Drugs, Jesus and 90's music

I'm focusing on worship this month and that usually starts and ends with twenty minutes and four songs on Sunday morning for Christians, change that, most Christian men.  So let's start there.

That guy

Last Sunday there was a great worship session.  We have recently started going to a new church in our new hometown, it's about three minutes away from our house which means we are only five minutes late.  My wife and I play a game where you take anything good and you call it a creation of two other things that had a baby.  Like my 4 year old daughter has hair that looks like the lion king and little mermaid had a baby.  Or Kale is when lettuce and boring had a baby.  This church has a worship pastor that sounds like hootie and the blowfish had a baby with mumford and sons, in my opinion.  Kelsey thinks he sounds like our old worship leader had a baby with John Goodman.  Either way, this worship team is great.

So they go through there thing and they sing a great Michael W. Smith song and then out of the blue they crush a little song called "Lullaby" by Shawn Mullins.  It was like awesome had a baby with the 90's.  And here we are.  The best of the best Christians are ten to fifteen years behind everybody else.  I have a reason for this.

The progression of the average Christian is based on age and nothing else.  When you meet a normal forty year old Christian sitting in church on Sunday, getting ready to get back in the minivan and go home to watch golf, that guy used to be cool when he was a sinner.  He watched cool movies, got drunk and had feelings.  He used to sleep with his wife because he liked her and listened to music because it did something.  That guy is now full steam in the system, and has not done anything new in ten years.  But he wants to feel something because he is in fact, still a creation of God, no matter how much he abandons living.

(as a very side note, I miss spelled abandons so badly that the first suggestion on spell check was boondocks, I actually saw a tear fall from my English Literature degree)

Thus, he goes back to what he knows, and right now what that guy knows is music from 1995.  As an ugly side effect, he starts to have feelings again but since he has not really felt anything in ten years he just has the feelings that died when he was twenty eight, so he wants to run a marathon and start a business.

And mind you, this is the good stuff.  This is the best of what we have to offer, there are some sects of Christian music that were never good, just like a women in a denim romper.

So what is the culprit and what can be changed...  Well I think there are a few issues, let's start a list.

1) Church worship pastors are the only musicians who get paid an adequate wage, imagine if all of the music at the grammy's was created by middle school music teachers.  Musicians either make way to much or way to little, and that is where the art thrives.
2) The listeners are broken, as discussed above in regards to fifteen years ago.
3) We are afraid to offend (we Christians) and the truth is some Christians are offended by feeling anything because they are hiding in cultural Christianity as cover not as salvation.
4) Worship is about being a blessing not being blessed and we actually don't know how to do that.

So here we are, where the edge is singing Shawn Mullins, the cutting edge, and we are singing worship songs to a guy who partied with hookers, mocked the reigning super power and literally raised ten year old girls from the dead (something Justin Beiber has gotten close to doing but is yet to accomplish).