John Ellis and the CCM machine: finding your own way home.

Tree63 was the very first live band I really saw. They were the beloved sons, adopted into the contemporary Christian music scene from South Africa and were a great live band blending ambitious rock anthems and worship music. The band led by John Ellis were very good at what they did.

But in 2009, the band split up and Ellis tracked his own way forward. What became obvious fairly quickly was that he wasn't that enamoured by the Christian music scene, or in fact modern Christendom in general. He was fairly vocal about this:

"There's definitely a healthy dose of defiance in there, that's for sure. I just started feeling trapped as an individual over the years, and Tree63 felt oppressive towards the end. We were signed to a label that only wanted a very narrow thing from me as a writer, and trapped as we had become in the world of modern Christianity we were always expected to tow the party line. You can only do that for so long before it starts eating you alive. I just started feeling done with being told how to live, what to do etc. It felt like I was in a cult. I think it's true for anybody in life, to some extent: don't allow yourself to be walked over, find your own way home, stop auditioning for peoples' favour..."

He's an interesting guy to keep track of, someone who knows the machine from the inside out, the Western Christian machine. And someone who is passionate about his country and his role within it. What is perhaps just as interesting is the reaction from some of his Tree63 fans struggling with his honesty. South Africa and its Christians often seem in many ways a time warp to someone in progressive New Zealand society:

"John, Tree63 sustain my faith over the last decade, having a chronic illness and being close to death a few times. You have a gift from God and have saved lives WORLDWIDE with it. You had the opportunity to save a member of my family but by the time you spoke with them you were going on about about athiesm. If you are disillusioned about 'modern Christianity' be the spark that begins the change. Now you're having fun in Durban going your own way but you're not saving lives anymore. Come back."

"Where is Jesus ? God ? what happended ? :("

Have a listen to his first solo single, Own Way Home - pretty straight down the middle pop-rock but intriguing in light of his personal journey.

Harlem Shake @ Elephant

Yeah, so we jumped on the bandwagon. No, this is not a move of the spirit. Yes, it was lots of fun. Yes, about those guys at the front on the right - they are for real.

I can't stop watching this.

mission strategy: shut up and listen!

I can't even begin to describe how much I resonate with this video clip. Because the whole time I was listening to him, I kept thinking about the way churches operate a lot of the time. The have their key values all ready to go, have their blueprint already set up for the machine to get running and preaching series ready and waiting to sniff out any private heresies.

But what about really paying attention to where the people are at first? What about taking people with you by meeting them where they are? What about listening well first so that we can express the character of God to people in a way that actually helps them?

Shut up and listen ecclesiology. I like it.

There's no 'I' in anxiety. Oh wait. There totally is. Oh gosh.

I’m a worry. Seriously.

This summer, while most of my friends seem to have been prancing around on beaches and smiling for cameras, I’ve spent most of my time creating a vast array of situations in which all the good things in my life could be taken away from me due to unforeseen external factors. My mind is convinced that the universe picks on me, and that I’m destined for catastrophe. I suffer from anxiety for a bit every year or so.

Somewhere along the line, probably as a result of some repressed traumatic incident from my childhood, I developed an inclination for my mind to prefer a particular neural pathway. This puts me on constant high alert. Phone calls terrify me as potential bringers of bad news, babies scare the heck out of me due to their dropability, and the other day I heard a noise and panicked because I couldn’t work out whether it was my phone, work computer, Macbook, Skype, Facebook, Instagram, email or TV. Luckily it was just my fire alarm.

Sometimes it turns into social anxiety, and the fun really begins. Negative past experiences tell me that talking to girls will result in being compared to a rat like that time when I was 12 years old, or that on a date I’ll say something totally bizarre like that time I asked my lady friend across the table what the plural of foetus was. She wasn’t impressed. (It is both foetuses and foeti by the way, I researched afterwards).

I’ve literally trained myself to droop my eyelids when talking to strangers to disguise the panic and hide the crazy before I go back home to research lung disease while also discovering that the back pain that I’m assuming is caused by my worry  could be spinal stenosis, fibromyalgia or spondylitis.

If I can’t think of anything to worry about I usually just arrive at the inevitable conclusion that I will probably die really soon because there’s no way that things stay good for long. It is usually at this point that I grab beer and vow to name my firstborn Lorezepam if I survive.

