Category Archives: Bible and Theology

#181: Anatomy of a Songwriting Collaboration

May 8, 2017 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #181, on the subject of Anatomy of a Songwriting Collaboration.

I have long been of the opinion that the best way to learn to write songs, initially, is to find someone who already does and work with him, in essence apprenticing as a songwriter. That’s how I learned, although it occurs to me that I never really wondered how my mentor learned. Still, I had learned quite a bit of music theory and had attempted quite unsuccessfully to write songs before I met him, and very quickly learned the secrets once I started working with him. I have since worked with quite a few people who had never written a song before, and taught them the basics of how to do so. So there might be other ways to get started, but working with someone who already knows what he is doing is a tried and true approach.

Because of this, I’m not claiming that anything I write could ever teach you how to write a song. I can teach you quite a bit of music theory (I did some of that in Mr. Young’s Music Theory Class on Facebook), but to learn to write a song I think you would have to go through the process with me. On the other hand, this past weekend I persuaded my youngest son to collaborate on a song, and it came out fairly well, and so I am going to attempt to explain the process that brought about the song here.

I am going to state the caveat I have often stated in other contexts: all songs are different, and there are many different ways in which they come into being. When people ask whether the words or the music come first, I always say no, because it does not work that way. There have been times when I have begun with words that had no music, and other times when I had a melody but no lyric, or even a chord progression or background that was worth forming into a song. How it happened this time is one example, but it shows aspects of process.

It began while I was driving in the car. I should credit the Reverend Jack Haberer, because if I recall correctly when we were together at Ramsey High School he put under his yearbook picture, “Secretly desires to be born again again,” and the line has stuck with me over the decades. It was nagging at me as I was driving, so I pulled a digital recorder from my pocket (I have one on my cell phone and another that is just that) and dictated something roughly poetic. I do this sometimes with ideas for articles, stories, songs, and tasks I should complete, because I know I will forget quite soon if I don’t, and even with the convenience of recorders that I don’t always think to use too many ideas escape me.

Upon arriving home, I played back the recording and cleaned it up a bit, typing up a document that read

If deep in your heart you remember when–
Did you want to be born again again?
The good news is the news is true:
Jesus comes to make all things new,
Even you.
Even you.

So I had the beginning of a song idea, but I had no melody, no music for it at all.

What I did have was a desire to help my youngest son Adam with his own music. He happens to be a natural–like me, he picks up instruments and figures out how to get music out of them. He plays the piano for hours, but has very little notion of the names of the chords or key signatures. He is learning; he questions me frequently, about what he’s doing on the piano or the guitar or the recently-added cello or other instruments. He is very creative, but he doesn’t often write what we call “songs”–he does improvisational music, and then tries to remember fragments of it, or he records himself jamming at the piano and uploads it to the Internet but can’t otherwise reproduce it. I wanted to give him something of an understanding of how I write a song, and so I wanted to collaborate with him on something. I printed those words and kept them on my desk for a couple hours.

He is notoriously difficult to catch, but while I was rushing about getting his mother ready for work I saw him standing in the living room, grabbed the lyrics, and said something on the order of, “I thought you might like to collaborate on a song. Here are some lyrics to get it started.” He took them over to the piano and started playing something and singing something. I was only half listening as I was otherwise occupied, and by the time I joined him he had worked some of the bugs out of it and I tried to pick up his melody.

Honestly, I was a bit disappointed with the rather stock chord progression he had adopted, even with the unusual stray notes, and the melody was nothing terribly original–but the song had vitality and drive, and that fit it extremely well, so I quickly tried to learn his melody, which probably changed a bit in the process. He had also doubled the end words, so that Even you was sung four times rather than two.

He then grabbed the paper and ran looking for a pencil or pen. People who know me will wonder that I didn’t just reach into my shirt pocket and hand him one, but around the house I don’t wear the shirt with the pencils, only the pocket T-shirt, so I only sometimes have a pen available. He grabbed one from the kitchen, and scrawled words on the page as the pen died in his hands. Still, there was enough there that we had a second verse, and I got one of my pens and filled it in, with a few tweaks, thus:

There in your mind when you feel abused,
Don’t you get tired of being used and used?
Darkness falls, then the light breaks through.
Jesus comes to make all things new,
Even you. Even you.
Even you. Even you.

After that, we were talking about a bridge.

That progression I mentioned was A minor, G major (with a suspended 4 frill), F major, E major (with a suspended minor second frill)–yes, quite common, quite boring from a musical theory perspective, and it repeated, playing through three times for each verse. I wanted to exit into a bridge with an unusual transition, and he had played something I liked (he was on the piano, I was on the guitar). I started talking about where the chord would be “expected” to go, and before I’d gotten very far he told me what chord to play. Well, he didn’t exactly tell me, “Play an F major 7 with an added augmented four,” but he told me where to put my fingers and that’s the chord he wanted. As root progressions go, it was not terribly interesting (from the V of VI to the IV), but the dissonance inherent in the chord was interesting, and he wanted to slow it down so I shifted to a light picking (I tend to avoid tempo changes in my songs, preferring meter changes that achieve the same effect but are more precise). He sang the next words, You want what you want, creating the shape of the melody for the bridge, and then started spitting out words that he liked as individual lines. I told him to write them down, because it was obvious we were going to lose some potentially good material if we didn’t do something. He wrote you got the joy, Jesus got the pain, then crossed out Jesus got and replaced it with He took, and added away to the end. He next wrote your sin is a stain–redemption sustains, but it was all disjointed. I said I wanted to invert that line, strike the away, and make pain rhyme with stain, but we needed a line between to make it fit. He suggested you get what you get, and with a bit of scribbling arrows on the page we wound up with

You want what you want.
You got the joy, He took the pain.
You get what you get.
Redemption sustains, sin is a stain.

I still wanted a second bridge, something that would break out of the ordinariness of the progressions so far, because the other chord in this bridge was a G six nine, and we played it in essence F to G to F to G, returning to the original progression–and the melody was only slightly different from that of the verses, although slowed.

My vision at this point was that we were going to write a third verse related to that idea of sin, do a different second bridge, and resolve it in a fourth and final verse. The tempo being what it is, the song was moving fast and I thought felt short. I put forward an opening line for the third verse, Asking yourself why you want to sin, and we started talking about what to say next. The contrast between losing and winning came to the fore, and I wanted to say something about choosing to lose, but couldn’t fit it comfortably and still get to the word win for the rhyme scheme. Between us we hammered out the second line, and along the way Adam said that the words to win should flow into the next line, the object won opening that line. I observed that the second line in previous verses always had the double ending–again again, used and used, and that we should maintain the pattern, to win to win–and then that this would achieve what he wanted, if we made it to win. To win victory in the opening of the next line. The rest of that flowed quickly, and we had a third verse,

Ask yourself why you want to sin,
Why you lose, you were made to win. To win
Victory, and to make it through
Jesus comes to make all things new,
Even you. Even you.
Even you. Even you.

And now we came to the point where I wanted the second bridge, and I pushed for the resolution from the E major to go to something at least a bit unanticipated, the C major. I also agreed again to reduce the drive.

