Gary Lamb opened his service with a new song from Montgomery Gentry last weekend. Here are some of the lyrics:
There’s one in every crowd,
brings the party in us out,
good time Charley with a Harley, whiskey bent and hellbound,
he’s got the next round, but he always drinks for free,
there’s one in every crowd, and it’s usually me.
He’ll bum a light and steal your girl,
then laugh at you for gettin’ all upset.
He’s a hard drinkin man’s man,
and women love him when they can.
Lamb is using the song in a series called Party, which supposedly describes the reaction in Heaven when a sinner is saved.
Gary, this is not an appropriate song to use to describe that holy event. The character in this song is unconcerned about going to hell, steals women from other men and laughs at their misfortune, and an adulterous drunk.
How does this have any relationship to your worship of God?
Now, NewSpring’s youth group maintains its momentum with murder and hate in a tirade seemingly plucked from the hymnal of the Bloods and the Crips.
Youth pastor, Brad Cooper, highlighted his band’s performance of a song whose lyrics are so violent I’d be ashamed for someone to find it on my iPod, let alone offer it in God’s house as worship.
[You] Don’t wanna step to me unless you plan on losin’
I’m here to battle, baby. I dance to kill.
Time to go all in.
Move to kill ‘em all.
We dig them trenches so they be trippin’
Annihilation of the enemy. Wrath pours down when I move my feet.
Fall in all my new recruits. Now you’re in my troop.
They can scratch and claw, We ain’t backin’ off.
I have developed low expectations when it comes to NewSpring’s worship, though they keep surprising me and lowering the bar in new and creative ways.
(Note to commentators, before you huff and puff about taking the song out of context, you might want to defend BCoop’s boastful post, the point of which is to present his so-called “dirty” song out of context. Where does he show off the songs that actually worship God?)
I once criticized Cooper for describing his worship as BAMF.
Some of you have probably noticed the disparity in how NewSpring and its fellow traveling churches use language. When they talk to or about sinners, the language is watered down to strip the essential meaning out of the words.
If you get into their heads, the logic sort of makes sense.
* Noble complains that pastors who preach for pay are prostitutes. Besides the insult and error in the claim, the hypocrisy is astounding. Noble is paid so much by his church that they worry about an IRS audit for excessive payment to the CEO of a non-profit (Check items 14 and 16 in the linked pdf in this article). Understand that I have no problem with Noble’s high salary. He is obviously an effective leader and his congregation definitely values him; they can pay him as much as they care to. But if it’s good for NewSpring, why can’t Noble extend the same privilege to other congregations who are happy to pay their own pastors?
NewSpring’s worship leader seemed quite down on himself on Sunday. He acknowledged that he has payed his dues to Satan, and seemed to think he’s going to hell.
I know NewSpringers don’t like bloggers always finding things to disagree with their leaders on, but would this be an appropriate time to point out that he’s probably wrong?
UPDATE: People who complain about playing Highway to Hell to open an Easter service are told that they can’t criticize unless they’ve seen and understood the song in the context of the whole service, notwithstanding the fact that NewSpring itself is proud to display the song out of context. Look at Brad Cooper’s page or Tony Morgan’s site (who posted two versions of it); all they show you from the entire service is the H to H song. They obviously think it’s the coolest thing they did that morning.
Has anyone seen them showing off videos of the other parts of the worship service to the same extent as this one?
I wanted to create a stage persona for myself that allowed me to really speak about anything I want… So I can be a storyteller, I can be jokey, I can be corny, I can be a little vulgar, I can be a lot vulgar. And I’m not afraid to go anywhere to get the point of [the message] across, even if I have to just blabber like an idiot.
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.
You don’t have to take my word for how offensive bamf is. Amazon sells T-shirts with those letters emblazoned across the front. From the site’s product description:
Crack Smokin T-shirts are far more then just a novelty, they’re a lifestyle. A company that covers all bases of the crude t-shirts market, making people laugh and cringe day in and day out. All shirts are 100% soft cotton with awesome silk screen print and a WILD message. Take your ordinary offensive t-shirt to the next level of obscenity.
