Because it’s big. On Easter weekend, the church counted 15,000 attenders across all its campuses. In a city the size of Anderson, that’s a big deal. When an organization has the kind of rapid growth and influence as this single church does in such a relatively small area, why wouldn’t it warrant closer scrutiny than the 200-member, 100-year-old church down the road? Something unusual is happening there, and we shouldn’t have to accept only their official explanation of why that is.
Because it matters. Perry Noble has said that he’s out to change what church is. Rick Warren has talked about a second reformation. That’s not necessarily welcome news.
I really do believe in what we are doing here at NewSpring Church. I believe that lives are being changed. I believe that Jesus is being lifted up. I believe that the word “church” is taking on a new meaning in the community of Anderson, SC…and even the upstate. I believe so much in what we are doing that I can’t even sleep most nights…I am consumed.
And so when people want to speak against our church and attack what God is doing here I usually have one response–FIGHT! [emphasis added]
Note the “and so.” Noble understands why this is happening; he’s out to redefine the church, which is why people like me speak up.
Because God cares. God cares about how he is worshipped and demands that we test new teachings. Little things matter to him, so they should matter to us.
Because people care. This blog has not always focused on NewSpring, and it probably won’t always do so. Blogging software gives bloggers an idea of how many people are reading what articles, and from what I can see, people obviously are interested in NewSpring and don’t always take NS-approved blogs as the last word on the topic. For example, after I posted an innocuous note about Tony Morgan leaving NewSpring, the blog was flooded with people who were searching the Internet looking for the real story, beyond what Morgan and Noble were saying in their public statements. It won’t always be the case, but a Google search for “Tony Morgan Newspring” (there were many such searches) puts this little blog at the top of the search results, above TM and PN’s official sites. People obviously want to know what’s happening in this church.
Because people ought to know. I am aware that there are a number of families who send their kids to NewSpring’s youth group, even though they’re members of other churches. As a parent, the prospect of my child being excited about mid-week church activities sounds good, though I’d hate to think that I would ever let my child attend a church that does things like show condom ads and curse at God’s house. This blog may serve an an archive that could be found by a parent who is researching NS’s youth group. I know that I’d appreciate the knowledge.
Because I’ve approached Noble privately first. On multiple occasions and through multiple channels. Just so you know.
Because I’m a Protestant. We care and argue about church doctrine and practice. It’s what makes us who we are.
Because people I love, love NewSpring. I’m not usually touchy feely, so that’s all I plan to say about that.
Because it keeps surprising me. I hadn’t expected to spend this much time and this many words focusing on NewSpring, but often when I click on a new blog post, I find something new that surprises me. Just when I thought I was out . . . they drag me back in.
Because the defenses are often pitiful. I noticed it first in the billboards reaction, but the defense–to the extent that there is any–to any NewSpring outrage is usually 1) You go away, then 2) Others are coming. If I can at least prompt a few folk to think about why they do what they do and express it clearly, it should help everyone.
Because it’s interesting. I enjoy watching the interaction of culture and media, and particularly how those two forces interact with the church. When you change the environment within which the Gospel is preached, you change the message in small and sometimes large ways. NewSpring and churches of its ilk engage culture and media more than most churches, so it fascinates me professionally.
Because I want my son to be proud. My father did this kind of thing when I was growing up (still does), and I want my son to be able to look back and say that, when it mattered, his dad made an argument in defense of the purity of Christian doctrine and worship. Who knows what issues his generation will be dealing with, but I hope he will care about it enough to do more than just shrug his shoulders and go along.
If a high school teacher came across the lyrics from NewSpring’s worship band handwritten in a student’s locker or desk, would the school have to be evacuated?
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.
I just re-read Perry Noble’s explanation of why Tony Morgan was leaving and noticed this passage:
Our approach to leadership and the execution of the vision were slightly different…and while we DO agree on most things there was a slight disagrement on the methodology of as to how execution of the vision was to take place.
As a part of the discussion yesterday Tony said that he didn’t want his style of leadership to hinder our church. [Emphasis added]
What caught my attention was the emphasis on slight. If we’re to take Noble at his word, it’s remarkable that a slight difference was going to be enough to hinder the church and require a resignation.
We hear from Noble and leaders like him that the church must sell out to the leader’s vision. Now we have some idea just how dogmatically Noble takes his own vision. (Perhaps his vision is his blind spot?)