At this point we needed a progression, and Adam said that he wanted me to go from the C up half a step, so I slid it into the D-flat major. That certainly satisfied me for unusual progressions, and he liked it as well–but he said we needed to resolve that, and since I was the expert on that point he left it to me. I decided I could go from the D-flat to the A-flat to the E-flat, and from there I could get back to the C easily enough (all major) and repeat the progression. I also recognized that the last note of the melody of the verse was the E, and I could hold it into the beginning of the bridge and start this melody on the same note. The melodic line at the first chord change was tricky, but I managed to bring it down to be on the G by the time we reached the E-flat chord, which was the common note going back to the C chord, and a leap back up to repeat the line worked. I wrote the words with the melody at this point, and Adam put them on paper. I also after the second descent held the G with my voice and changed the chord from the E-flat to the G major, thinking that it would give me the leading tones to get back to the A minor for my final verse.

But–

That fourth verse was supposed to resolve the message of the song. There were probably a lot of things we could have said, but I had none of them in my mind yet and I realized that the unexpected shift to the G major chord provided a musical resolution to the song, and that the words of what was supposed to be the second bridge resolved the message rather well. I presented the alternatives to Adam–write a closing verse, or end the song here–and he agreed that this was a decent ending for the song. Thus our fourth verse never materialized, and our second bridge became instead our coda:

Thank God for what He’s done
To set us free
He gave His only Son
For you and me.

And you should be able to hear the song here on SoundCloud.

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Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#179: Right to Choose

April 17, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #179, on the subject of Right to Choose.

It made the news this past week, that a teenager in Arizona (her name is Deja Foxx, and her stated age is 16) challenged Republican Senator Jeff Flake with the statement, condensed in headlines as “Why is it your right to take away my right to choose?”

Let’s be fair to Miss Foxx. What she actually said, according to transcripts of the town hall meeting, is

So, I’m wondering, as a Planned Parenthood patient and someone who relies on Title X, who you are clearly not, why it’s your right to take away my right to choose Planned Parenthood and to choose no-co-pay birth control, to access that.

That’s a little different, and a considerably more defensible question. I also want to examine the more fundamental question, though, the one presented in the headlines, because that question comes up quite a bit, particularly in arguments about abortion: why does anyone have the right to take away anyone else’s right to choose?

The first thing to say is that law is fundamentally about taking away the right to choose–or more precisely, about creating negative consequences for choosing conduct we as a society want to prevent or discourage. You do not have the right to choose to help yourself to retail products off the shelves of a store without paying for them. As much as you might wish to do so, you don’t have the right to kill your annoying little brother. You don’t have the right to operate a motor vehicle on public roads while under the influence of an intoxicating substance. You can, if you wish, choose to do any of these things; if you are caught, you will face penalties for doing them. Whether or not you have the right to do things, in our society, is defined by the laws on which we, through our legislatures, executives, and judiciaries, agree.

So the people of Arizona who elected Senator Flake to office gave him the right to take away some of our rights, to curtail our freedoms, to put limits on what we can and cannot do.

Yet that is not quite what Foxx means. She had prefaced her question with a tirade about how she, as an underprivileged homeless black girl trying to finish high school, was dependent on Title X (read “ten”) funding for Planned Parenthood, recently cut by a new law barring funding for any family planning center that also provides abortions. She was fundamentally asking what right America has to refuse to pay for that; she would not have put it in those terms, but that’s the essence of the question.

There are a lot of questions we could ask in response to this. What right does she have to expect that we are going to fund her promiscuous life choices? When I was sixteen I did not need any funding for birth control. I knew, and everyone I knew knew, that if you had sex you risked having children, and there were a lot of consequences to that. There were ways to reduce the risk, but it could not be entirely eliminated. Most of us made the intelligent choice: we did not have sex. If you want the privilege of making stupid choices, you should expect to bear the costs of that yourself. If you stupidly steal from grocery stores, expect to go to jail. If you stupidly drive while intoxicated, expect to lose your driving privileges. If you stupidly engage in sex, expect to face the risk of pregnancy (which is clearly a risk for boys possibly even more so than for girls).

Of course, hidden in both sides of that is the fact that the new law has not terminated funding for low-cost no-co-pay birth control. It has cut funding to organizations that fund or perform abortions. There are other programs that provide birth control and birth control advice that do not promote abortion in the process. Further, Planned Parenthood could continue receiving as much money as it has been receiving simply by terminating all programs related to terminating pregnancies–and in the process would have more money for the other birth control programs because none of its funds (which as we previously noted are a fungible resource) are going to those cancelled programs. The government is not providing less money for birth control services and advice; they are only refusing to provide that money to or through those who would advise you to kill your unborn baby, and who would help pay for that.

So if the question is who has the right to decide that American taxpayer money will not be given to organizations that kill unborn babies, the answer is that American taxpayers have that right. In fact, American taxpayers technically have the right, if we so chose, to refuse to provide any kind of support for teenager promiscuity. It is American generosity that provides those things; Foxx has no superior right to expect them from us, whatever she thinks about supposed entitlement arising from her lack of privilege.

There is, though, the other level of all of this, the level hinted by the headline, the question Foxx was not asking but which Planned Parenthood undoubtedly wants us to hear in her question: what right do people like Senator Flake, people like me, people like roughly half the American population plus anyone else who agrees with them, have to tell a pregnant woman that she cannot abort the preborn child she carries? What right does anyone else in the world have to tell that woman that she does not have the right to choose whether to give birth to that child or not?

And let me agree that for millions of women, their choice of what they do with their own lives, their own bodies, is not my business. Should they want facelifts or breast implants, stomach banding or tattoos or piercings, however they wish to improve or mutilate their own bodies, my approval or disapproval is immaterial.

However, your own body is where that right ends. If you want to kill that annoying little brother, I think he has a right to object to that–and I think the rest of us have a responsibility to protect his right. Indeed, if you want to kill your own annoying preschool child, that child has a right to choose to live, and we have a responsibility to intervene on behalf of that child. Further, if that child happens still to be inside you, it has the right to choose to be alive, and we the corresponding responsibility to speak on its behalf to protect that right. We certainly have the right to refuse to help you do it.

So ultimately the question

who gave you the right to take away my right to choose?

is one that every unborn child can ask of its mother, and of Planned Parenthood and anyone else who becomes involved in deciding that the child does not have the right to live.

Jefferson wrote that we were endowed with inalienable rights–rights that no government could take from us without just cause and due process–and the first of these is life. They, those unborn children, have the right to choose life. Who are you, to take that right away from them?

Bible and Theology

#178: Alive for a Reason

April 12, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #178, on the subject of Alive for a Reason.

I heard a woman on the radio recounting how she had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed nose-first into an oncoming car. Rescue workers had to cut her out of her vehicle. She says, and everyone who hears her story says, God has a reason for you to be alive. You have a purpose.

It is something we often hear in similar situations–the person rushed to the hospital who survives a heart attack or some other life-threatening condition or incident, the person who has, or nearly has, a potentially fatal accident and walks away unscathed. It is often said of such people, by themselves and by others, that God has a purpose for them, a reason for them being alive. “I should be dead,” they say, “but God has a reason for me to be alive.” In fact, we hear it from people who somehow missed being at a disaster–accounts from people who were supposed to be at the World Trade Center when it was attacked, for example, have been collected in a book somewhere recounting how it just happened that they didn’t get there in time to die. They should be dead, and many of them credit God’s intervention for the traffic jam, the sick kid, the emergency call, whatever it was that diverted or delayed them such that they were not there.

