Yesterday I talked to Chris Rosebrough of Fighting for the Faith radio for about an hour about this story. In that time, we couldn’t cover everything, but I offer you the link in case you’re interested in hearing a bit more in a different medium.
He starts by asking whether I hate NewSpring and Perry Noble. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know my answer to that.
I describe the beginning of the harassment and some of the implications of the Twitter messages.
Rosebrough plays a clip of Noble talking about jackass bloggers, which I had not heard before, which starts a discussion on dealing with critics.
Here’s something you haven’t heard before: I tell about my offer to Perry (through Brad Cooper in April) to join him in writing a book that answers the common criticisms against churches like NewSpring. For all who continue to think I hate NS and PN, ask yourself why I would offer to write something defending them.
In my favorite part of the interview, we talk about the beauty and sufficiency of Scripture, also of how there’s no need to jazz up the Bible or to reinvent the church.
Finally, we talk about “discernment blogging” in which I recommend that everyone starts such a blog.
On his blog, Nick Charalambous has been engaging the question of whether church and worship can be conducted online. He has many thoughtful posts about the issue, but this section from one in January sums up the question nicely:
Could you not have a physical campus-less church and still be the church as Christ intended it?…
Is the disciple-making machinery of church the worship service or the community the worship service creates?
If the technology is here, or coming soon, where sophisticated worship services can be experienced in all their intensity anywhere in HD, the real work ahead for the church is learning how to guide and manage community, the kind of authentic community that, in Acts, added to its number daily and changed the history of the world.
I think a lot is going to boil down to questions about what’s the role of the weekly service in daily worship? And how important will it be to have a weekly physical gathering spot that belongs uniquely to a specific community of believers?
In other words, does worship need a common physical foundation as has traditionally been found in the church sanctuary? My answer to that question is yes. Without a weekly gathering spot we lose the sensuality of worship that God built into it.
Worship is inherently physical. It can’t be fully experienced by clicking a button or watching a screen. Let’s look at ways that worship engages our five physical senses.
Hearing. In one sense, this is the easiest sense for the online church to satisfy. We hear God’s Word read and taught by preachers. We hear prayer. We hear the worship band and worship leader. Worship can also include the absence of hearing, as found in moments of silence and reflection. One weakness of online worship, however, is that we can’t hear each other. If I do sing along, no one hears my joyful participation, or perhaps notes my lack of participation.
Sight. Again, another one that is served fairly well by a computer or television screen. We can see the leader. We can see Scripture texts and various artful symbols of God and his works. As with hearing, online worship, for now, doesn’t have the capability to let me see the people I am worshipping with, people who are made in God’s image. Young believers can learn and be encouraged by the behavior of older or more mature saints. The simple ability to see multiple generations of a family worship together communicates profound truths about the body of Christ that is lost if all we see is the preacher and the band.
Touch. God’s people don’t just assemble, they rumble. Right hands of fellowship are extended. Holy kisses are exchanged. Feet are washed, oils are poured out. We touch each other, but we also touch the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper when we break the bread and hold the cup. Baptism also requires touch.
Taste. The bread and wine of communion obviously engage this sense. The New Testament church often extended their fellowship into meals. Interestingly, one of the first things we’ll do in Heaven is feast, so good food is a small taste of Heaven. In a more spiritual sense, God tells us to taste and see that he is good (Psalm 34:8).
Smell. This is listed last because it’s one sense that we don’t engage nearly as much in contemporary worship as the other four. In Old Testament times, however, worship would have had very strong odors with the sweet smells of incense mixed with the more pungent smells of animal and crop sacrifices. To some extent, we do add some pleasant odor to worship with flowers and personal deodorants and fragrances, which some are more likely to wear on Sunday than most other days. Even though we don’t have as many obvious physical fragrances, Ephesians 5:1-2 and Philippians 4:18 tells us that our worship, including giving, is a fragrant offering to him.
When God condemns idolatry, he often does it by pointing out how sense-less the idols were. From Psalm 115:6-8:
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but they cannot smell;
they have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but they cannot walk;
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
Our God, on the other hand, is a sense-able God who asks to be worshiped in a sensual way.
