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The first swift kick to my youthful idealism was delivered—not so surprisingly, in retrospect—by the Beastie Boys. In the late 1980s I took a year off from college to work at a retreat center in the mountains of north Georgia, hosting youth groups that drove up from the Atlanta suburbs. They would tumble off church buses dressed in Hard Rock t-shirts, well-scrubbed teenagers steeped in the New South's blend of genteel religiosity and upward mobility. In those days before the iPod, they came laden with Walkmans and bulging pouches of cassette tapes. These were mainline Protestant kids, mostly Methodists and Presbyterians, and their musical choices seemed largely to have escaped parental oversight. No self-respecting Baptist would allow their child to go off to church camp with a box full of Black Sabbath and AC/DC tapes, but these youth showed up with unapologetically secular collections—heavy metal for some, Celine Dion for others. They spent their free hours in the still, green Georgia mountains sitting on the porches of the cabins, plugged in to the sounds of home.
Youth ministry in America, at least since the rise of youth culture (which is to say, since the invention of youth ministry), requires continual recalibration of the axiom "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Popular culture is hard to beat. After a few months of watching groups while away their hours praying along with popular music (as the crocheted wall hanging in our staff quarters said, "To sing is to pray"),
I decided I couldn't convince kids to put away their Walkmans. But maybe I could get them to think about what they were hearing. The Pop Music Workshop was born.
The Pop Music Workshop would probe the deeper meanings of the music kids already had in their Walkmans. It would encourage youth to critically examine the music they were hearing, and yet it would do so not in a spirit of condemnation but of sympathetic attention to the yearnings and fragmentary solutions offered by the artists of the day. (I would later learn an evangelical phrase for this— "engaging the culture.") Until each group showed up in the conference room at the appointed hour, where I was waiting with a tape deck and a sound system, I had no idea what music they would bring. We'd pop in a tape, listen to the song, and then, aided by a whiteboard and some notes I had scribbled while listening, talk about what it meant.
At first, the workshop was a success. It was an exhilarating kind of speaking, interactive and improvisational, and I took delight in seeing youth pay attention to the lyrics of popular music, often apparently for the first time, and correlate them with the gospel. Critics of contemporary worship music sometimes gripe that Christians have simply borrowed and baptized the language of pop romance, and there's something to that, but it always seemed to me that pop songs were borrowing from religion more than the other way around. "I'm forever yours, faithfully," Steve Perry sang during one memorable slow dance of my high school years; even then, with my arms around a girl who consumed every ounce of my attention and desire and whose name I cannot now recall, I had an inkling that eternal love was too much to promise or expect from another mortal, and that the longings I felt could only be satisfied somewhere else.
Such were the conversations I had with church kids from all over Georgia for the better part of the year, and more often than not, unpredictable and risky as the format was, there were small and large epiphanies, kindled by the tinder of popular music in teenage hearts.
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