01-31-2019, 05:42 AM
(01-29-2019, 10:35 PM)Ed Hurst Wrote: On the one hand, I can see why the Christian music scene is like that, Jay. So very much of what churches do follows the shape of secular culture, and it's often pretty subtle how that influence seizes control. What we get from that is just a different flavor of the secular stuff. There is apparently no real biblical moral model for them to use, so this puts a burden on us to dig in and find the better answer. Some elements are simply the nature of the thing and can't be changed, but I'm convinced there is plenty that is purely a cultural adaptation and we can do it better. The problem is that I don't have any solutions because I'm not that close to it. Maybe it waits for someone who has that calling from God to reconstruct the various elements of our faith future, to come up with a genuine biblical cultural frame of reference for the arts in religion.
But I'm definitely on board with Iain's drive to reconstruct the apprenticeship path for building better men of faith. That's sadly missing from mainstream church life.
The scene might've been a little different for me. There was a clash of worlds: basically kids who started bands because they liked the music vs. churches who mostly weren't sure how to handle it. A lot of the Christian bands we played with also played heavily in secular venues...sometimes more the latter than the former. There often wasn't a lot of support for the metal bands on the religious side because of the stigma and the general unmarketableness of the music, when compared to the general worship genre. Some of the metal stuff could be downright repulsive to some folks. Here and there, personally, I've come across a few pastors that genuinely "got" what we were doing, and would at least give us a blessing. There were literally maybe 1 or 2 (i.e., not a lot) youth pastors, out of the many that we come across, that actively supported what we were doing. Most of the time, the bands maybe had support from a home church, and that's it. Until they got more popular, they were stuck with getting into the secular venues.