That’s a brutal work environment. Do you think the other members of the leadership team got the message?
Most readers will already know this, but Tony Morgan announced that he’s leaving the NewSpring leadership team today.
Not that it matters much to him, but he has always struck me as a mature leader with a good head on him and someone who has a good understanding of what the new church movement is all about. He seems like someone I’d enjoy talking to.
I heartily agree with Perry Noble that we should pray that God will help him find a new opportunity to advance God’s kingdom. He has the gifts to do a lot of good work.
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.
Perry Noble gave his annual pep talk to like-minded pastors yesterday and told them they need not worry if their parishioners get offended at what they do in their churches and leave. It’s a good thing when people leave your church, quoth the preacher man.
To support his point, he quoted scripture from
To illustrate his point, he said that the people who leave are the equivalent of–how shall we say it nicely?–bowel movements.
Warming to his task, he went just a little further. If they won’t leave naturally, give them something to help them on their way.
Sometimes an enema is the best thing that can happen to a church. (Perry Noble)
Might I pose a few questions to Perry and those who cheered for him today?
If most of these folk are leaving for other churches, what are you saying those churches are filled with?
Why should I walk in your front door if you’re so eager to push me out your back door?
If your church needs an enema, what have you been feeding it?
One or two commentators have referenced Newspring’s oft-repeated mission of making Jesus famous, a term that is also in widespread use beyond Newspring. It’s a phrase that has long bothered me for its carelessness. I’ve tried to use Google to help me understand what its users think the term means and where it comes from, though I haven’t been able to turn up anything substantive yet.
Perhaps someone can tell me what is meant by it, but I suspect that its overuse is more a product of a fame-fueled media culture than of careful biblical reasoning. Here’s why I think it’s a weak foundation to base a church’s entire mission on:
Fame is usually incompatible with knowledge. Consider someone like Alex Rodriguez. He’s a famous athlete, though the more we know of him, the smaller he gets. He may still be as famous, especially since the steroid story attracted the attention of people who don’t pay attention to baseball, but his fame has certainly turned into something very different now. Also, is anyone still listening to Milli Vanilli?
Fame is independent of knowledge. We all know of people who are famous for being famous. Paris Hilton comes to mind. In this sense, we see how the fame-making mission of the church is consistent with the usually hostile responses given to people who ask for more teaching about Jesus. You’re being selfish; go and invite someone else to church, is the customary and curt response. Of course it is. Knowledge of Christ is an optional and self-indulgent accessory.
Fame is a merely a state of awareness, not an attitude or belief. For someone to be famous, it just requires a relatively large number of people to be aware of a person, regardless of what they think of him or her. For example, Barack Obama is probably the most famous living person in the world, but almost half the people (at least of Americans) who generate his fame disagree with him, and some even want him to fail. Fame and persuasion are very distant relatives.
Fame is independent of the famous. A person’s fame vacillates depending on how many people are disposed to think of that person. For example, Britney Spears’ fame increases whenever I think about her (not often), and it decreases when I forget her. This is why you find so many Hollywood has-beens in reality shows; they need to remind people to think of them again. Britney Spears has no inherent fame; it’s totally dependent on us.
It suggests I can do something to change some quality of Christ. To emphasize Jesus’ fame puts his wholeness in my hands. My attention has the power to make Jesus greater or smaller. Heaven forfend. If it were possible for the whole world to forget about Jesus, would he be diminished in any way? If the whole world started talking about him, would he be enhanced in any way? Absolutely not. Jesus did not care about fame when he walked the earth; in fact, he often rejected it when it was his for the taking, telling recipients of miracles not to tell anyone about it.
The KJV uses the word fame to describe several instances of news of Jesus spreading throughout the land. Most are simply descriptive of Jesus’ effect on the people, though the most interesting usage is in Luke 5:15, where the news of Jesus is linked to a public response to him. In contrast to other uses of fame, this one uses the word logos, which denotes knowledge based on teaching and doctrine.
Oh, and what did Jesus do after attracting all that fame? Check out verse 16. He withdrew to a lonely place and prayed.
I understand the well-intentioned impulse behind the drive to make Jesus famous, and I recognize, along with the Gospel writers, that preaching about Jesus will have that effect. My argument is that fame is a low-value product of our following the Great Commission, not the raison d’etre for it.
Jesus didn’t ask us to be his publicists. He simply asked us to make disciples.
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 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.