Pill poppers of the Pacific

Originally I was reluctant to be this open about my mental issues, concluding that if people knew I was like this then everyone would be freaked out, would slowly stop talking to me, leaving me isolated and destined to fall into an escalating drug addiction and die painfully and quietly with only cats as friends. But it turns out that New Zealand has a bit of an issue. It turns out that 25% of you are probably just as nuts as I am.

According to a study reported on in the Sunday Star Times, last year 784,000 Kiwis were prescribed drugs for depression, insomnia and anxiety. This is up 50% since 2007 putting us in the high end of the world spectrum for anxiety and depression. Anxiety is driving a significant amount of behavioural and emotional problems in children and there are dangers that we are too readily turning to a pill to be the messiah of our minds. With a growing trend like this, you’ve got to ask what’s behind it, and then how best to address it. It appears to be the plague of the net generation for the West, like smallpox.  Just more panicked and less itchy.

The study suggests that while medication helps, it doesn’t fix the deeper causes of mental disorders. With the fast pace of modern society and the complexity it brings, doctors are finding it is far more simple to just throw drugs at patients rather than addressing underlying issues. And while a small percentage of depression is actually caused by a chemical imbalance, quite frankly, Prozac is cheaper than sorting out someone’s marriage.

“Make me happy. Make me feel good.”

But perhaps these are all the wrong questions. In the early 90’s, influential pastor Eugene Peterson once addressed the question, “Do pastors face more difficult problems today than in previous generations?” He responded by saying, “I know this is a mixed-up, difficult, damaged generation. But it’s arguable that the main difference today is not how much people are hurting, but how much they expect to be relieved from their hurting.”

“The previous century suffered just as much; in fact, probably much more. Just think of all the illness, death in childbirth, infant mortality, plagues. The big difference today is that we have this mentality that if it’s wrong, you can fix it. You don’t have to live with any discomfort or frustration. And the pastor is in the front line of people who get approached: “Make me happy. Make me feel good.”

Perhaps the real issue here is that we are constantly bombarded with narratives about human experience that insist that life should be about one carefree road trip after the next and to expect life to be a fulfilling and exhilarating journey of adventure. That to experience anything else, to suffer, is in fact wrong.

Maybe that’s the issue. We’ve convinced ourselves that suffering isn’t supposed to happen to us. That it’s not necessary. And it makes it difficult for us to understand our suffering God. And we are certainly not okay with not being okay. So we try to make it stop rather than dealing with it. We avoid the source. Not that I would know any better, I have panic attacks over non-existent problems.

I just don’t think you can’t just swallow your brokenness away.

I’m not on drugs, kids.

new things. new video. elephant!

It's been an amusing time informing people of the name change for our service.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the amount of ambiguous yet sincere names we have for our different groups and initiatives in church. I've been a part of 3 seperate 'Pulse' groups across completely different continents and names intended to glorfiy the Lord through loaded meaning like 'Revive', 'Regenerate' and 'Illuminate' are all too common. Naming seems token most of the time, and often leaves me cringing and just wanting to call it all simply 'church' and 'homegroup'.

But it would seem that most people would prefer the classic names and opt for something less strange than we have. For most, when I tell them we've named our church group 'elephant', I get raised eyebrows, a slow nod and the simple response of "Interesting...".

However, helping to shape the culture of our young adults group at Windsor Park has meant that although we've had specific ideas in mind, we've also kept our ears to the ground with what people are struggling with, what they're really thinking about, and what isn't working in our church environment. It has lead us to become a group that grabs the tricky issues by the horns, let the uncomfortable voices get some air time and learn to hold things in tension. We've had to move out of opinions and standpoints in the black and white and become comfortable camping in the greys of life.

Alongside all of this is a desire for everyone to be authentic with each other. And this comes at a cost too. We want people to be honest and to feel at home enough to talk about their depression, anxiety, addictions and doubts. Because, quite frankly, we're all a bit messed up, and adhering to some sort of false veneer of perfection just isolates everyone. We want to struggle well together and not pretend.

So with all of this we just don't want to adopt certain behaviours only for church. We want to get rid of our imposter selves and learn of the God who loves us just as we are and not as we should be. This scandalous love that demands nothing from us but our attention. We want to really understand that though sin abounds, grace really does abound all the more. It is so foreign to our human concepts of right and wrong and justice that we often diminish it. But it's not about performance and putting up a front. It's about acknowledging how it really is and knowing God in that.

We're not ignoring the elephant in the room.

And that's why the name fits, at least for now.