For those who would discount Cooper’s bamf description of his church because he only used the initials, not the actual words, let me ask you this:
If someone tells you to your face that you are full of bee ess, are you offended any less than if he or she used the full words?
If a child responds to a parent’s instruction with an eff eewww, do you think the parent should just take it in stride because the kid didn’t actually say the magic word?
It wouldn’t happen in my world, and I doubt it would happen in yours.
A few weeks ago I pointed out how pastor Brad Cooper asked his congregation if they frickin’ believed the Word of God (frickin’ being just a different spelling of the f-word.)
This evening I clicked on a Twitter picture from Cooper of people receiving Christ at NewSpring’s Easter service. Very good, no problem. Then I clicked on another of his photos and found this.
The caption says Fuse Factory looking bamf!(FYI, the Fuse Factory is the church’s newly completed youth “worship” center.)
I didn’t know what bamf meant until this evening, and my Internet filter did its very best to block me from finding out, so vile is the meaning. If you’re brave and not near anyone who could fire you from your job, check out the meaning here, though I really suggest that you don’t. Take my word, this makes frickin’ look positively genteel.
Come on, people. Why aren’t alarm bells going off all over Anderson?
If you go to NewSpring, I won’t ask how you can support this (though if you do, I’d love to hear from you), but I would like to know you can stand by when this is happening? How do you go to a church that keeps on doing this (as if once weren’t enough)? Do trash-talking pastors mean more to you than God’s holiness?
Either BCoop knew what bamf meant, which is unthinkable, or he used it without knowing what it meant, which is unthinkably stupid.
Much of what NewSpring does is debatable, meaning that you could make an argument to defend its beliefs and practices.
This? This isn’t debatable; this is unbelievable.
And on Easter Sunday. Way to go.
Update: It’s not the first time. Apparently worship at NewSpring is bamf too.
A few weeks ago BCoop complained that I was being too concerned about desecration in the house of God.
I’ve been accused of worse, but I happened to be reviewing a Brad Cooper sermonette for an upcoming post and ran across this little piece of desecration. Although he doesn’t have the sex posters behind him on this evening, he brings the dirt to the altar all by himself.
After reading a passage from Romans (and successfully soliciting the crowd to endorse universalism, though we’ll leave that alone for now*), he asks his listeners if they frikin’ believe the Word of God.
You probably already know or suspected this, but frikin’ is simply a synonym for the other F-word. The fact that it’s a verbal sibling hardly excuses it it, given that the meaning is exactly the same.
Some questions:
What does Cooper mean?
How does one learn to frickin’ believe the Bible? Is NewSpring a good place to start?
Should all Christians frickin’ believe the Bible?
How do you get away with this as a pastor? Would his bosses be upset if he’d said “do you effing believe?” or if he actually used the original F bomb? How is what he said any better?
It’s too bad his question wasn’t greeted with a loud chorus of No’s.
P.S. What kind of Bible is this?
Shouldn’t the question be, “Do you frickin’ believe my sermon notes?” or at least “Do you frickin’ believe this little cut and pasted part of the Word of God?” Nothing against sermon notes, but if you’re going to use the Word of God as a visual aid, it probably should actually be the Word of God.
*Quick hint: when someone asks you to shout out an answer to something you haven’t thought about, keep your mouth shut.
This doesn’t (or shouldn’t) require much commentary, but there’s a verse that head pastor Perry Noble, who wasn’t a part of this service, loves to titillate his audience with, though he appears not to have grasped the point of the passage.
Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you. (Deut 22:24)
Besides being good public hygiene, the point of the regulation is to emphasize the holiness of God. Our sin and refuse are incompatible with his incorruptible nature. God demands holiness.
I’m sure that sometime in the series the preacher is going tell his congregation that they should not corrupt themselves with illicit sex because our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Which is true.
But if our bodies deserve respect as God’s temple, how about God’s temple as well?
What’s on stage here is execrable and indecent. And it’s not just in the camp, it’s in God’s temple.
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.
