I went to Vacaville over the weekend to visit Mom, partly for Mothers Day but mainly because Friday was her birthday… and now that I’m not in school and don’t have Saturday classes, I figured it’s good to visit her on a monthly basis. My family doesn’t tell me anything that’s going on, so in order to stay in the loop, as it were, I just have to visit. (In fact, it’s probably a conspiracy of theirs to deliberately keep me out of the loop so that I do visit.)
My allergies, in Vacaville, were just horrible. Sneezing, dripping, coughing… but in Santa Cruz, they don’t exist. So maybe I won’t visit in May again. I gotta time it for when the pollen isn’t around.
Whilst I was there I got to reading a back issue of Kerry’s Relevant magazine, which is a magazine for twentysomethings who don’t feel they can entirely reject secular culture, so they read things like Relevant in order to try to “engage it”—in other words, discuss and critique it. But in reality, that actually won’t ever happen. They’ll read Relevant and similar magazines in order to justify their continuing sell-out to pop culture, and so they can feel spiritual when they listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Flaming Lips and say to themselves, “True, the spiritual content of these CDs are wack, but I can now discuss these bands’ angst with non-Christians thanks to my new postmodern apologetic. Thanks, Relevant! You’ve made me relevant.”
No it hasn’t. But I already ranted about the hypocrisy of the emergent church here and here. It’s one of the bigger ironies of the emergent movement—so pomo of them!—to reject the traditional church as being full of hypocrites, and in so doing they’ve become new ’n improved hypocrities.
Side rant over. Relevant, though encouraging the problem, even so has some interesting articles. I was greatly amused by the interview with Derek Webb, former Caedmon's Call frontman who is apparently really controversial. Except he really isn't. The lyrics of his latest album, Mockingbird, aren’t anything critics of Evangelicalism haven’t been saying for decades. It’s just new to Christians who don’t read. The knee-jerk reaction of a lot of them will be that he’s gone liberal or apostate; many others will dismiss it as too radical to be practical; the rest will listen to it, agree with it, love it, share it with their friends, yet continue to behave the same way they always have, letting its message fall on the wayside for the ravens to eat.
I like the lyrics, and agree with a lot of them, but I’m not going to buy the album. I don’t like the music! I was never a Caedmon’s Call fan; and it wasn’t because they didn’t know how to pronounce Caedmon either. It’s the same problem that plagues a lot of Christian pop: Little musical ability combined with a big you’re-all-apostate attitude, or (conversely) catchy songs combined with a replace-“baby”-with-“Jesus”-so-they’ll-play-us-on-K-LOVE vibe.
I’d rather listen to U2; they’ll challenge me spiritually just as much, plus they rock, and unlike most other Christian bands they’re actually doing something to help the poor.