03.29.07 An Insider’s Look At Christian Radio Pt.5: Profane?
My favorite chapter of scripture is Ezekiel 36. I know that’s an odd favorite but here’s why I love it. Ezekiel 36 is the moment at which God spoke Jesus into human history. God spoke His wrath through the prophet Ezekiel, calling the Jewish nation “profane”. The word used in Ezekiel 36 for “profane” in Hebrew means to “make limp,” “cripple” or “make small.”
The Jews, God explains, were placed among pagan nations to image HIM to them. Their actions said something about the kind of God Yaweh was, what He cares about. Dwight Edwards, author of Revolution Within, explained this to me well when he said God stakes His reputation on His people...then and now.
The Jews, however, didn’t love God’s reputation as much as they loved commerce. They did business with the nations around them and entered into covenants with their citizens along the way. When a covenant was made the two parties sometimes exchanged belts, swords, and an oath to protect one another. It was the way business was done, allegiances were made.
Because of their business practices, their oaths, the Jews wound up killing the enemies of their friends. They shed blood, as Ezekiel puts it - blood God had not commanded them to shed. They also adopted the idols of their business partners.
God calls the Jews profane for this. Why? How does shedding blood and raising idols cripple God? Theologians like Edwards believe these sinful actions sent a false image of God out to the pagan nations and even preached an artificial Yaweh to the Jews themselves. Shedding blood said “God doesn’t love people.” Idol worship said “God can’t be trusted.” Both of these messages are merely sentences in the Enemy’s overall message, the same message he preaches to every generation: “God isn’t good.”
MY STORY
I had a great childhood. Two parents who loved each other and me very much. They took us to church, taught us the bible, prayed with us every night before dinner. Truly great.
But from the time I was thirteen until my Senior year of high school I battled depression. I won’t bore you with all the reasons why. It’s enough to say that stress at home and a disease I’ve had all my life, coupled with a few bad habits of mine and the resulting guilt, kept me under a monumental mound of anxiety and sadness.
Eventually I took a knife, stuck myself in the forearm and slid it quickly up toward my elbow in hopes of doing irreparable harm and ending my life. I didn’t succeed. A friend of mine, a pastor’s kid, also very involved in church as I was, came much closer to success. He took some sleeping pills and dozed in a running car with the garage door down, wearing his best Sunday clothes.
I remember he and I driving down Broadway in my hometown just before we tried to take our lives. We were cruising like teenagers do, flipping through the radio stations. Our local Christians station had a show targeted at youth that ran late at night on the weekends. My youth minister had mentioned it. I turned to it wanting to feel better. I remember feeling angry instead. What I heard was music I couldn’t relate to at all, what sounded out of touch with reality, written by happy people who’d never been where I was, who’d never felt hopeless before. No words I could put my heart behind and sing to God. The messages in the broadcast, to me, were clear: God doesn’t care and good Christians don’t have problems.
WHY I DO WHAT I DO
That night made me mad enough to write about it. It was the first poem I ever wrote in fact and so, I guess, that anger I felt at Christian music that night is partially to credit for me becoming the song writer I am today. That poem even won some contest back in Texas. But it did more than that. Not only did that poem begin for me the habit of funneling my emotions through a pencil onto a page, but it also gave my creativity a purpose.
That purpose is why I moved to Nashville - to write music that supports the spiritual health of Christians, that encourages through honest discourse, acknowledges the good and bad in life, that reminds us all that a life spent knowing God and not also making Him known is only half a life, a life without meaning and prone to depression and anxiety. I moved here to write songs that hometown station of mine wouldn’t broadcast when I needed them to all those years ago.
I became a song writer to force more honesty into the faith discussion on radio stations and in bookstores and in churches. I signed a record deal because other artists and labels didn’t have the same desire I had to sing about such things. I was signed for writing Welcome Home, a song other artists rejected for being too dark. My career, when I was winning awards and getting played and even now that neither happen, has always been about saving listeners from the misery I languished in for so long - desperate to hear a sermon, read a book, or tune to a song that touched even a little of the pain I dealt with daily. The goal is to meet people where they are by being honest about where I am and where I’ve been, and from there, walk with them out of the despair and into a life full of purpose and hope.