Of course, the skeptics will say that this is nonsense, that these people were simply very lucky. We hear that all the time: “You’re lucky to be alive.” I think a mechanic once said that to my mother when he found that the front wheel of her car was loose and had cut through three of the five lug bolts and was working on the other two: “You are one lucky lady.” I was in the car at the time, so that must make me lucky, too. However, I am inclined to credit God for these survivals; that’s not the problem I have here.

The ultimate statement of this lesson is this: You are alive, therefore God has a reason for you being alive, a purpose for your life.

My issue is, did you really need to come within a hair’s breadth of death to learn this? There is nothing in that truth, as stated, that requires such a harrow. It applies to anyone who is in fact alive, regardless of how close they have ever seemed to have come to not being alive (and really, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and atomic warfare). You were born; there was a purpose for you to be alive. You are still alive; there is a purpose for that as well.

In Philippians 1:21ff Paul makes this point from the opposite direction. He says that he would be happy to die and be with the Lord, but apparently they (the Philippian recipients of the letter) still need him. Since he was still needed on earth at that time, he concluded that he was not going to die–a very real possibility given that he wrote from prison awaiting a trial that could have ended in his execution. Yet as long as there was a reason for him to be alive, he knew he couldn’t die. The same is true for you: as long as you are needed, as long as God has a purpose for you being here, you will be alive; therefore, as long as you are alive, it is proof that God has a purpose for you and your life.

Years ago I shared this with the mother of two young girls who was concerned about whether she was going to survive upcoming medical procedures. I told her what Paul had said, and admitted that this did not mean we knew she would not die. What it meant was that God had already taken into account the needs of her daughters, and if she did die she could do so resting in the assurance that He already knew a way to care for them without her that was better than caring for them through her. If He needed her to care for her daughters, she would not die; if she died, it was because she was no longer needed for that.

Incidentally, she has not yet died. Apparently, God still has a reason for her to be here.

I have not yet died, either. I tell my wife that I am required to stay here as long as she needs me here, and then I will be permitted to die. She tells me that in that case she is going to die first, because she is never not going to need me as long as she lives. Of course, we don’t really know that, but I did think I was going to die once, and it turned out that I was still needed, so here I am.

Doctor, doctor, will I die?
Yes, my dear, and so will I.
Doctor, doctor, tell me when?
When you do, and not ’til then.

Does this mean we effectively have “plot immunity”, that we cannot possibly die until our time and can do nothing to live beyond that? That’s a much more difficult question. Did Keith Green’s plane crash because he carelessly overloaded it, or because God had decided there was no purpose to keeping him here any longer? That, though, is an entirely different question, the question of whether we are able to thwart God’s purpose for our lives–and the answer is that millions of lost people do that every day. Carelessness is not God’s will for your life. God will keep you alive as long as you are needed, and that means as long as He can use you. Your purpose might not be active–the world needs people who need help, because most of us need to learn how to be servants, and there might come a time in your life in which you are that person who is needed specifically to be the burden on those who need to learn to bear the burden. Many lost people are alive because mercy is giving them time to be saved, but some lost people are alive because we need to learn to love the lost and serve them.

However, that is not the question with which we began. The question is not even what your purpose in life is. It is only whether you have one, and the answer is, as long as you are alive, God has a purpose for that. You should not need to experience some miraculous escape from death to know this–for all you know, you may have been saved from death a thousand times simply by His intervention in ways of which you were unaware, delayed by the traffic light keeping you from the accident, tossing out the old lamp that would have caused the fire, eating at the restaurant that would have been the bomber’s target had he not taken ill that morning. You could be dead. You are alive. Ergo, you have purpose.

Bible and Theology

#177: I Am Not Second

April 6, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #177, on the subject of I Am Not Second.

Bill Cosby said it:

I am not the boss in my family. I don’t know how I lost it; I don’t know if I ever had it. But I’ve seen the boss’s job, and I don’t want it.

I am not the boss in my house, either. The boss tells me what I need to do and when I need to do it, and anything I think is important I do on my own time. I’d like to tell you that I am second, but I don’t think that’s true. I think actually the dog is second; in any case, I’m pretty sure he outranks me. If he wants to go outside in the middle of the night, he wakes me so I can let him outside. If somehow his whining and wheezing does not get a response from me, he wakes the boss–and the boss wakes me, and tells me to let him outside, usually with the words, “You’re not going to make me get up and take him out, are you?” Thus it is clear that the dog outranks me and gets to decide when I am going to give up my sleep so he can go out. This is the same dog of which I said, “I don’t want a dog,” and “you can have a dog as long as he is never my problem.” He is also the same dog that I feed and water every day, and let out several times a day, and deal with whenever he is a problem for someone else. So I am not second; both the boss and the dog rank above me. There are almost certainly other people who rank above me, but I don’t really want to try to enumerate them at the moment. It sometimes (read “often”) feels like everyone in the world outranks me; I am pretty far from second.

This tirade was inspired by what is apparently a fairly successful ministry under the name “I am second.” I expect it’s the best Christian catchphrase since “What would Jesus do?” I get it. It’s saying I need to take myself out of first place and put Jesus in first place; that puts me second. The thing is, it doesn’t, really–or it shouldn’t. I had a bad reaction to it the first time I heard it, and my wife had the same bad reaction quite independently of me. I am not second, and I am not supposed to be second. Whoever might will to be first of you will be slave of all. I am not called to be second; I am called to be last.

The problem with the formulation “I am second” is that it might state my relationship to God correctly, but it misstates my relationship to the dog. O.K., maybe not to the dog–but to everyone else, certainly. The hierarchy in my life is not supposed to be Christ, me, everyone else. It’s supposed to be Christ, everyone else, me. I am not second; I am last.

I am sure that it is a wonderful ministry doing wonderful things, and I do not mean to denigrate it. However, I feel that a significant point has been missed here. Don’t put yourself second. There are a lot of other people who should be above you in the hierarchy. And remember, it is not a single fixed universal hierarchy. Jesus is always first for all of us, if we have it right. In the hierarchy that governs my life, you–all of you, each of you–outrank me; but in the hierarchy that governs your life, I, along with the rest of us, outrank you. We were called to serve each other, to put everyone else above ourselves, to be a long distance from second place in our own lives.

Don’t put yourself second, either.

Bible and Theology

#173: Hospitalization Benefits

March 24, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #173, on the subject of Hospitalization Benefits.

This is not about health care or health care coverage.

Some of you are aware that I was recently hospitalized twice within two weeks. It started on a Wednesday afternoon, when someone needed a ride to a clinic and I thought while I was there I should get an opinion about a previous umbilical herniorhaphy that was not doing well. The people at the clinic desk said they could certainly look at it, but it would almost certainly require tests which they were not equipped to perform, so I should go to the emergency room. I did, and indeed they performed the obvious test, having me drink the contrast and wait around for it to work through my digestive tract so they could get a clear Computer (Axial) Tomography (C(A)T) image. Hours later someone was poking at my belly, and said that this might be very serious and he did not think we should wait until morning, so despite the fact that he and I both wanted to go home and the anaesthesiologist had already done so, I was to be prepped for surgery.

I’m told that the condition was not as bad as feared, and the surgery went well–so well in fact that I was placed on clear liquids in time for Thursday breakfast, and on full diet by Friday morning, and was discharged after supper on Friday. There were the usual restrictions about lifting and driving and the like, but in the main I came through well–except that my arm hurt.

