Re-invention

We went to see Nils Lofgren at the Birchmere last night.  Nils is one of those rock'n'roll lifers, guitarist, keyboard player, harpist, and now, apparently, tap dancer.  He has played with Neil Young and most famously as a member of Springsteen's E-Street Band, but he has also had a long solo career where he scratches his own songwriting itch.  One of the last numbers of the evening had him don tap shoes and thump out a rhythm with his feet and huge silver baton like you might see a drum major use at a college football game, while playing a harp with one hand, quickly switching to his Fender Stratocaster to wail out a solo and then back to the tap dancing, baton, harp routine.  He is 63 years old, did I mention that?
What this leads me to think about this morning is re-invention.  Almost all really great musicians do it. David Bowie does it every ten minutes, U2 has done it several times over the course of their career, the most notable being between The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, with a rather interesting detour called Rattle and Hum.  Dylan made the switch from acoustic folk to electric guitars with Highway 61, prompting a bunch of "folk purists" to call him Judas.  Zappa experimented so relentlessly that he pretty much lost all of the non-musical-genius audience.
You can go too far, you can make mistakes (I'm looking at you Zooropa), you can impress critics accidentally, or make something you really think is great but critics think is mud, the point is you should always try to keep things fresh.  I think musicians do it so they don't get bored.  Lofgren has been touring, more or less constantly for 46 years.  I'd probably think, "Hey, how about tap dancing" at some point too.
Which is more or less a problem for church (hey, you knew I was going to go there at some point), because we have this idea that we're rooted in tradition and we are part of something that is not just about passing fads and trends.  This is true, and important, but we use that rooted-ness as an excuse to ignore pressing realities and it traps our thinking in "look-back" mode.
Music is a good example, for instance rock'n'roll owes a debt to blues and jazz and folk and even classical music, it did not occur in a vacuum or disconnected from what came before, yet it is undeniably something new.  Musicians like Dylan and Bowie manage to hold on to a certain number of fans through changes.  Sure there will be people who think anything but Blowin' in the Wind, and Space Oddity just aren't up to scratch, but then again those one trick ponies would have been dead horses a long time ago.
Ultimately the innovators are the ones who last.  Pearl Jam is still around and making music, they still have many passionate fans.  Most of the bands who imitated them are pretty much relegated to the county fair circuit.  There just aren't that many rabid Collective Soul fans out there now, even though I just heard one of their songs on XM this morning.
I wonder, what are the "one hit wonders" of the Church?  You know the things that worked well for a minute but didn't really launch anything lasting.  Sure we have had our Highway 61  moments, like the Reformation.  We have had our bizarre experiments run amok, like dispensational eschatology.  We have had our prophetic, punk rock movements, but what really lasts, perhaps the only thing that really lasts are those moments when we get something that no one else really does.  When we boldly proclaim a God who is about love and mercy instead of wrath, when we actually try and do the things that Jesus did, and we constantly find new ways to do it, no one could really get bored.
Sure there will always be some moron in the back yelling, "Play Freebird!" Because that's what they want, because it's familiar and that guitar solo is awesome, but we need to learn to just ignore that guy, he's probably drunk.