Relevance! Catch the fever!

When a church is looking to be "relevant", there are few ways it can better accomplish this than through its music. Many such churches believe the ultimate in relevance is achieved by singing secular songs as praise, but others choose a different route: taking the same songs but changing a word here or there to "Christian them up". When the latter method is chosen, you often get a true masterpiece of 'worship'.

As you might expect, I have a few comments on this.

1) If you're going to take an atrocity and pretend it's worship, at least don't imitate the exact plot of a South Park episode ridiculing the practice (and since this church is clearly hyper-relevant, certainly someone on the 'worship' team has seen this episode - come to think of it, maybe that's where they got the idea). According to one plot synopsis, Cartman forms a Christian band that "rocketed to the top of the Christian rock charts, with Cartman simply tweaking the lyrics of love ballads, changing words such as "Baby" to "Jesus". While effective, the band eventually comes under some scrutiny when one of the songs involves more passionate lyrics. Cartman manages to manipulate his way out and the band continues in its success."

If you're familiar with the original tune by Dead or Alive, you'll note that there was exactly one lyric change - from Baby to Jesus. Yeesh. Also, you no doubt see that the changed lyrics make this song a lot of things - sickening, sacrilege, disgusting, creepy, disturbing, and blasphemous come to mind - but worship is not one of them.

2) What was the deal with the socks? Spinning socks = praise? Alllllrighty then. I did think of one potential use for the spinning, though. If you were to place a heavy object in the sock - say, a cue ball, or a big rock, or maybe a stadium or quarry - you could spin it, release it, and hit one of the people responsible for this atrocity.

3) It can often be difficult to know when exactly to walk out of a church. When in doubt, you can't go wrong leaving at the first mention of the "Holy Spirit Hoedown". Although I think Spurgeon might've used that phrase a time or two, and John MacArthur uses that as a sermon title every other week, so maybe I'm jumping the gun here.

4) Isn't the point of "relevance" to make the gospel "more appealing" to the lost? Who, exactly, is this going to appeal to? Dead or Alive plus a square dance plus the O'Jays, all with swirling footwear? Sounds great! I'm so impressed, I need to hear more about Jesus!

HT: Luke MacDonald, who is one of our worship leaders at Harvest. Thankfully, we can be certain he'll never subject us to anything like this.