The pain in the arm was apparently related to the IV site, that is, the place where they had connected the intravenous feed to give me such medications as were deemed necessary post-surgery. I think every nurse that looked at it said it did not look good and she (or he) was going to move it when there was time, but they pushed me through so fast that it was out before anyone had the time to start one somewhere else. Below the site (further out into the extremities) my arm was swollen and inflamed, painful to the touch and when moved in certain positions. I was also having some difficulty breathing and a worsening cough. Respiratory problems do not normally alarm me because I have allergy-related asthma and the list of allergies which aggravate it include just about anything that has a smell other than real food (artificial food scents can be trouble, particularly if they are linked to smoke as in incense or candles). However, I have a history of pulmonary embolism, which is a condition in which a blood clot usually from an extremity migrates to the lung and lodges there, and thus there was at least the chance that the swelling in the arm and the respiratory trouble were related. It thus called for more tests, and again of a sort that required a visit to the emergency room. This time the CT scan was of my lungs, and there was an ultrasound of my arm, and the major conclusions were first that the two problems were not connected, but second that there were definitely two problems that needed to be addressed.

There was no evidence of a pulmonary embolism, but there were some small clots in the veins in my arm which could be problematic and were going to require treatment. There was also a shadow in my lung which the emergency room doctor took to be a very mild pneumonia, but of concern because it might have been contracted in the hospital, and if you get an infection in the hospital it is likely to be a serious microorganism. My wife, the registered nurse who would rather have me home where she can tend me herself, argued that there was not much they could do in the hospital that she could not do for me at home, and this is where it gets weird. The emergency room doctor said that the treatment for the clots was going to involve heparin injections, a drug that ought to be monitored fairly closely as it really does promote bleeding, and so I would have to be admitted for the heparin. However, before I got the first shot of heparin or got moved out of the emergency room to an inpatient bed, the order was changed and I was put on the very expensive (mostly covered by my wife’s employee health care coverage) new drug Xarelto, which is taken P.O., that is, per orum, by mouth. So I did not have to be in the hospital for that. However, because the pneumonia might be some drug-resistant organism they were planning to treat it aggressively, with vancomycin and cefepime, two IV antibiotics, instead of oral antibiotics, so the reason I had to be admitted had changed. Still, I was admitted, and I was not complaining because this time they were going to let me eat, and Elmer Hospital has mostly decent food, and I don’t have to cook it or do the dishes.

The next day the specialists appeared. The hematologist said in essence that the Xarelto had been cleared through our prescription plan, so as far as he was concerned I could go home and take the medication there, as long as I came to see him in four to six weeks. The pulmonologist was even more optimistic: the lung shadow on the CT scan was identical to that in a scan from 2012, and I did not have even the slightest touch of pneumonia, the antibiotics were unnecessary, and I could go home any time.

It was still another day before that got through the red tape so that the hospitalist overseeing the whole case ordered my discharge, but in essence I was not really very sick. I still have to get the staples from the surgery removed and see the hematologist, but the surgeon did stop by and look at the incision during my stay and said that I am permitted to drive, so I am overall on the mend. (The staples were removed at his office today.)

And at the risk of stealing a line from Arlo Guthrie, that isn’t what I came to talk about today.

In the wake of these hospitalizations, many people, some of them readers, some connections through social media, some “real world” connections, have mentioned that they were, have been, are, or would be praying for me. They fall into three categories, that I’ve noticed.

First, there are people who mentioned that they are always praying for me. Prior to this I could not have named more than one person (my wife) whom I could say I knew was praying for me regularly or consistently. I’m sure my grandmother was, years ago. This aspect of having someone praying for you, when you are in ministry (as I am–Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild and Christian teaching music ministry), is very important. Pastor Ern Baxter once told of how his grandmother always prayed for him and he never really gave it much thought, as he had been seminary trained in how to preach and had the necessary skills–until the day his grandmother died and he went to preach a sermon and found nothing. He told his congregation, right then, that he had never appreciated his grandmother’s prayers until that moment, and now she was gone. Someone in the congregation rose and said, “Pastor, I’ll be your grandmother.” She prayed for him, and he said thereafter he kept an army of praying grandmothers to support his ministry. So to discover that there are people I did not know were praying for me is an encouragement.

Second, there are those whom I know pray and who probably are not usually praying for me, who having heard of my hospitalization turned some of their prayerful attention my direction. Some of these people I have not met outside the Internet, or only met once or twice. Many of them have ministries of their own. That they have raised prayers on my behalf tells me that they care, that I matter to them at least enough that they noticed my condition and put some prayer into it. It means there are people out there who will support me, at least with prayers, when it is needed. That, too, is an encouragement.

Third, there were some people praying for me through these events whom I would not have guessed were praying people. Some are people who do not express much of a belief in God in our interactions. Some are people with whom I have only recently reconnected after decades who have seemingly found faith in the interim. This, too, is an encouragement, as it tells me that these people are not lost, that they are praying, connecting with God, and while I am always hesitant to say that I know any individual is saved, it is good evidence that they might well be. After all,

he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him,

in part because who would pray who did not believe at least that much?

So I thank you all for your prayers and encouragement, and now I return to that long “not what I wanted to say” part at the beginning. One of the lessons I learned many years ago came from II Corinthians 1:11, which in the Updated New American Standard Bible reads

…you also joining in helping us through your prayers, so that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the favor bestowed on us through the prayers of many.

That is, the reason God wants us to agree in prayer, and is more likely to answer prayers when many agree, appears to be that way when the prayers are answered all those people who asked will all say thank you.

Thus your prayers on my behalf have obligated me to let you know that God has been healing me, I am improving rapidly, and there is cause to give thanks.

Thank you.

Bible and Theology, Elections, Law and Politics

#171: The President (of the Seventh Day Baptist Convention)

March 12, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #171, on the subject of The President (of the Seventh Day Baptist Convention).

One subject that intrigues me is what is called church polity, that is, the way various churches and denominations organize and operate themselves both locally and globally. We call our various subdivisions synods, presbyteries, conferences, and quite a few other names. Among the Baptists, a highly democratic and congregationalist group (“congregationalist” polity means that the church is run entirely from the bottom up, as church members decide what the denomination believes and does, and anyone who disagrees either goes along for the sake of unity or leaves the group), divide themselves into “conventions”, gatherings that attempt to agree on what is important to them. Each convention elects a president, who sets the agenda for his term; they also hire staff to provide services for the member churches, such as publications. I am not an expert on church polity, with only passing familiarity with a half dozen or so denominations, but my mind was caught particularly by the practice of one denomination, the Seventh Day Baptist Convention, and I thought it might have lessons for non-religious people immersed in the secular political world.

Seventh Day Baptist Churchof Plainfield, New Jersey — Seventh Day Baptist Church
of Plainfield, New Jersey

For those who care about such things, the Seventh Day Baptists were founded in England and are the oldest denomination in America to observe a Saturday Sabbath. Some are perhaps a bit legalistic about that while others are more relaxed–much as found in Sunday-observing churches. (I have written On Sabbath elsewhere.) They are otherwise like most Baptist churches. Once a year–in the United States, it happens in August–they hold a major meeting of the convention, Conference, hundreds of members getting together somewhere for a week of meetings and services and discussions. (The week prior to this, they have a major gathering for the youth of the denomination in the same location, many of whom then stay for the convention itself.) It is at this conference that they elect a president.

