Radiohead's highly anticipated album "In Rainbows" was available for download this morning. I've seen no figures yet as to how successful the download was. This is being hailed as a groundbreaking, as a major artist/band is thumbing their nose at the industry.
Corky has already posted something on this but I couldn't help reflect this morning about Keith Green's break with his friends at his record label, Sparrow Records. His convictions would no longer allow him to charge for the gospel and the album, released in 1980, was available for "whatever you could pay", both in concerts and by mail. Keith joked that it was the "worst selling album of all time". According to Wikipedia, by 1982, 200,000 units had "sold".
Alas, to my knowledge, none of Keith's friends in the industry followed suit and Contemporary Christian Music became an industry.
Though Radiohead's motives aren't as "sanctified", I have to wonder if the church, rarely at the forefront of social change, will be reminded of the prophetic voice it heard in 1980 and be challenged once again to offer the gospel at no charge.
6 comments:
Is it possible to make the gospel available at literally "no charge"? Really? Then who pays for the radio program, the Christian book, the church building, the furnishings, etc.?
My concern is not that it is available at "NO CHARGE" but that we in the church should not make EXCESSIVE CHARGES for what we do. For example, a song book has to be sold because we have to pay for the paper, the printing, the time consumed in the project, etc.
This could be debated at length.
Once I became a "fulltime" minister I was tremedously relieved to be able to leave the secular workplace. I was not prepared for it being a different world. One of the things you and I discovered was that the only thing besides hypocrisy that the unchurched don't like about the church is the professional posturing. Later I was saddened to find that the gatekeepers of this professional ministry were blatantly secular and the "market" to be often more brutal than corporate America . In 1986 I preached against paid ministry due to a biblical understanding of Paul's "theology of bivocation". The MRI tube led me to rethink it, and so I went to the "church of the royal court". I am back in the workplace and the "church of the prophetic imagination". I don't want a AB to read me say I like it, but I have come to see it as a church/kingdom division, thanks to Arthur Glasser.
Yes, you know, as a minister and as a missionary, and now as a missionary administrator I have never liked the "Professional Posturing" that happens. I really don't believe that outsiders would know as much about this as we (the insiders) do. I have been rebuked, dis-appointed, made to feel like dirt by a few - but I choose to believe that most of my colleagues are in the ministry because they have been called. Maybe, may be, just may be that after 51 years of full-time ministry that I'm still naive about that. I know for sure that I would not do what I do for only the money - altho the money is needed! AB's and GO's and GD's could do well to hear Johnny Paycheck's famous song now and then!
Maybe if our buildings, furnishings and programs weren't so expensive we wouldn't have to worry about who's gonna pay the bill.
I forgot Jesus teaching on the mount: "blessed are you when you purchase prime real estate, build state-of-the-art properties and begin expensive programs that give you a great marketing advantage...."
I'm not really this hardcore, but I do think the Christian "industry" has taken on quite a bit of excess and many of the unchurched see easily what many inside the church cannot see.
m.d. you are very "on target".
Keith Green is beautiful and his rejection of the Christian Industry was beautiful! I've seen the inside of that, and the truth is, the Christian Industry is nothing more than the world, selling Jesus trinkets and charging Christians more for the sake of feeling they are supporting Christianity. I agree with Mike that our structures are too expensive, and too binding.. .like big lead weights that hold the church down and force her to be what she is not... stationary. Ron Sider has a lot to say about this in Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience.
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