Oscars Out of Touch — Are we much different?
Monday, February 25th, 2008http://www.media.switchpod.com/users/scdumc/turnaroundtrack5.mp3
Did I miss something? As the Oscar awards were handed out last night I must admit I was clueless. I didn’t know any of the movies. I wasn’t even sure what No Country For Old Men was about. Maybe something like that old Ron Howard movie where the old people become young again. It turn out that No Country is a ultra-violent film that even the New York Times says is not for the squeamish and barely made a dent in the overall box office totals for the year. Spiderman 3 and the latest incarnation of Harry Potter were at the top of the list. It seems like people are attracted to the familiar. If you want see a picture of the box office draw, take a look at this site. Click on the graph and pull it back and forth and you can see which movies have drawn the best audiences.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/
20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html#
So while the vast majority of people see movies that connect, the Hollywood insiders give awards to the obscure movies that only they seem to know about. So while they held a great celebration, the rest of the audience in TV land was left scratching their heads.
Which brings me to worship. I once was part of a church where the music director’s mission in life was to educate the congregation about all the wonderful hymns in the hymnal like a 1789 hymn written by a Monk in Germany as a lullaby for sheep. The choir seemed to enjoy it because they could read music but the rest of us watched from the sideline. One Sunday the director made a mistake. A familiar song made it into the service – Holy, Holy, Holy. Suddenly the whole church came alive as even Aunt Millie and Uncle George in the back row knew the tune. But sadly those occurrences were few and far between.
So as you design worship, who is it for? The insiders or the multitudes that want something they can connect to. Do you really need to give that sermon on Transformative Substitutionary Theology or would a message on Jesus Feeding the 5,000 suffice? Do we really need to learn to sing that new country-funk song off the Internet or would Amazing Grace with an acoustic guitar be more meaningful?
The challenge for those in leadership in the local church is to figure out how to communicate in a way that relates to the everyday life of people in the congregation. Our ultimate task is to share the universal truths found in faith in Jesus Christ – love, hope, joy, and peace – that’s what people are longing for.
By Craig Miller