The interesting aspect is that the president does not at that moment take office. He is elected to replace the current president, but it is expected that he will take time to tour the denomination, talk to the churches, and develop his “vision” for the denomination during his term. He remains effectively “president-elect” during this time–an entire year, as the following year at conference he will step into the role, introduce his vision for the year ahead, and oversee the election of the person who will replace him as president elect. He now has a year to serve as president of the denomination, to make his vision a reality, before the new president takes the office at the next annual conference.

There are a lot of interesting aspects to that. For one thing, I don’t believe anyone has ever served two consecutive terms, but in the several centuries of history (our local congregation was established before the American Revolutionary War) I could not say whether anyone has filled the position more than once. It is a small denomination, the sort in which ordinary members all over the country know each other, partly because in addition to this annual meeting they have another annual business meeting one weekend to which everyone is invited, hosted by one of the member churches, and several smaller multi-church gatherings. So the fact that I know a father and a son who both held the position (many years apart) does not suggest nepotism as much as tradition. It also means that no one runs on his record–you are not going to be elected to serve two consecutive terms. Interestingly, you are not really elected based on what you promise to do; you are elected based on the belief of the electorate that you will do something that needs to be done, something that will be good for the denomination. You are elected, in essence, because people trust you to discover the needs in the church and address them.

Ultimately, too, the system reminds us that all leaders are temporary. In a democratic system such as a representative federation, almost all leaders serve terms of office which end after a few years. (Our federal judiciary is appointed for life, but even that ends eventually.) Some can be re-elected, but many have term limits, and re-election is never guaranteed. The people we have picked to be our leaders were picked because a large number of us from a very large area of the country thought they would do what needed to be done. It was not exacty because we liked their policies, although that is part of it and in truth it was also partly because many of us feared the policies of the alternative. It was, rather, because we perceived these as people who would try to do what America needed to have done. It might not be exactly what they intended to do initially, and they might not succeed in their objectives, but we needed to change the course of the Ship of State, and this crew seemed to be the best chance to do so. We know that we are committed to this choice for the short term, and if we are unhappy with it there will be a chance to change in the not too distant future (already serious politicians are working on their twenty twenty presidential campaigns).

Every once in a while I find myself trying to reconstruct the sequence of Presidents and Vice Presidents who have served during my lifetime. They are all important, and they all have done things that mattered at the time. Some have also done things with long-term consequences, but despite their importance at the time there are few who can tell you what significant actions were taken by the Eisenhauer administration, or that of Johnson, or Ford, or Carter, or even Clinton. We remember the scandals, but what Presidents do is rarely remembered outside history books.

So stop worrying about it. A Presidential term is really a rather short moment in history, even in the course of your life. There will be other Presidents, some better and some worse than the present one. Let’s see what this one does, and build from there.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Music, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#169: Do Web Logs Lower the Bar?

February 24, 2017 M.J. 2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #169, on the subject of Do Web Logs Lower the Bar?.

I noticed something.

I don’t know whether any of you noticed it, and there is an aspect to it that causes me to hope you did not, to suspect some of you did, and to think that I ought not be calling it to the attention of the rest. But it is worth recognizing, I suppose, even if it is at my own expense to some degree.

What I noticed was that some of the web log posts I publish are not up the the same standard I would expect of my web pages.

Certainly it is the case that some of the web log subjects are what might be called transient. I was quite surprised to see in my stats recently that someone visited the page that covered the 2015 election results for New Jersey. I’m thinking it must have been a mistake. Yet at the time it was important information, even if in another year it won’t even tell you who is in the Assembly, because we’ll have had another election.

It is also the case that being an eclectic sort of web log it is going to have pages that do not appeal to everyone–indeed, probably there are no pages that appeal to everyone. I recently lost one of my Patreon supporters, and that saddens me, but he was the only person contributing as a time travel fan, and was not contributing enough to pay for one DVD per year; I’m sure he is disappointed that I haven’t done more time travel pages, but there has not been that much available to me and the budget has been particularly tight. With pages about law, politics, music, Bible, games, logic problems, and other miscellany, there will certainly be pages that any particular reader would not read. Yet that has always been true of the web site, and although the web log is not quite as conveniently divided into sections it does have navigation aids to help people find what they want.

What I mean, though, is that I don’t seem to apply the same standard to web log pages as I would to web pages.

I suppose that’s to be expected. As I think about it, I recognize that I put a lot more time and thought into articles I am writing for e-zines and web sites that are not my own. I expect more of myself, hold myself to a higher standard, when I am writing such pieces. For one thing, I can’t go back and edit them later–which on my own site I will only do for obvious errors, never for content. For another, something of mine published by someone else should represent the best that I can offer, both for my own reputation and for that of the publisher. If you’re reading my work at RPGNet, or the Christian Gamers Guild, or The Learning Fountain, or any of the many other sites for which I’ve written over the decades, you might not know any more about me than what you find there.

It’s also the case that, frankly, anyone can set up his own web site, fairly cheaply and easily, write his own articles, and publish them for the world to ignore. There is a limited number of opportunities for someone to write for someone else’s site, and to be asked to do so, or permitted to do so, is something of a recognition above the ordinary.

Of course, there are even fewer opportunities to write for print, and fewer now than there once were. Not that you can’t publish your own printed books and comics and magazines, but that those that exist are selective in what they will print, and so the bar is higher.

The web log system makes it quicker and easier to write and publish something. I suspect that there are many bloggers out there who open the software, start typing what they want to say, and hit publish, as if it were an e-mail. I maintain a higher standard than that–all of my web log posts are composed offline, and with the only exceptions being the “breaking news” sort (like the aforementioned election results page) they all get held at least overnight, usually several days, reread and edited and tweaked until I am happy with them. (As I write this, there are two web log posts awaiting publication which have been pending for two days, and I will review this one several times over the time that they go to press.) But even so, the standard of what I will publish as a web log post is considerably lower than that which I will publish as a web page.

In that sense, the web log becomes more like diary, something in which you compose your thoughts and then ignore them–except that this diary is open to the world. I think–I hope–all bloggers put more thought and care into their web log posts than they do into forum conversations and Tweets and Facebook posts. However, while I have read some web log posts that were excellent, I have also read a few that caused me to wonder whether the author was thinking. I try to keep some standard here, but I admit that sometimes I wonder whether I posted something because I thought it was worth posting or because I wanted to keep the blog living and active.

In any case, if you read something here and wonder why I bothered to post it, perhaps now you have a better idea of that.

Bible and Theology, Music

#168: Praying for You

February 23, 2017 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #168, on the subject of Praying for You.

A number of years ago I was playing quite a few venues and interacting with quite a few other Christan musicians, and something began to bother me. At first it was that we needed to support and encourage each other, and I took steps to do this, connecting venues with artists as I was able. However, I realized that no one had ever mentioned praying for me, and I had not mentioned praying for anyone else in music ministry, and that this was something I should remedy. I sent notes to–well, quite a few people whom I knew were involved in music ministry, and offered to pray for them on condition that they keep me informed of their situation (that’s going to be explained). A very few accepted my offer; one offered to reciprocate. Then over the next year or so they all dropped off the radar, as it were, no longer answering my inquiries about their situation, and today I again have no Christian musicians on my prayer list.

And that just is not right, so this is an attempt to fix that.

On the other hand, I don’t want it to seem as if I’m being exclusive. I have quite a few Christian ministers on my “friends” list who are not musicians, or not primarily musicians, and quite a few who are not involved in ministry but would want my prayers (and some of you are indeed already getting them, whether you want them or not). So I am putting this forward as a sort of “open offer”, that anyone who wants me to pray for him (or her or them) should contact me, and I will put you on my prayer list.

