There’s a guy I quoted once – a friend of mine – who said something that I actually thought was pretty worrying. We had different perspectives on a certain topic, and his words sent me off on a whole chapter’s worth of ranting and raging about the myopic nature of the church.
Anyway, this summer we were chatting and once again he said something that made me stop and think. The only thing about this time is that instead of being opposed to his opinions, I’m wholeheartedly in agreement with them. In fact, his words were so accurate that I’ve adopted the sentiment and the sentence as my own.
We were talking about the workings of the Christian industry – the machine that offers both he and I occasional trips out of smaller, more local, more anonymous work. In this small pond we are eclipsed by other, far larger fish, but from time to time we swim along with them. Anyway, enough of the words, the deal is that he’s a worship leader who occasionally makes albums and I’m a writer who occasionally writes books.
He was relating an incident that had just happened. He’d returned home to find a bit of promotional material for a forthcoming product he was involved in that mentioned all the contributors’ names but his own.
He was, at first annoyed. He hatched a plan to put things right – a phone call to the main man, a few home truths. He might even get a few other issues out in the open too – explain how he’d been feeling kind of frustrated about being treated like a lesser version of all the others, about how he’d had enough of being put down in the subtle ways, of being passed over and ignored.
Then he stopped. And he listened once more to the thoughts he’d been thinking. And he despised what he heard.
Telling me his story, he delivered his killer line:
“I hate the person I have to become in order to be a part of all this.”
All this – this Christian industry where reputation and influence and fame seem to create a not-so-alternate version of the more secular worlds around us - worries me. It worries me for the person I become when I get tempted to strategise to increase my readership, when I take offence at the snub I think I ought not to have received, when I wonder about a future characterised by sales and an oh-so-flawed view of success.
I hope this doesn’t make much sense to you. I think that this probably affects a handful rather than the bulk of us, but despite that, it’s something I frequently need to get off my chest.
Perhaps that’s just the point. Perhaps it’s better to wince at the bitter aftertaste of the cult of Christian celebrity rather than to crave its sweetness. Perhaps there’s no point in decrying it completely, but instead to keep a check on the personal. I don’t know much more, but I do know that I hate the person I have to become in order to be a part of all this.
Slowly I realize how this little flame - this wanting to be recognized and appreciated - burns inside of me.
It is with great regret that I jump on this bandwagon.
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