THE MESSAGE IN THE HAPPY
You see, when God is ignoring your hurts - which is what I felt when listening to sermons, Sunday school lessons and songs as a teen - we begin to suspect that God either doesn’t exist or He’s some sick twist who gleefully ignores our woe. And the Enemy wins. We believe his lie: God isn’t good. That’s where always happy gets us.
Doesn’t this fit Satan’s M.O.? Disguised as light, he brings darkness. He takes our good intentions to encourage people by focussing only on the pleasant and makes us his accomplice in wounding God’s reputation and His undermining His Church’s hope.
Don’t get me wrong. The lie will be told regardless of what kind of music I write, what music you play, what sermons get preached, which books get published. But we can stop propagating and even fend off this lie I think. I hope. It’s what my life is about. The best way to do it, I believe, isn’t to bury our heads in the sand of good cume, play another commercial free barrage of happy tunes, close the hour with surface banter, and repeat 24 times daily. The best weapon I’ve found in the battle against this powerful lie is honesty. Honesty about the greatness, the laughter inducing, the breathtakingly miraculous, the sweetness of life. Honesty about the tears and fears and hurries and worries we all have in common.
That’s human. That’s Christian. That says God is good, He knows you hurt, He hears you, He’s sent this song, this book, these words to tell you you’re not alone. We’ve been there too. And we and our God want to meet you where you are and help you from there. There’s so much good stuff about life and God you might have forgotten about and we want to remind you of all that. Trust us. We’re just like you. If I’d heard that kind of music when I was sixteen I wouldn’t have been cured, not with one listen, but I may have tuned in again, I may have bought that CD, gone to that concert, gotten out of bed, opened up to someone sooner, felt a lot less dysfunctional and strange and unChristian.
Instead I wore gray and listened to Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana - music that acknowledged how I felt. Unfortunately it celebrated my misery and gave me no incentive to leave it behind, painted no picture for me of what life could be instead. I read Nietche and self-help books and threw pity parties - all these attracted other miserable people and that made me feel less alone. How great would it have been, how many years could I have salvaged, had the Church (not just radio) been honest.
MY SALVATION
Honesty did save me in the end. I met a girl who’d grown up in church and yet made all kinds of mistakes. She had been a drunk. She’d been abused. She’d made poor choices. She and her family were the first Christians I met who didn’t make me feel inferior for being flawed. They met me where I was, told me their own stories, challenged me to be more than I was. Her father was my pastor after high school and he preached about growing up in a ghetto, starving, being beaten, told he was stupid daily. He told of his ascent from poverty to earning a doctorate in theology and eventually being the president of an entire denomination. He talked about tragedies in the world and asked us as a church to lend our help to righting the wrongs in our city and our planet. He even let me, knowing me well, marry his daughter.
My wife’s honesty, and her family’s, brought me back to life. I found in them a safe place to be myself, to ask questions, to beg for prayer. A place I wanted to spend the rest of my life. By sharing their wounds mine were healed.
Radio stations can (and do) do that too.
MY CHALLENGE TO HAPPY STATIONS
If you run a happy station I want you to stop deciding before you hear a song that you won’t play it if it isn’t all grins. I just want you to be open to whatever message is on that disc. If it’s hooky enough to entertain your listeners and it’s true then please disregard how happy or not happy it is. Consider on its musical and theological merits, not it’s positivity.
If you don’t believe that your station’s happy policy is profane then please get a second opinion, or a dozen. Please invite local pastors from all denominations (don’t invite Osteen) into your station. Serve them coffee, take them on a tour. And tell them you don’t want to do anything that harms the Church. You want to serve them and their people. Tell them you’d like their help. Explain to them what your policy is, how you aim to be always happy. Ask them if they think that’s something they’d encourage their congregants to listen to every day. Then listen.
One last thing. Radio stations, whether wooing advertisers or donors, like to tout their power. Advertise with us and your message will get to this many thousands of people. Write us a check and you’ll make a difference in this community. If those statements are true - if radio stations have the power to deliver messages that sell us stuff we don’t need and/or change entire communities - doesn’t it matter immensely what radio stations tell us about ourselves and our God? If stations are such powerful messengers, does anything about a radio station matter more then its message?
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