However, I have a few conditions.

The one idea that is not a condition is that you pray for me. I would not feel at all right saying that I will pray for you if you will pray for me–it’s too mercenary, I suppose. I certainly do not object to you praying for me, and if you wish for me to meet conditions similar to those I am about to state here, I will certainly endeavor to comply. Nor is it a condition that you support my Patreon or PalPal.me campaigns–a lot of people who need prayer don’t have money, although I’m sure that people who have a lot of money still need prayer (not something I really know from personal experience). I am certainly grateful to those of you who do support my efforts in any way at all, but I need to assure those who cannot do so or cannot justify doing so that they will not be treated the worse for that.

My conditions are based on II Corinthians 1:11, which in the Updated New American Standard Bible reads

…you also joining in helping us through your prayers, so that thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf for the favor bestowed on us through the prayers of many.

What I derive from that is the point that God wants us to agree in prayer, and answers prayers when more of us are agreeing, because that way when He answers there are more of us saying thank You to Him for the answer. That, though, means that if I am going to pray for you, I also have to know how God is answering those prayers. So this is how it works.

You must connect with me through Facebook. If we are not already “Friends” send a “Friend Request”, and I’ll approve it and ask how we’re connected. Just tell me that you read this post and wanted me to pray for you, along with some idea of who you are (for example, pastor, Christian musician, Christian gamer, reader of my other materials). I am betting that I will already have some notion of who most people who want my prayers are, but I don’t always connect names to people quickly, so at least jog my memory. I do not really do e-mail–every few months I download a few hundred letters, throw most of them away, and see if there’s anything important in what remains. Facebook is the way I communicate.
Tell me enough about your situation that I can pray intelligently. This is not Romper Room (and I pray for Sally, and Jeff, and Mary, and Mark….). If I’m to know how God answers these prayers, I have to be praying for something particular enough that you can tell me about the answer. I have a theological objection to those “unspoken” requests which I should probably discuss somewhere sometime, but as Paul says about people who pray in tongues in public meetings, if I don’t know what is being prayed, how can I say “amen”?
Which of course brings up the final condition. Probably about once a month I’m going to get a reminder to drop you a note to ask what is happening. That’s so you can tell me what good things God has done and I can give thanks for them, and so you can update me regarding what I ought to be praying. If I miss a month, don’t worry–I’m still praying. If you miss a month, don’t worry, I’ll keep praying for a few months without hearing anything. However, after a few months I’ll decide that you’re not answering and I’ll drop you from the list. I can’t very well give thanks to God for answers to prayers on your behalf if you don’t tell me what God has done on your behalf. You are, of course, welcome to drop me notes between my reminders, either to let me know about God’s answers or to redirect my prayers. I do not want your impersonal newsletter; I want to interact with you directly, to hear from you what God is doing. If it’s not worth a few minutes to do that, you don’t really want my prayers.

So that’s the offer. I should caveat that the only people for whom I pray every day are my wife and myself (she because she deserves it, I because I need it); how often I pray for you will depend on a lot of factors including how many people ask for prayer, how serious I perceive your need, and the limits of the program that manages the prayer list. Obviously I am offering to pray for individuals, but the offer also extends to individuals who want me to pray for a ministry they represent, such as their band, who thus are promising to keep me informed regarding the band. I also don’t promise that I won’t give you advice if I think you’re asking for prayer about something with which I can help; it’s free advice, and you can decide whether it’s worth as much as you paid for it without offending me. You can also ask me to stop praying for you (which I assume you would do if my monthly queries are irksome) and I’ll take you off the list.

I think that covers it. Any questions?

Bible and Theology

#165: Saints Alive

February 11, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #165, on the subject of Saints Alive.

I usually avoid issues that are denomination-specific. I don’t want to fight with other believers but promote unity and love between us. This, though, seems to have crept up on me.

It came about because my wife decided she needed a statue of St. Francis of Assisi for our currently non-existent back yard garden, and found one online (not the one pictured) which we could have for a song and a long drive. She has never been Catholic; she was Lutheran for many years until God moved her to a Baptist church, and although she is still more liturgical than I she shares much of my interdenominational attitude and experience.

There seems to be a story connected to this. St. Francis means little to me and only connects to two stories, one a legend about a wolf who agreed to a vegetarian diet so he could live with the friars and their animals, the other a joke about the unluckiest man in the world. However, one of our long-term houseguests was raised Roman Catholic, and during his brief ill-fated marriage to a conservative Baptist girl made the mistake of bringing home a statue of St. Francis for their garden. She was so upset by this that she had her father come read him the riot act for this act of pagan idolatry, and I think maybe our statue is here to say that not all Christians are so unreasonable. However, I don’t really know why we need this statue, other than that it is apparently part bird bath (although she also wants a bird bath). It was going to rest on our front deck for the winter, but then someone was concerned it might be stolen or vandalized, so it is now decorating our living room.

I would be more concerned, I think, had I any expectation that our guest was likely to pray to this icon. I don’t think he does very much praying, and certainly not when he is not in trouble, and probably not when he is. I do, however, realize that there are a lot of nuances and complications here. The Roman Catholic Church officially states that people do not worship saints; they venerate them. That’s a word that most people don’t have in their vocabulary, but some Dungeons & Dragons™ Dungeon Masters will recognize as the verb form of the adjective “venerable”, the oldest age category for character races in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. To venerate, to revere, is to show someone well-deserved respect of the highest order.

That appeals to me. There are believers I genuinely deeply respect, and not all of them are living people whom I have met. If you tell me that St. Francis of Assisi, or St. Teresa of Calcutta, is someone deserving of such respect I can at least understand that, whether or not I share that respect. However, one point that is worth noticing is that just about anyone I think deserves that kind of respect does not count himself worthy of it. It is something of the enigma of veneration: anyone who thinks he deserves it is disqualified. That doesn’t mean you necessarily deserve it if you don’t think so, only that thinking so is arrogance of a sort that does not fit the character of the person who deserves it. The people we most admire for their faith generally do not think themselves all that admirable, or at least don’t convey the impression that they do think that. It makes it difficult to know who to venerate, as just about anyone who might deserve such respect to whom you offered it would reject it and turn your attention toward Jesus. Maybe, though, it is different when you have entered heaven; maybe there are some among us who are regarded more highly in heaven than the rest, and have had to accept the burden of being special.

It is the next part, the part where people pray to the saints, where we start getting into trouble–but the trouble is complicated.

Let us first establish that most people do not confuse the statue with the person. That is not an impossible mistake to make, and there are people who appear to make it, traveling great distances to visit specific statues or shrines where miracles have been reported, thinking that somehow the statue is, or contains, the presence of the person here in the world. For most people, the statue is not different in kind from a crucifix or even a cross–a reminder, a focal point, a way to keep in mind the person being addressed. It is not in that sense different from the person who comes upon a photograph of a deceased or absent family member and speaks to it as if it were that person–except, of course, that the person speaking to the saint in the presence of the statue assumes that the saint can hear. But the request is being made to the saint, the departed believer, and not to the statue. If that is clear in the mind of the person making the request, we eliminate one of the problems.

