The Piper's Calling You to Join Him
This is the sermon hymn from a 2022 Easter service:
If this performance looks familiar, it is the same big choir orchestral arrangement with the light show that was famously done by Heart in at the Kennedy Center in tribute to Led Zeppelin in 2012. Here it is:
There are not many women gifted with the vocal prowess of Nancy Wilson, but the unnamed lady singer in the church service version above certainly pulled it off with aplomb!
Many of us enjoy Led Zeppelin. Many of us appreciate the power and melody of this particular rock anthem, including this specific arrangement and performance - even though the words are gibberish. A lot of us grew up listening to classic rock and heavy metal. But what does any of this have to do with Jesus? Of course, nothing. It’s just entertainment. And entertainment has its place. Just not in church. This is the church growth movement on steroids: the severance of even the pretense of the Word of God. It is the substitution of an emotional rush in lieu of the objective reality of Christ’s Presence in the Word and in the Sacrament. And if your congregation is trying this kind of bait-and-switch to “do church differently” to be “attractional” to draw people in where they can hear the Gospel by means of entertainment, well, this “Church by the Glades” is your competition.
How does your “praise band” stack up to this? How is your light show? Orchestral arrangement? Choir? How do LCMS “CoWo” services, songwriters’ initiatives, and district hymnal projects compare to this? This is the gold standard of “modern worship.” How many Plants and Pages do the LCMS advocates of this kind of thing have to keep up with the Glades?
And coming up at the Glades this Easter…
In their teaser, something (or Someone) seems to be missing. Who might that be?
If you encourage people to go to where they will be entertained, where they will get a rock concert - why should they stay with you and not go to an even “better” example like the Glades? When the last chord ends, when the stage lights are turned off, when the performers have cased up their instruments and gone home, when the emotional high is over, what’s left? What do entertainment-based churches have to offer at the end of the day, at the end of our life, at the end of the world? “It really makes me wonder.”
Those who live by entertainment will perish by entertainment.