When we try to worship through a computer screen, we have to first take leave of our senses.
My family and I regularly enjoy watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, and over time we’ve come to recognize certain genres of clips that routinely make it into the show. One such genre is the toddler or young school kid who, often in the middle of some public performance, stops everything and announces in a loud voice, “Mommy, I need to go to the bathroom.”
It’s funny because it’s embarrassing for the parents, though I can’t say I’ve ever seen a clip of an adult shouting out the same thing. Sure, it would be embarrassing, but for very different reasons. It also probably wouldn’t be funny, except in a Jerry Lewis movie.
With that in mind, after a long flight last week from Atlanta to Honolulu, Perry Noble checked back in with his followers with this little observation:
Gotta tee tee SO bad…taking forever to get off of this plane!!!
One can just imagine the poor man standing trapped in the aisle, legs crossed and eyes bulging. Can I push past that lady? No. Can I climb over the seats? No. What can I do??? Got it. I’ll Twitter!
We’ve all been there, and I do empathize with his plight. I do. But isn’t there a kill switch on Twitter? (In radio, announcers use the kill switch to temporarily turn off the mic if they have to cough or do anything else of an embarrassing nature on the air.) Does Noble have no mental filter that asks, Should I really be saying this?
Perhaps I don’t understand this newfangled media world, but what would drive a man to report the state of his bladder to 8,000 people?
Gregg Doyel, a sports columnist for CBS, addressed a similar phenomenon with how sports stars and their fans use Twitter.
Twitter … is the new narcissism. For the sender, I mean. To wake up before 6 a.m. on a typical day, as [Lance] Armstrong did last week, and send a faceless, voiceless good morning to your “audience” … that’s the height of narcissism. You really must be self-centered to believe thousands of people are waiting to know you’re awake. But then, if you’re Lance Armstrong, you’re right. Thousands of people really are waiting….
For the receiver, Twitter is something even worse than narcissism. It’s voyeurism. And it’s pathetic. You can’t be Lance Armstrong, you can’t be his friend, but you can receive his tweets. So you do. Congratulations…
Am I sounding negative? Even petty? Sue me. Everybody has a limit, and I’ve reached mine with Twitter, which isn’t just the world’s fastest-growing social networking tool. It’s a religion, filling the hole in regular people’s regular lives. Twitter is society’s new church. It’s a personal savior. Twitter Christ….
For celebrities, Twitter is a gigantic ego stroke. It’s a game of narcissist strip poker, and you’re the thong.
Doyel started his rant after a simple “Good Morning.” Imagine what he might have said after receiving the reverend’s Tee Tee post.
Last year, Voelz, a pastor, was tweeting at a conference outside Nashville about ways to make the church experience more creative — ways to “make it not suck” — when suddenly it hit him: Twitter.
Voelz and David McDonald, the other senior pastor at Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Mich., spent two weeks educating their congregation about Twitter.
As expected, banter flourished. Tweets like “Nice shirt JVo” and “So glad they are doing Lenny Kravitz” flashed across three large video screens.
Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.
Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.
As a dream comes when there are many cares, so the speech of a fool when there are many words.
So let me say at the outset so you don’t miss it, I think it’s nice that NewSpring gives away houses. What follows is a critique of how they do it.
For the last three Mother’s Days, NewSpring has given away a refurbished house to single mothers who attend the church. The handover is typically taped and edited in the style of Extreme Makeover and presented on the big screen as part of the service.
The show duplicates the ABC show in the opening interviews and profiles, the family getaway and pampering, the “move that bus” chant, the donated appliances, and even the scholarship checks.
I’m afraid that the Extreme Makeover mimicry is too clever by half and actually destroys the message that the church is trying to send. Here are a few problems I see with Perry Noble’s flashy philanthropy:
It details NewSpring’s goodness while demeaning other churches. Giving a single mother a new roof over her head is certainly admirable, but wouldn’t you feel a little used as the recipient to see your gift turned into an opportunity to belittle other churches’ care for their own mothers? This was Noble’s giddy comment after the first home giveaway in 2007:
It was so cool to see our church come together the way it did…and so, this Mother’s Day, instead of giving a flower to the oldest and youngest mother–we GAVE a house to a single mom.
