My semi-regular column in Evangelicals Now is now in print. You can read my unedited version below.
Back in April, a video of Blur headlining Coachella went viral. To cut a long story short, Damon Albarn got a bit riled that the crowd failed to join in the chorus of their biggest hit, Girls & Boys, and insisted they would never play again. He later suggested it would be Blur’s last ever gig. One commentator said, ‘If Damon Albarn was telling the truth, and Saturday’s Coachella performance was Blur’s “last gig”, it was a miserable swansong. A field of influencers (some of whom appeared to not know who Blur are) crowded into the most corporatised festival in the world, all to turn it into sponsored TikTok content. It’s exactly the sort of scene that Nineties Albarn would have written a scornful observational pop song about.’[1]
Now, I don’t wish to make you feel old, but I have been the pastor of Oldham Bethel Church for 10 years and Blur’s Parklife was released in 1994, the year I turned 8 (in fact, I was only 7 because it was released before my birthday of that year). Not to make you feel even older, but many of the people going into church ministry today were only just born in the 1990s. Not to make you feel even older still, but I am now at best close to, but more likely well arrived at, what most young people count as old; and to reiterate, I was two years into primary school when Blur were in their heyday. I mean, even referring to anyone as “young people” makes its own case, doesn’t it? Which, if you think my being sub-40 makes me young, and young people think I’m old… anyway, I’m not here to make anyone choke on their breakfast (or pureed meals).
Bands having a hissy fit on stage is nothing new. But I find it interesting that an aging musician gets annoyed that today’s youth have no idea who he is or, at best, don’t know his material well enough to sing along. It seems even more foolish given this wasn’t even a British audience, but an American festival primarily serving a generation of people who were not alive when Blur were at their most famous and from a country the band never properly cracked. The sad truth is, even though the band may sell out UK stadia, they are little more than a nostalgia act for old people who have not yet retired but still cling on to the last vestiges of their youth. But the view of Damon Albarn seems to be, to quote Seymour Skinner from The Simpsons, ‘Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.’
There are a number of possible lessons for the church to learn here. Older leaders can easily deride younger leaders for not leading in the way they did when they were pastors some 20 or 30 years ago. It is not uncommon to hear somewhat disgruntled comments from former pastors who were leading in the 90s about the state of younger pastors and their approach to ministry today. Rather than reflecting on the changing nature of pastoral ministry, demands on pastors and their time that simply didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago, they can be more excoriating than encouraging that things are not like they were in their day. There can be a real sense of displeasure when younger pastors don’t sing their tunes because the world is not the same as it was back then.
Current pastors can run into similar problems. It is easy to look at younger people in the church, or even a world outside the church, and bemoan the fact that they simply do not recognise our greatest hits. Not only can they not sing the tunes because they have never heard them, they don’t recognise the notes we often hit in our preaching either. It is very easy to become stuck in messaging and styles that would have landed decades ago but has very little traction with the world as it is today. It is often easier to excoriate the world for not asking the questions we want to answer nor thinking in the way we want to address live issues than it is to change what we’re doing and speak in ways that are relevant to the world as it really is.
Almost every generation has a problem with the ones that comes after them. The temptation is to say that things were better in our day and to get irritated when people neither recognise our tunes nor think in the way we think they should. More of us need to reckon with Ecclesiastes 7:10: ‘Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.’