Of course, it still is not that different from idolatry. Certainly there were ancient worshippers who believed that the statue or carving was itself the deity, but in the main most pagan worshippers understood that the statue was just a statue, a marker of the presence of the deity but not the god itself. Worshipping a statue and worshipping a spirit whose presence is indicated by the statue are both idolatry–but then, so is worshipping a spirit who is not God. There is a fine line between veneration and worship, since the former means showing respect for the object/person and the latter means expressing reasons the object/person ought to be revered (worth-ship), but let us assume it is possible to stay on the right side of that line.

C. S. Lewis explored the issue of prayer to the saints somewhere, and his analysis was interesting. He noted that asking St. Francis, or St. Teresa, or any other departed believer (he did not name anyone specifically), to pray on your behalf is not different in kind from asking your pastor, or your spouse, or your neighbor to do so. It seems rather straightforward, really, when you put it that way. The problem he advanced as fatal was the issue of knowing which persons actually are in heaven. That is a certainty we cannot have about anyone other than Jesus Himself. We might carry the ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent out to the hundredth decimal place, but it is not actually given to us to know that Peter or Paul or Mary–or Francis or Teresa–is in heaven. I am very confident that my sainted grandmother is there, less confident of others of my relatives, but I could not say with absolute certainty that anyone I have known is in heaven–I do not see the heart. I am completely confident that I will be there, but my confidence is not something I can give you, and I have been known to be mistaken about some facts in the past so I might, in theory, be mistaken about any of them now. We don’t really know who we can ask.

We have the additional problem that we don’t know how we get from here to there. Are our departed loved ones already experiencing heaven in what we call real time, concurrent with our continued lives here on earth? That is a possibility popularly embraced. However, some hold to the notion of “soul sleep”, that we who die remain unaware of the passage of time until we are awakened on the resurrection day and all enter heaven together. That would mean that Jesus is in heaven, but Peter and Paul and the others are still waiting, unconscious of the wait but not yet there. There is also the possibility that neither of those is quite the reality, but that at the moment of death we leap across time to the moment of resurrection, not “sleeping” anywhere but simply skipping whatever time remains in this world to enter eternity on the day of a resurrection still in the future for everyone else. In those cases, it does not matter who is going to enter heaven–no one is there to hear us yet.

Prayer to the saints also assumes that those who are in heaven are listening to those of us who are on earth. We imagine that they are for a couple of reasons. One is that from our earthly perspective, if we were to be taken from our loved ones and moved to heaven, we would be very interested, even concerned, with what was happening to them here on earth, and so would want to watch, listen, keep aware of their situation. The other is that we want to believe that those who have left us love us enough that they would want to know what is happening to us. Both of those points ignore the possibility that someone who enters the presence of God might have something far more significant to occupy his attention for the next few thousand years than what is happening to the people he left behind. Having finally stepped into the actual immediate continual tangible presence of God, am I going to be wondering how my granddaughter is doing? That’s possible, but somehow not likely–and I tend to think we would very quickly lose track of time, particularly if we have stepped out of time into eternity. Let’s suppose, though, that it is the case that my grandmother wants to know how I am doing. There is yet the question of whether heaven actually provides the opportunity to watch–as if it were the observation windows above the operating theater where students can observe the surgeons at work. We are never told that the departed know what we are doing. In fact, the one documented instance in the Bible of someone speaking from beyond death, of that of Samuel to Saul, suggests that Samuel had no idea what Saul was doing, and had to figure it out when it happened. So the assumption that the departed can hear us is itself questionable.

But even if we grant all that, there is yet the question of why they would be listening to us, specifically. I can imagine that St. Teresa of Calcutta might be intimately interested in what is happening with the Sisters of Mercy order she founded and the work progressing in India (and as we recently noted, it is getting more difficult for Christian work in India). I might even suppose she is interested in my close acquaintance Dennis Mullins, who on one occasion some years ago wrote a song for her and presented her with a copy of the recording. It is a far stretch to suppose she would be interested in me–I never met her, never directly supported her work, probably never prayed for her during her ministry. It is an even farther stretch to imagine that St. Francis has any particular interest in me, and the fact that I will be one of millions to erect a statue of him in a backyard garden probably does not impact that significantly.

I think, though, that there is a fundamental problem with our attitude when we pray to a saint. The notion we have is that somehow they are more worthy, more likely to receive an answer to their prayers than we are to ours. It is a mistake. If we ask our pastor to pray for us because we want someone to pray with us, that is perfectly reasonable; if we want him to pray for us because we somehow think that Jesus is more likely to hear and answer his prayers on our behalf than our prayers on our own behalf, that is not humilty, it is error. God wants us to bring our concerns to Him ourselves, and Jesus is given to us as the “one mediator between God and man”. When we ask others to pray “for” us we are using the wrong preposition; we should be asking them to pray “with” us, to agree with our prayers, to support us as we pray. We are invited, encouraged, even commanded, to pray to God through Jesus Christ. If we will not do this, our prayers to anyone else, living or dead, are not going to be of much use. If you ask me to pray with you, I will gladly support you in prayer; if you ask me to pray for you, the best I can do is pray for whatever I hope God will give you (which might not be what you are asking), or perhaps that you will be able to find whatever it is that will enable you to pray. God will hear your prayer. To pray to the saints is to presume that God does not care enough about you to listen, and that someone more worthy than you needs to mention you–like having a friend who has God’s ear. You have God’s ear, and no one is more worthy than Jesus Who makes you as worthy as Himself.

So respect believers who reflect this, but make your requests known to God directly.

And don’t make a big deal about lawn ornaments. A reminder in the middle of our garden of a man who cared about our relationships with God and with nature is not a bad thing, and a better thing if it reminds us that God cares about our garden more than we do, and loves us, and hears when we pray.

Bible and Theology, Music

#163: So You Want to Be a Christian Musician

February 9, 2017 M.J. 2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #163, on the subject of So You Want to Be a Christian Musician.

I have been a Christian musician–performer, composer, arranger, founder and/or director of bands–for near half a century now.

It might be argued whether that alone puts me in a position to give advice on the subject. After all, although I have recorded an album, it would be debated whether I was ever a “successful” Christian musician. I am not in much demand on the circuit and never have been. However, from the time I was in high school, later in college, and then during five years as first a disk jockey and ultimately program director of a major Contemporary Christian Music radio station I talked to dozens, possibly scores, of successful Christian artists, and nearly always asked them that question: what advice do you, as a successful Christian musician, give to anyone who wants to do what you do. I asked such people as Noel Paul Stookey, Dan Peek, Phil Keaggy, Scott Wesley Brown, Glad, Brown Bannister, Chris Christian–well, I don’t even remember everyone I asked, let alone what they all said. However, four of them I do remember, and I will give you something of the gist of what they said for your consideration. I will also comment on that advice, because I think it worth contemplating. I also think, in retrospect, that it is probably good advice for anyone who knows what he wants to be or do, and particularly for those who want to pursue artistic endeavors.

Larry Norman, perhaps the original nationally known self-identified Christian rock musician

I will mention Barry McGuire first–probably the first truly prominent secular musician to become a leading contemporary Christian artist, who had been with The New Christie Minstrels, starred in the Broadway production Hair, and soloed with the hit Eve of Destruction, but whose signature song following his salvation was Happy Road–mostly because I do not think I can articulate what he told me. What I remember is that the concert somewhere near Boston had ended and he was out among the audience, mobbed by people, but he heard my question and focused his entire attention on addressing it, addressing me and the rest of the audience, as if the question genuinely mattered. What he said, and perhaps what he did, caused me upon returning home to write a song entitled Mountain, Mountain, about being what God made you to be instead of trying to be something you perceive to be great. That actually is a good starting point for this, but we will return to it.

