Nick Bogardus

This is the fifth and final post in my series on cover songs.

The introduction and first post, featuring Obadiah Parker’s cover of “Hey Ya!” is here. The second post, featuring Ryan Adams’ cover of “Wonderwall” is here. The third post featuring a beautiful choral cover of “With or Without You” by Scala & Kolacny Brothers is here, and the fourth post featuring Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” and Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” is here.

Where was I going with this? If I just wanted to turn you on to some new music, I would’ve made you a mix tape. Did I simply want to do a blog series with a theme of discussing cover songs? That seems thin and something I could leave to people who like those “I <3 The 80’s” or “I <3 The 90’s” shows on VH1. No, I’m using the analogy of a cover song to illustrate something much more impacting and to address something more timely and urgent.

Contextualization and the church.

Contextualization is something that the Church has been discussing in depth for the past decade or so, and it’s a discussion that has much to do with the coming of the Emerging Church. The fundamental question to this dialogue is, “How do we articulate the Gospel to our unique time and place?”. That question is also implicitly tied to another question, “What does it mean and look like to be a Christian in our modern setting?” Many good questions have been asked and many good answers discovered, but sadly there have also been many bad questions and conclusions. There are many good websites, books, pastors, and scholars who’ve analyzed the situation; my hope is to toss my analogy into the mix.

I don’t think that the church should be approaching contextualization from a deconstructionist or reductionist point of view, thinking that we need to tear everything down and start all over. I don’t think we should be approaching articulating the Gospel with the metaphor of “repainting” or “reimagining” because those two approaches seem to be too subjective and unanchored from the truth that’s in the Gospel.

I suggest we approach contextualization as though we were doing a cover song; and here is why.

In the Gospel, like a cover song, we are talking about contexts. To properly communicate the message in both, you have to understand the context in which the original was written and the context that you’re bringing it into. You can’t just tear a piece of the Bible out and slap it into 2008 expecting the meaning to translate. You have to get to know the audience, writer, and the writer’s intent to really convey the meaning of the song. Similarly, you need to understand how to connect that meaning to your contemporary audience.

Ryan Adams’ audience likes alt-country, so he did a version of “Wonderwall” that pulled it out of its original context and presented it to his fans. Maybe they knew the song already, and if so, maybe they heard the song in a whole new way.

In the Gospel, like a cover song, we’re not asked to write a new song or be the stars. The star is the song itself and we are to be true to the general musical framework of the song. Now, stick with me as I toss out some lame musical jargon. Perhaps we can “remix” it, emphasizing the simplest parts of it for broader commercial appeal - I’d say the seeker-sensitive churches do this - but we’re not to make a ‘mash-up’ with it - because that would be taking another song (truth) and saying that it’s equally as valid and making a new song of out of it; that would be syncretism. And, we’re certainly not able to ‘sample’ it like a hip-hop artist, jarring the piece we like from its original context to make it part of our song, our story, with us as the star. No, it’s not like that. The Gospel provides the structure, melody, and lyrics we’re to be true to; and God, not us, is the star or hero of the story.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this; but the reason I think Christian contextualization needs to be more like a cover song than anything else is because we’re dealing with truth. The Gospel is truth. It is a true story, set it in real human history. It is a set of beliefs and doctrine that have come from this story. We have been given the song to play in the Bible. We have been given the words, the melody, the core of the song. To veer from those things would be to make a whole new song. The only question we have to explore is how are we going to play it?

This is why repainting and reimagining fall short in my opinion. They’re rooted in the subjective; they’re completely up to the artist to revise. They seem to disregard that we are given an objective set of truth with which to work.

My concern for my generation is that we learn the Gospel - that we learn it like our favorite song that we hum over and over, that we play on repeat in the car and sing at the top of our lungs. My concern is that we learn the truths like lyrics and melodies so that when someone says, “How does that story go?” we can sing it off the top of our heads. My concern is that we practice and learn our instruments so that we’re first bringing the truths about God, sin, Jesus, the cross, the resurrection, and their implications to bear on our own hearts constantly - like a guitar player callouses his hands practicing - to be able bring the truths to bear in new ways, to new contexts, to new people.

It’s hard to add anything to the discussion about “With or Without You” because it’s a song that already has connections to so many people. But, if a teenage Belgian girls choir is bold enough to try…