Hooray for you, Pastor Noble, but if you’re going to start comparing gifts, we could stack up the cost of the two flowers from those other churches with what you paid for the house.
Yes, there were volunteer contributions to fix it up, but $10 vs. a couple of flowers doesn’t really justify the boast.
It disavows branding while delighting in it. In his Sunday evening reflections, Noble talked about how he hopes the event will point only to Jesus.
One day the name “NewSpring” will fade away…but the name of JESUS will endure forever!
I don’t disagree with Noble on this point, but it does make the repeated shots of the NewSpring brand in the living room and bedrooms a little harder to understand.
If NewSpring is going to fade away, wouldn’t they speed the process by not burning the logo into the actual gift?
It declares the Gospel while distorting it. Noble introduced the video by explaining that this was a practical example of John 3:16.
Practically, what does it look like when someone gets something that they don’t deserve? What does it look like when unbelievable, extravagant love is poured out on someone? What does the Gospel look like in today’s world? This is what it looks like.
Undeserved? The video starts by showing us how admirable the recipient is (and I’m not disputing that she is). A few seconds into the clip, a NewSpring member says
You have to admire someone like Niekia that decides to raise her baby by herself, to make the best home for that baby, and to also realize that she needed to have an education.
Niekia is obviously a fine young lady, and I’m delighted that she has a new house for herself and her son. The point is that God does not give us his grace and love because we’re admirable people.
It is also interesting that Noble visualizes God’s gift in a very materialistic form. Translating God’s favor into material blessings is a characteristically American way of understanding God (watched any religious TV lately?). It’s something that even the producers of the real-life Extreme Makeover show understand.
What may have seemed at first to be an updated version of This Old House has become a spiritual happening, more revival meeting than TV taping. With its charitable sensibilities and ability to mobilize entire communities with a single episode, EM:HE is setting a standard for a new genre: Good Samaritan television.
“I’ve had people come up to me and say this is like a religious experience,” says Denise Cramsey, co-executive producer, standing on the new back deck. “It’s a modern-day barn-raising.”
Giving people new houses just feels like religion. It really isn’t.
It demonstrates care while duplicating cynicism. This is where I think the whole Extreme Makeover routine cheats and manipulates the worthy recipients. The goal seems two-fold: give away the house, and be seen doing so in as emotional a manner as possible. Again, this will be easy to misinterpret, so let me say that my sympathies are 100% with the recipients, and I completely understand their appropriate emotional and grateful response to the gift they are receiving. But why the need for the ever-present cameras if not to document and show off every tear and emotion?
Extreme Makeover has the same goal. If you watch the show, you are no doubt moved by the stories of the families, but do you think that the program producers really care? If they weren’t making a handsome profit off their public pseudo philanthropy, do you think they’d continue? They wouldn’t. In fact, they scour the country in a grubby search of atypical hard cases to draw you back to the TV every week. It’s Good Samaritan cynicism at its finest.
I am not saying that Noble is nearly as cynical as Ty Pennington and Co., but when you speak the same language, your own good deeds don’t look much nobler by comparison.
If you want to give away houses, do it in the Biblical style (in secret and without show), not in the Hollywood style. Otherwise, the channel corrupts the message.
A few posts last week referenced BCoop’s deletion of Tommy and Twit’s comments, and I wanted to return to the topic briefly to explain why the incident warranted the attention I gave it.
Simply, blog moderators shouldn’t delete comments without a good reason, which would include comments that are off topic, libel, spam, and ad hominem attacks. I’m not questioning BCoop’s right to delete a comment or remove a commentator’s posting privilege; I’ve removed a couple of comments from this blog myself.
The problem with the Tommy and Twit comments was that there was no good reason to delete them, and, I would argue, an affirmative obligation to keep them on the page once the discussion began. Cooper had asked for advice, which Tommy offered.
