after the initial bloom has died and we have to see what fruit the tree will yet produce.) My prayer was, "God, let me write songs, too." I would pray that frequently, and pick up my guitar and try. And nothing would happen, or, nothing that I could honestly identify as an answer to a prayer for new songs. (This is not really accurate: I wrote one or two but there was no sense that it was possible that I could ever write any more than that) But I kept praying and I kept trying, and suddenly, it seems, in retrospect, at a retreat (an Alpha "Holy Spirit" weekend, if you want to know...) I wrote a song (we sang it last Sunday) which seemed to uncork the bottle. After that for a time, I wrote new songs nearly every day. God had really answered my prayer. But there was a hitch, a missing component, a thing without which the blessing of being able to write songs at all was somewhat sour.  Maybe I never thought to ask for this also. Maybe God just wanted me to gain what nobody wants the bother of gaining, that is, character, so he withheld this other blessing at the time. I refer to what some have called 'favor.'  There. I said it. Favor. Now I have to resist the temptation to digress into a rant against super-spiritualized Christian code words. But whatever you want to call it, the truth was that few people saw anything particularly special in my songs. I tried submitting them to some who had oversight of that sort of thing in our church and their response was akin to "Don't call us. We'll call you." Yeah. That felt real good. But it didn't stop me from writing even more songs. And I didn't stop. I have slowed over time, but I still haven't stopped. Anyway, it was pretty frustrating. Truth is, if you don't have the opportunity to teach others your songs, no one will get to love them and I certainly didn't.

I'm not going to chart my whole journey from there to here except to mention that some people actually believed in me and my songs. My brother, for one, and a few others -- very sustaining and more than in a small way. So now they let me lead worship and they let me teach my songs and they seem to like it. I thank God. It's a load off my heart. It was always supposed to be a gift to share. I hope to keep sharing.

Someday... Yesterday

Yesterday,
This revival seemed so far away
Now it looks as if it's here to stay
Oh I believed it yesterday

Suddenly,
There's a power coming over me
More than twice the man I used to be
Oh something new came suddenly

Why it took so long, I don't know
I couldn't say,
Then he came so strong
Like we longed for yesterday

Yesterday
Praying, crying for it everyday
Now it looks as if he's come to stay
Oh I believe I bless this day!

The Myth of the Theological 'Alone'

It happened in the context of an argument. It often does for me, so I'm used to it. A group of people who all disagree when I bring forward an alternative view that I'd been brewing, and yet I didn't think they needed to. My alternative view didn't rule out anything they said, though they treated it that way. I was merely emphasizing something that I thought had been neglected. So I've been pondering how things like that happen. It came to me that Martin Luther might have started it. Since his 'Justification by Faith Alone' it's possible that the use of the word 'Alone' has been an expected feature of all theological debate. It speaks of entrenchment. It speaks of either-or, it rules out both-and.

Look at Luther's cockeyed down-rating of the book of James -- a mere straw epistle he called it. James, that wonderfully practical view of the Faith, mere straw? And why? because Luther could not reconcile James' emphasis with his own now entrenched position. Yes, I know he got to this position through divine revelation. I don't even doubt it. But it seems to me that revelational experience is a double edged sword in theological pursuits. We need fresh ideas and paradigms and that's one edge, but defending your private revelation is apt to entrench you in your own ideas and not allow for balancing views. 

Bad Theology And God's Love for His Children

Yesterday at prayer meeting we prayed for some specific people, that God would heal them. There was a bit of a discussion in that process that turned up some bloggable material that I'd like to hash through here.

Point. There's not one bit of God that is bad. He's all good. He never intends evil to anyone. Even though he is never caught off guard by evil and can and will go to extravagant lengths to redeem his creation in face of evil, his intentions never include it. (So yes. I'm a thoroughgoing open theist. God made Adam and Eve with every intention of a joyful eternity and did not 'know' that they would fall. I speak here of a timeless 'knowledge' that would make him out to be a twisted person who would see all the horror awaiting his children and create them anyways. I just don't -- God help me -- accept that.)

From this we understand that God's plan, although, he will work with and around our sickness is never our sickness itself. He doesn't wantonly damage his creation: he restores, he redeems, he heals it. Suffering in the context of the kingdom battle that is still happening will come, but not from God afflicting his children with sickness.

So what do you do about stories where people who receive their sickness as from God and suffer and die with a glorious sense of the presence of God all around them? I realized (again, probably, because I'm sure it's not the first time I've thought this) that God's love for his children supersedes bad theology. "According to your faith be it done to you." or something like that. If someone has a problematic idea that blocks God from doing what he does naturally, i.e. heal, he will still love them and dwell with them, sometimes gloriously. But don't let's, as Christians have in the past, build a theology around it and bless sickness itself as a 'gift' from God.

Yeah, that sounds a bit militant. Whatever.

The Debate of Ages

Couple of days ago I was exposed to the Gospel in Chairs. It's a picturesque contrasting of two views of the crucifixion. One is labeled 'legal' (I've also seen it called 'juridical') and the other, 'restorative.' Brian Zahnd, the speaker, essentially popularizes the debate I alluded to in an earlier post-- popularizes and makes his case for the restorative view of the crucifixion.

Now without saying too much about the debate itself-- I see weaknesses in both positions, glossings over or ignorings of relevant scripture passages that would support the opposing view (like I said in my earlier post: a plague on both your houses) -- I really have to say that watching the video really got my dander up. There was an underlying message shouting louder to me than the chairs presentation that upset me greatly.