I was one of several reporters interviewing B. J. Thomas at Creation ’83. At that time he was probably the most successful secular artist to turn to Christian music as an entertainer, his song Home Where I Belong introducing the singer of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head and I Can’t Stop This Feeling to a Christian audience, and he had a hard time in the Christian music field precisely because he was an entertainer, not a minister. What he said, though, was don’t think you missed your break, or that you are still waiting for your break to come. If you are diligent, many breaks will come to you, and if you are good you can make one of them work for you, and if you miss it, another will come.

Ted Sandquist was probably the original contemporary Christian worship leader, with songs like Eternally Grateful, All That I Can Do, and Lion of Judah. I’m afraid that when I caught up with him after a concert, his answer could have been a wonderful book, delivered orally in under a minute. He spoke about things he called scope and ministry, and to a large degree was the first person ever to get me thinking of some of the things I discussed recently in the music ministry series–along with whether your calling is to be nationally known or simply serve in a local congregation. In short, his advice was to think in terms of ministry, whether you are called to it, and what is the nature and extent of your calling. If you follow this web log, you have already seen the extensive materials I have written on that.

Finally, I caught up with Larry Norman after one of his concerts at Gordon College. Larry is probably the original nationally-known Christian rock musician, best known for I Wish We’d All Been Ready, Sweet, Sweet Song of Salvation, and the album title Only Visiting This Planet. The intensity of his response was overwhelming, and the focus of it was in the question, why do you want this?

Before I address that further, I should mention two things about Larry that I learned separately from that. One is that he was known for a gift of discernment, that he could see things about people that they often did not recognize about themselves. It may well be that he would have given different advice to someone else, but that this was what he thought I needed to hear. The other is that he had a very hard life as a Christian rock musician. Often he would play a concert and after the fact be informed that “apparently the Lord did not provide” enough money to pay him. He was then criticized for subsequently insisting on signed contracts for concerts that could be enforced against those who did not pay what they agreed, and quite specific terms concerning what his hosts would provide such as accommodations. He rubbed shoulders with people like Paul McCartney, but he did not find the life at all glamorous or enriching. That might have impacted his view as well.

However, I think that there is a level to that advice that we all need to hear: Do not want that; it is not something to want.

It came to me recently, as I had again heard a story of some Christian band that had been formed to provide music for one event who then found themselves propelled to the top of the Christian music charts and sent on national and international tours. The famous story is that of Amy Grant, who at sixteen spent a bit of money on some studio time to record a song for her mother’s birthday, and the recording was heard by Christian record producers Brown Bannister and Chris Christian, who quickly signed her to a major Christian label recording contract and propelled her to stardom–perhaps the first contemporary Christian recording artist to crossover into secular success. God clearly sometimes chooses some people to be “successful” Christian artists who had made no effort to be that; it makes sense that He has a hand in choosing those whose success appears to be built on years of hard work. There are equally many stories we do not hear, of people who worked hard to achieve what never came, and of people who hoped maybe that one day lightning would strike, as it were, and they would be propelled to success, to whatever level of fame is found in Dove Awards and Christian music chart-toppers. If God wants you to be there, He will get you there; it may be that He wants you to work hard at your music and stay where you are, and it should be sufficient motivation for the work that God is pleased with it.

It is also the case that this is not something to want. The work of a “successful” Christian musician is hard work–constant travel, brief stays in strange places, one performance after another. I have seen how tired such people often are, but this is what they do, and they will do it again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It wreaks havoc with family life, as either you take your family with you to hotels or more commonly in a camper, or you leave them behind while you travel for weeks or sometimes months without them, sleeping in the “bus”, a modified camper shared with the rest of the band. Those who make it work either managed to reach a high enough level of success before marriage that they were able to do very short tours and fly to most events, or have other jobs frequently as pastors such that they finish concerts Saturday night and are in church Sunday morning. And the money is not all that good–better, perhaps, than it was for Christian artists a few decades back, but the entire music industry is changing, in a sense collapsing, so that even the major stars do not make what they once did.

Of course, it is not so much the money as the recognition, that you are on stage, people are listening to your songs on the radio and the Internet, you are traveling the world singing. That is also called fame. But then, fame in the entire music industry is not what it was–if you heard a list of the twenty most successful musicians in the world today, it is likely that you would not recognize several of the names simply because styles have fragmented, and no one is truly informed about rock, rap, country, Christian, and the wealth of other genres that command substantial but discrete audiences. Take it from me. I might not be a “successful” musician, but I am world famous–as a role playing game author and theorist, defender of hobby games, time travel theory writer, and general writer–and it has almost no cash value and very little impact on my daily life apart from that I have to do the work. Or hear Paul Simon. He tells a story of a night when he and Art Garfunkle were sitting in a car in a park under one of New York City’s many bridges, and a song came on the radio–their song, Sounds of Silence, which the disk jockey announced was now the number one song in the country, by Simon and Garfunkle. At that moment, Art Garfunkle said to him, “Gee, wherever those two guys are right now, it must be a real great party.” Being at the top of the chart doesn’t mean nothing, but it doesn’t mean much.

Of course, get enough fame, and you have to reorganize your life to insulate yourself against the crowds. You are not going to get that kind of fame doing this, and the admiration you do get will perhaps bring a smile to your face from time to time, but it’s going to prove to be much less than you imagined.

More on point, though, and connecting what Barry McGuire said to what Larry Norman said: this is not something you should want. What you should want is to know God, to become what He made you to be, and to seek to do what He wants you to do in life. If that includes being a famous or successful musician, He will bring you there; He won’t lead you where you want to go, though, only where He knows you will become the best you He made you to be. One thing I needed to learn over the years was that had I been a successful Christian musician early in my life I never would have been any of these other things–I never would have written the role playing game or become involved with the hobby gamers whose lives I have in some small way touched, never would have undertaken to write about time travel, never would have studied law or written about politics, never would have become chaplain of an international online organization, never would have done most of the things for which I am recognized. There was so much of who I am that I never would have discovered, that no one would have known, had God moved me in a straight line to what I always thought was the only thing I could do well–music. He wanted me to become the teacher, the writer, the influence that I am. I might have been a great musician, but I would never have been anything else.

Peter Hopper was the drummer in a band called Rock Garden, who played their penultimate concert at Carnegie Hall. I never talked with him despite having a more than passing acquaintance with the band’s rhythm guitarist Dennis Mullins, but a few weeks after that concert, after they had played their farewell concert, I heard him speak about it. It was what he had wanted all his life, and as he sat on stage playing for the crowd he looked around and said, is this really what I wanted? Why did I want this? He told us that God promises that if we seek Him He will give us the desires of our heart, and said that in his experience God had done that, given him what he had always wanted, so he would be able to see how empty it really was, and how the only thing worth desiring was God.

So don’t want this. Don’t want to be a musician, or anything else for that matter. Want to know God, and to find His path for you. That’s the only desire in life that is guaranteed to be fulfilled and to satisfy. It is also the only path that will bring you anywhere worth being.

mark Joseph "young"

Category Archives: Bible and Theology

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#168: Praying for You

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#163: So You Want to Be a Christian Musician

A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.