Cooper responded and refuted Tommy’s suggestion, inviting Tommy to explain or defend himself, which he did. If Cooper didn’t want Tommy playing in his sandbox, the time to shut him down was when he offered the first comment. Once Cooper disagreed and engaged Tommy’s idea, he really needed to let the discussion play out.
From what I recall, Tommy offered several detailed and substantive responses on the difference between us and the disciples, and on NewSpring’s apparent institutional contempt for seminary. Twit, as you know, joined in with a Spurgeon quote supporting book learning. Tommy’s responses took some fine thinking and time in writing, and Twit’s took some research to find. Deleting them was an act of bad faith.
If Cooper felt that the comments section was getting too long, he could have simply shut the post down to further comments and left it at that. That’s done fairly regularly, especially for old posts or for long discussions that have gradually veered far afield from the original point.
The value of seminary and formal learning was certainly appropriate to the advice that Cooper had asked for.
Instead, it seemed that Cooper was worried that Tommy was winning the argument.
That, my friends, should not be a sufficient reason for deleting entries.
Over on another outlet, Brad Cooper asked readers for advice for people going into the ministry. Our friend, Tommy, suggested in his usual diplomatic way that seminary might be a good idea.
A spirited discussion ensued and lasted on the site for about a day and a half.
Tonight, it’s been sucked down the memory hole. Deleted. Wiped. Gone.
Twit Conway was also annihilated.
That is bad blogging form. Here’s the proof from the way the site looked this afternoon.
One of Tommy’s comments was a response to Blake. Now we’re left with Blake’s response to Tommy, but not the argument he was responding to. It makes curious reading if you don’t know what happened.
The deleted discussion was about the merits of seminary, in counterpoint to NS’s repeated characterization of it as a cemetery. Twit Conway made the egregious error of quoting Spurgeon. (I assume that now that they no longer have to devote their time to two fora, they might reappear on these friendly pages and tell us what happened. T&T, did you get an explanation or notification from BCoop?)
Apparently disagreeable thoughts are too disturbing for some leaders. It would be nice if they could apply the same passion for ideological purity to what they put on stage during worship.
Market research firm, Neilsen, reports that 60% of new Twitter users quit after a month.
According to Nielsen, “a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure … There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.”
A few of the defenses of Newspring have pointed me to the sermon and the fruit of the series, which is fine, but not really my point. My professional expertise is communication and media, a topic that I try to view as much as possible through a biblical lens. What I’m looking at is primarily the style and methodology of the message, which are important because they color the content of the message.
Brad’s sermon was solid; I have no objections to it. My objection is to the setting that it was delivered in. I rejoice for the fruit that Newspring is seeing, but I worry that your harvesting methods will spoil some of it unnecessarily.
I’m a methodology guy, and I think that God is a methodology God. (An issue I’ll address in an upcoming post.)
Speaking as a media guy, I am in awe of the level of production work that Newspring regularly puts out. The quality of the work is top-notch, and it has been my privilege to have several AU communication majors intern at the church. In fact, I regularly recommend Newspring as an internship destination for students who are serious about integrating media and ministry. Last time I visited Newspring’s Anderson campus, the staff was generous with their time and showed me the video production suite. It was sweet.
I am repeatedly impressed by the zeal for Jesus and for ministry of the many Newspringers I encounter every day.
While focusing on the positive, I want to give props to Brad Cooper who has impressed me over the last few days with his willingness to defend and explain himself, when he probably didn’t really have to. He has been kind to me personally as well, so I want give a shout out to him here.
Yes, we have important disagreements, and I’ll probably continue to express some of them here. Newspring is an important part of a new and significant direction in the Christian church. Much of the territory it is covering is worth talking and thinking about. At the end of the day, though, we are all coworkers serving the same great God.
From my perspective, that’s what this is all about.
At this point I must say that I feel somewhat regretful for criticizing the sex magazine at the center of worship in my last post. I’m now convinced that I should have been encouraging it.
Not because of anything in the feedback, but because whenever you see improvement in behavior, it should be encouraged.
