“The Set List”

The situation

Dale is not a real man. He's a composite, built out of cases like his, and every name here is changed. Dale is forty-one. He drives a parts truck for a plumbing supply company, and for eleven years he's led the music at a church of about two hundred people. The church pays him four hundred dollars a month, which is not a living and was never meant to be one. His wife Carrie teaches the four-year-olds. Their middle daughter is in the youth group with the same six girls she's known since kindergarten. The new pastor came in March. Good preacher. Young. Everybody liked him. On a Tuesday night at eleven-forty, Dale got an email. Subject line: Sunday set, small ask. The body said this. Love that hymn. Let's cut the second and third verses. The wrath language reads as exclusionary to our guests, and we've got new people in the room. I had new lyrics written for those verses. They're attached. Let's plan on the new version for rehearsal Thursday. Dale read the attachment twice. The new verses don't deny anything. They just don't say anything. And rehearsal is Thursday. If he says no, nobody fires him. There's no meeting, no letter. There's just a different name on the schedule in August, and a word that starts following him around the fellowship hall. Difficult. Not a team player. Making it about himself.

The technique

So what's actually being run here. Not an argument about music. If it were an argument about music, it would still be going on Friday. Here's the mechanism. A doctrine gets reclassified as a tone problem. The verse isn't false, nobody said false. It's exclusionary. It reads harsh. It's a style question now, a hospitality question, and once it's a style question, Dale is no longer defending the atonement. He's defending his preferences. And a man defending his preferences in church looks like a man with an ego. That move is the whole play. In the book, William Green's Rules for Radical Christians, it's the first pattern in the chapter on the Arts Mountain: a conviction redefined as conduct. Change what kind of thing it is, and you change who has to justify himself. Two more pieces are stacked on top. Manufactured consensus. The email says we've got new people in the room, and by Thursday somebody will say the team's already on board, though no one can name a single member of the team who said so. And the deadline that prevents deliberation. Tuesday at eleven-forty at night, for Thursday. That's not scheduling. That's a window too small to call an elder, too small to read the new lyrics slowly, too small to pray about it with your wife awake. Deadlines like that aren't about the calendar. They're about making sure the decision gets made by a tired man, alone, at his kitchen table.

The temptation

Which is exactly where Dale is on Wednesday night. Everybody's in bed. One lamp on. He's got the new lyrics open on his phone, and here's what makes it hard. They're not heresy. They're warm. They mention love. They mention grace. A man could sing them without lying. He'd just be singing without meaning anything, which is a different sin and a quieter one. And the voice in that kitchen is not a devil with a pitchfork. It sounds like a reasonable friend. It's one Sunday. It's just paper, Dale, it's words on a page. God knows your heart. Pick a better hill than a hymn verse. Stay in the room where you can do some good. Every one of those lines has a grain of truth in it, and the grain of truth is the point. That's what makes it work. It is one Sunday. God does know his heart. That last one is the sharpest, and notice that it's not a comfort. It's an indictment. God knows his heart, and God knows Dale would be standing in front of two hundred people teaching them to sing something Dale himself does not believe. Look at Aaron at the foot of the mountain. He built the calf, and then, Exodus thirty-two, verse five, he made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD. Nobody announced apostasy. They kept the name of God on the service. They just changed what the service was about. It felt like a compromise. It was a worship service.

Your move

Here's the counter, and it isn't louder. It's a change of ground. They've put the fight on taste. Dale has to put it back on confession. Singing is confessing. A congregation's hymnal is its shortest creed, and the man at the microphone is not choosing decor, he's leading people in saying things out loud to God. So Dale doesn't argue about the arrangement. He asks the church to state its own doctrine, in writing, before Thursday. Here are the words. Pastor, singing is confessing, and I can't confess what I don't believe. Show me in writing which doctrine of this church that verse contradicts. That's it. Calm, courteous, no accusation. It names the sincerely held religious conviction and it hands the burden back where it started. If the verse is false, the church should be able to say so from its own statement of faith. If it isn't false, then there is no reason to cut it, and everybody in the room now knows that. Two more moves. Before Thursday, tell one brother and one elder exactly what you've decided and why. Not to build a faction. To pre-commit, so the decision is already made when the pressure arrives, because a man who has told nobody will fold in a hallway in nine seconds. And keep being excellent. Show up early. Tune the band. Learn the new songs that aren't the problem. Don't sulk, don't work the parking lot. Be so obviously useful that the only thing left to say about you is the true thing.

Scripture & close

Colossians chapter three, verse sixteen. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. Teaching. That's what the set list is. A song you don't believe is a lie you taught two hundred people to sing. This is the Arts & Entertainment Mountain. If this is happening to you, Ask: rules for radical christians dot com, slash ask. Your first one is free. And to know which of the seven mountains you are standing on, take the free assessment at rules for radical christians dot com, slash start. Stand your ground. We'll see you on the wall.