Before it was cool

I have a confession to make.  I was once a hipster.  I was a hipster before most of the hipsters one finds sipping soy lattes, carrying their ipads in surplus messenger bags and sporting ironic handlebar mustaches were even born.  I know that statement makes me sound really old, it's also kind of sloppy grammatically, but hey, it's just a blog, let's beat the English language until it says uncle.
The thing is, my hipster days were when I was in seventh grade, it was 1986, and I discovered the college radio station from the University of Delaware.  Before the internet, one of the only ways one could hear any kind of music other than top forty, classic rock or country music, was to find these little windows into what can only be described as cultural never-neverland.  The show was called The Cutting Edge, and it gave one a aural glimpse of music that was outside the bounds of popular music.  It was Alternative music, before alternative was a word used to describe music.  There were bands like The Cure, REM, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, even U2, who would eventually become the only band of my generation to rival the popularity and longevity of the Rolling Stones or the Beatles from my parents generation.  In a few short years, U2 would release the Joshua Tree, and REM would release Document, and all of the sudden Alternative music became a thing, a big thing.
I remember the day that I first saw it, a popular girl wearing an REM T-shirt, and preppy kids suddenly becoming "punks" wearing combat boots and Dead Kennedy shirts, I knew somehow that it was over.  The wave had broken, and now everything was going to turn to crap.  A couple years later some music started coming out of Seattle that had promise, but it was subsumed by pop culture so very quickly.  To this day, I have no idea how most of my high school class listened to Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit and had absolutely no idea that the song was about them, and it wasn't complimentary.  The world was becoming strange.
I fell back.  I looked for other stuff.  I found my parents albums, just kind of sitting around gathering dust. I went into a retro phase, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Cream, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were there.  In time, I found some of the more obscure stuff: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Tom Rush, Richie Havens, Tim Buckley, Jethro Tull, (apparently my parents had been hipsters too) my musical education was getting some much needed background.
All this conspired to make me a bit of a music snob, I get why pop music is a thing, in fact I have come to accept that pop music is a necessary thing, it keeps the masses away from things that are truly awesome.  I think I learned this from Frank Zappa, who deliberately challenged the auditory sensibilities of the average listener, because he thought it would be interesting.  Zappa had no cares about commercial success, he never recorded a top forty hit, yet most people who have dug a little bit into American music know who he was.
Here is some album art for you:

Will  you look at that?  That is eight shades of awesome!  And it pretty much sums up how I have felt about pop music since I was twelve years old, which you may note is probably entirely too young to realize that commercial success and musical integrity are far too often antithetical.

In my line of work, I have had to learn to accept all different sorts of people, with all different tastes and backgrounds.  I can no longer exclude people from my friends list as easily as I used to, but I would encourage you, if you really want to be my close friend, you must at least try to understand why Morrissey is so incredibly cool.

I tell you all this in order to talk about something that is crucial to the life of the church: identity.  At different times in my life, a large part of my identity was formed by the music that I listen to, and in turn the music that I really enjoy is shaped by my identity.  When I was first attracted to music outside the mainstream was when I felt outside the mainstream myself.  The fact that very few of the kids at school even knew who The Smiths were, made them all that much more attractive.  When a world from which I felt largely excluded started to crowd my music, I fled.

There's this thing happening now, called the Emerging or Emergent church.  I know, this is a dramatic oversimplification, but at least one of the hallmarks of the trend called Emergence, is that they sort of dip randomly into the traditions of the church.  They don't hold anything too tightly, not theology, not liturgy, not buildings or programs, not really even commitment of their members.  Right now they are sort of like college radio in 1986, cool and subversive and different, but I wonder whats going to happen when and if the masses start joining their little club.

Standing in the middle of the mainline protestant stream, which pretty much everyone agrees is in the process of drying up, I know that our big struggle is for identity.  Are we liberal or conservative? Are we traditional or contemporary?  Are we evangelical or progressive?  Can we even try to be both and somehow find a middle way?

Adolescents can just run away and dodge the question.  Growing up means turning to face it.  As I have grown up, I have had to let go of a lot of anger, and a lot of judgmental attitudes about music.  I have had to stop trying to stay ahead of the cool curve, because with the speed of things these days, and the massive volumes of sheer awfulness, you have to hold on to the good where you find it.  I will like Arcade Fire when and where I want, on my terms.  I will reserve the right to despise Justin Beiber and/or the American Idol popstar machine with righteous indignation, but I will not let it drag me down.

Also with the Church, I will take what is best about our life together and hold on to it, whether it seems cool or not.  I will like saying the Apostle's Creed and singing the old hymns because they give me roots.  I will like playing my guitar in the praise band because it's lively and fun.  I will hold communion with people who I don't always like or agree with, because it is important that our identity as a community of faith is deeper and wider than the identity of an adolescent peer group.  There is a difference between a congregation and an audience.  Faith requires participation.  Our identity must be shaped by that reality.  That will always be cool.