It turns out that the altarpiece was nothing compared to the video the church produced to promote the Sexed series. You can decide for yourself, but I don’t know how you don’t read it as a full-throated endorsement of fornication.
View it here, or check out a couple of screenshots below.
If you were ever told sex is wrong
You were lied to
Another section says “If you were ever told sex is dirty…you were lied to.” As the text appears, a man opens a box of condoms, selects one and opens it, pulling out and and revealing the condom (I’ll spare you that screenshot, though you can see it on the video). The video ends with a lingering shot of an empty condom wrapper. (UPDATE: If you freeze the video at 35 seconds, it is apparent that the shadow from the top condom is what makes the bottom one appear to be opened and empty. It isn’t.)
The most serious problem here is the textual content, though the visual content is also problematic, but I’ll deal with that in a moment.
The audience for this video is teenagers, almost all of whom are unmarried. That being the case, for them sex is always wrong. It’s not a difficult concept.
The arrogance of the “if you were ever told” line is remarkable. Ever is a strong and important word. The video asserts that there is no context or person who could have ever truthfully told them that sex is dirty or sinful.
Not God, who says so in the Ten Commandments and repeatedly throughout scripture?
Not their parents, who desperately hope their children understand that?
Not their conscience, which surely tells them it’s wrong? (Shoot, even Bill Clinton knew it was wrong.)
Lies. All lies, Newspring tells them. Not, perhaps you misunderstood, but the authorities in your life (former pastors, parents, leaders) all LIED to you.
This smacks of the same disrespect for parents the church paraded with its Parents are Clueless series and billboards (I wasn’t a big fan). The message to kids is that your parents are stupid, lying dolts, but we understand you and we’re cool with who you are and what you do. If I were a parent of a child attending this group and saw what the leaders were telling him or her about my moral instruction, they’d never see my child again and I’d knock on the doors of every other parent I knew with kids in the group.
But, you say, it was an ad to get kids to a series that would tell them not to engage in sex. Very well, but advertising the opposite of what you’re selling is a new and exotic marketing strategy to me. Toyota doesn’t generally promote the Honda Accord to boost sales of its own cars.
The message in this ad stood alone. Unlike the sex magazine on the stage, there is no other verbal message to contradict this. It surely wouldn’t take much for a couple of kids struggling with temptation to use the explicit condoning of sex (so long as you use a condom) to rationalize exactly the behavior the preacher will end up discouraging. Even if they come to the series, it’s at least a week or two before the preacher clarifies (refutes, would be better) the message of the ad. What about all the kids who will watch it online and never go to a meeting? How many teenage boys around the world are bookmarking a message from a church telling them that sex isn’t wrong?
In the feedback I got after the billboards article, and this weekend in response to the indecency post, I’m told by Newspringers that this stuff is a part of culture, so we need to let it into the church. (I disagree, but that’s another post for another day.) The thing with the condom video here is that this is so far over the line that you won’t even find this in our fallen culture. (The comments section is open for anyone to show me a condom ad broadcast on American television that shows the actual condom.) If this were a television ad, you could not find a station or cable channel to run it for you. It’s a shame that television executives have higher standards than some pastors.
Evangelism is not an invitation to depravity.
The text says that sex is not sinful. The accompanying video shows a close up of someone having sex. (If the guy is opening the condom, what would you see if you zoomed the camera out?) A few folk have said that they’d quit the church if they actually did depict sex on stage. Here you go. Just how much of that sex act do you need to see for it to be wrong?
Here’s something I’d like to know. If you were to make an ad that claimed that premarital sex was OK, how would it differ at all from the video Newspring sprung on its kids?
Over to you.
UPDATE: Here’s the third “if you…” line that Caleb asked for.
This blog is mine alone and does not necessarily–or very often–represent the thinking or sentiments of anyone who disagrees with me, my wife, my employer, my friends, my family, my pastor, my brother, my church and, almost certainly, God. After I hit the Publish button, it doesn’t always even reflect my own thinking. It does seem to often reflect the thinking of Tommy F, Twit Conway and some guy in Minnesota, however.
