The Gospel According to U2, Part Two
In my previous post I gave a little information about my church background, both when growing up and now. I will now move on to a description of that Sunday morning in August.
This past summer, when I mentioned to my mother that I was going to be visiting Lubbock, Texas, for a wedding in August, she told me that Jack and Teresa Cooney now live in Lubbock. The Cooneys attended the same church as my family in Pullman, Washington, back in the early 90's. Their oldest children overlapped in age with the youngest three children in my family, so our families ended up spending a fair amount of time together. My mother also had a close friendship with Teresa Cooney, and they stayed in touch after we moved to South Dakota in 1992. I hadn't seen the Cooneys since the early 90's, and I thought it was pretty cool that I got to see them again.
While staying with them that weekend in August, they invited me to go to church with them on Sunday morning. Teresa told me that their church was a seeker-friendly church, modeled after Willow Creek. At that point, my curiosity was piqued and I was hooked. I have friends from BBC that have visited Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California, and I have heard some extraordinary tales about those visits. For some time I had wanted to visit a seeker-friendly church for a Sunday morning worship service and see myself what it was really like. The opportunity had finally arrived.
We arrived at Live Oak Community Church shortly after the service began on the morning of August 7, 2005. The congregation was singing a song based on the Lord's Prayer. I hadn't sung the song before, but I liked the words (very biblical). The next song took me by surprise. It was "40," written by the Irish rock band U2. It's the last track on their third album, War, and it's based on the first few lines of Psalm 40. Even though it's a biblical song, it still felt strange to sing a U2 song in church. But that's the whole seeker-friendly philosophy: the church service contains familiar elements for non-believers so as to make the church service more comfortable for them. The next song we sang was a song I didn't know called "Let My Life Be Like a Love Song." The last song, though, was another U2 song! It was "Pride (In the Name of Love)." Sure, it contains one line that refers to Christ ("one man betrayed with a kiss"), but I was having a real hard time seeing how that song could be part of a Christian worship service. At that point I began to wonder if I wasn't really in a Christian worship service but was instead watching a U2 cover band. That's what it felt like, anyway.
I hadn't picked up a bulletin on the way in, so I was unprepared for the message. At BBC, the sermon usually consists of the exposition of a particular passage from the Bible. Sometimes it's a topical sermon, where a particular topic will be examined, with the exposition of particular passages that deal with that topic. That morning, at Live Oak Community Church, the title of the message was "The Gospel According to U2, Part Three: Bono by the Side of the Road." As I saw that title on the PowerPoint projection screen with a picture of the Bible and a picture of the band, it seemed that I was entering... The Twilight Zone ("do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do"). And in the twilight zone of a worship service about U2, the selection of songs suddenly made sense.
The message began with a brief introduction to the band U2, to Bono, his message, and his music. Not much time was spent addressing what kind of Christian Bono is (I suppose that would have been in parts one and two). The focus of this message was how Bono exemplified the parable of the Good Samaritan of Luke 10. Instead of just passing by the wounded neighbor on the side of the road, Bono helps him out, and he urges us to do the same thing (literally - the message included a video of Bono calling on us to help our neighbors in Africa by calling our congressmen and asking them to pass legislation to forgive debt to African countries).
After the service was over, I picked up a bulletin on the way out. It turns out that we had missed the first song of the morning, "When Love Comes to Town," another U2 song. Like "Pride (In the Name of Love)," it contains some references to Christ in the lyrics, but it doesn't seem that normally it would have any place in a worship service. Anyways, the service was a lot different than what I was used to (either from the churches of my youth or now at BBC). It was even more "seeker-friendly" than I had expected, too. With something that different, it's important to evaluate it carefully, and biblically.
This past summer, when I mentioned to my mother that I was going to be visiting Lubbock, Texas, for a wedding in August, she told me that Jack and Teresa Cooney now live in Lubbock. The Cooneys attended the same church as my family in Pullman, Washington, back in the early 90's. Their oldest children overlapped in age with the youngest three children in my family, so our families ended up spending a fair amount of time together. My mother also had a close friendship with Teresa Cooney, and they stayed in touch after we moved to South Dakota in 1992. I hadn't seen the Cooneys since the early 90's, and I thought it was pretty cool that I got to see them again.
While staying with them that weekend in August, they invited me to go to church with them on Sunday morning. Teresa told me that their church was a seeker-friendly church, modeled after Willow Creek. At that point, my curiosity was piqued and I was hooked. I have friends from BBC that have visited Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California, and I have heard some extraordinary tales about those visits. For some time I had wanted to visit a seeker-friendly church for a Sunday morning worship service and see myself what it was really like. The opportunity had finally arrived.
We arrived at Live Oak Community Church shortly after the service began on the morning of August 7, 2005. The congregation was singing a song based on the Lord's Prayer. I hadn't sung the song before, but I liked the words (very biblical). The next song took me by surprise. It was "40," written by the Irish rock band U2. It's the last track on their third album, War, and it's based on the first few lines of Psalm 40. Even though it's a biblical song, it still felt strange to sing a U2 song in church. But that's the whole seeker-friendly philosophy: the church service contains familiar elements for non-believers so as to make the church service more comfortable for them. The next song we sang was a song I didn't know called "Let My Life Be Like a Love Song." The last song, though, was another U2 song! It was "Pride (In the Name of Love)." Sure, it contains one line that refers to Christ ("one man betrayed with a kiss"), but I was having a real hard time seeing how that song could be part of a Christian worship service. At that point I began to wonder if I wasn't really in a Christian worship service but was instead watching a U2 cover band. That's what it felt like, anyway.
I hadn't picked up a bulletin on the way in, so I was unprepared for the message. At BBC, the sermon usually consists of the exposition of a particular passage from the Bible. Sometimes it's a topical sermon, where a particular topic will be examined, with the exposition of particular passages that deal with that topic. That morning, at Live Oak Community Church, the title of the message was "The Gospel According to U2, Part Three: Bono by the Side of the Road." As I saw that title on the PowerPoint projection screen with a picture of the Bible and a picture of the band, it seemed that I was entering... The Twilight Zone ("do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do"). And in the twilight zone of a worship service about U2, the selection of songs suddenly made sense.
The message began with a brief introduction to the band U2, to Bono, his message, and his music. Not much time was spent addressing what kind of Christian Bono is (I suppose that would have been in parts one and two). The focus of this message was how Bono exemplified the parable of the Good Samaritan of Luke 10. Instead of just passing by the wounded neighbor on the side of the road, Bono helps him out, and he urges us to do the same thing (literally - the message included a video of Bono calling on us to help our neighbors in Africa by calling our congressmen and asking them to pass legislation to forgive debt to African countries).
After the service was over, I picked up a bulletin on the way out. It turns out that we had missed the first song of the morning, "When Love Comes to Town," another U2 song. Like "Pride (In the Name of Love)," it contains some references to Christ in the lyrics, but it doesn't seem that normally it would have any place in a worship service. Anyways, the service was a lot different than what I was used to (either from the churches of my youth or now at BBC). It was even more "seeker-friendly" than I had expected, too. With something that different, it's important to evaluate it carefully, and biblically.
posted by fargonate | 9:47 PM
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