The problem came when Zahnd started to hold forth on the restorative view with all his gusto and passion. Passion that included supporting many of his statements with the phrase, "more biblical, more patristic" holding up the restorative view as the one to choose. Essentially, in an aside, he equates 'biblical' with 'patristic' and sets forth an underlying message that there is an ideal 'true' church that we all have to get back to. That's something I have serious problems with-- on lots of fronts.

First of all patristic is not necessarily biblical. For evidence let me submit this patristic writing. Justin Martyr's exaltation of the bishop in this passage borders on the obscene. Certainly, it carries any scriptural messages on the authority of leaders in the church to a ridiculous extreme. It flies right in the face of everything Christ taught about leaders not exalting themselves.

Secondly supporting your position terms by labels such as ancient and pillorying the opposing view as modern is as stupid as the opposite side calling your position old-fashioned and theirs, reformed. C.S. Lewis rightfully calls this sort of thing chronological snobbery. Essentially, you have exalted one age above another and given your audience to understand that everything from this age is better than that which comes from that age. (Hence the blog title) You have moved from serious debate (where ideas are weighed on their true merit) to a sales pitch. Yuck.

Thirdly, and to me, the most important problem with the idea of getting back to the ideal earlier church is this is a different age, culture and time. The issues addressed in patristic times are not the same as those needing addressed today. (Try St. Augustine's The City of God. Starts of with a refutation of polytheism.) Similarly the reformed view also comes from a different time and is showing its age. That is why videos like the one in question are popping up. Questions are being raised as we rethink some of the implications of what we've always been taught. It's a natural process. But what I hear when speakers employ chronological snobbery to push their point home, is that by returning to 'ancient ways' (how seductive that phrase sounds) we are not actually completing that process and answering the questions of our time in a way that we can truly embrace. If you want to embrace 'ancient ways' it's out there for you. The Catholic and Orthodox churches want to embrace you, too. Come home! Come home! Come home!

As for me, this is my age. I can't make myself into a Graeco-Roman of patristic times, nor yet a medieval. Too ornery, maybe.

Continuity and Commonality

I got a book for Christmas, written by a friend or maybe more precisely, a friendly acquaintance. After about three or four chapters, it seems like a pretty good book. It's Keepers of the Presence by Murray Dueck. I don't often read Christian literature any more. Most of such books are like extended sermons. That's not a bad thing per se, but I've grown up in the church and I find at forty-six, I don't need to absorb that many more sermons. I'll listen to them and even preach them when I get the chance, but it takes something fairly ground breaking for me to need to read one. Murray's book isn't that ground breaking; it's more of a practical encouragement to those who are spiritually sensitive and feeling overwhelmed by it. I know someone like that. Hope she we will like the book, because it's coming her way.

But the reason I mention the book, is it's got a mistake in it. No. Can't be. But yes, it does. Murray retells a story he's probably told a thousand times in his Samuel's Mantle teaching and he tells it slightly wrong. He talks about Elijah asking for a minstrel, and gives the bible reference. If you look it up you find that the prophet in the story is really Elisha. Interesting. A bit shocking, maybe, if you are persnickety about having all T's and I's properly crossed and dotted, (as an aside I always have liked the idea of dotting T's while I cross my I's) and I was shocked that an error like that would creep into a published work, but then I remembered that many of the sermons I have heard all my life have been guilty of similar pecadillos. I've been privileged to preach recently and I have found in moments of oratory, that I do the same thing. There's a looseness about making a point, where you make a generalization or draw on an example that might be slightly inaccurate, but the point of the message stands. And it even happens in the New Testament. Check out Mark 1:2,3 where he quotes 'Isaiah' the prophet and you find that actually the first part of the quote is Malachi. Hmm.

All of this brings me around (again) to my current bugbear, whipping boy, etc -- yes, you guessed it, inerrancy. Argument: The same Holy Spirit has been inspiring oral and written teaching and preaching throughout the ages. And those he has been inspiring have been imperfect. We don't get everything right, ever. And the idea that this group of writings called the New Testament somehow transcends that as if it was not after all written by people like us, is appallingly shortsighted, because like other cessationist doctrines, it disconnects us from ever really, completely being like them.

That continuity and commonality with Jesus' own earthly experience and later that of the apostles has become like a guiding principle for me. It's all still got to be true for this age and this time. We've got to have and be able to have all the resources they did, or the world will never be shaken the way it needs to be.

Sad State of Contemporary Christian Music

I never listen to the stuff myself and now I know why. A couple of days ago I was performing the parental duty of attending my daughter's dance recital. (For the record, she did just great.) The studio, of course trotted out performances from every class, and therefore included two numbers from their 'worship dance' offerings. Yes, unless you didn't know because you don't attend such a church, worship dance is its own art form-- sort of drawing on a lot of different styles, inoffensive, intended to be uplifting, etc. They actually, by and large, achieve their goal.

But what I noticed was the songs to which they danced. You see, I do that stuff, too. I sing, I lead worship in church and I even write worship songs. And I was frankly turned off by what I heard. One song expressed that what we can really offer God is not much except ourselves (My Surrender - Steven Curtis Chapman) a sentiment that I agree with, even though the lyrics were not anything I could sing with integrity and the tune was mediocre at best. OK, if it means something to you. But then the production got me. I'm sorry, your real purpose shouts too loud and drowns out your apparent humility. The production was highly crafted to appeal to a certain kind of church audience for one purpose only. To sell.

The other song (You Are for Me - Kari Jobe) had the same effect on me. Song is all about God's faithfulness in the face of our weakness. Nice sentiment. Over-produced to sell.

Makes me wonder if I ever want to write another song myself. Is this what happens to 'successful' songwriters? Crappy, mediocre, essentially dishonest songs prepackaged for the Christian consumer -- because now that I make a living at it, it's just business? Hmm.