Keith Green, Bill Hybels, and the Loss of Steeples and Bells

Keith Green

I used to love Keith Green’s music and singing when I was a younger Christian. Not to say I don’t still retain some warm memories of his songs.  But in my early twenties I found him to be the one singer who spoke to me. And he was already dead by the time I first heard of him.  A big influence in my early Christian walk.

Okay I loved Larry Norman and his lyricism and irreverent attitude (I once saw him play live in Belfast and he was scarier than a paramilitary with a few pints in him). And I enjoyed early Randy Stonehill (especially the Welcome to Paradise classic).

But there was something sincere and deep and otherworldly about Keith Green. I still find myself singing those songs in my head from time to time.

The Prodigal Son Suite was a favourite (although, thanks Tim Keller, for making me now wonder why there wasn’t a second Suite for the older brother!).  I also loved I Want To Be More Like Jesus. And I still do. Love it and want to be it. All these years later. Which show just how much Keith Green got our longings right.

Jesus changed him in much the same way Jesus changed many of those on a spiritual quest back in the 70s – through a radical conversion, with the attendant radical lifestyle changes that he and his wife Melody took on. This was not mainstream Christian lifestyle stuff, much less mainline Christian worship stuff.

Over the years I have found that I have distanced myself a little from some of the intensity he espoused, especially when he slipped into the role of playing God in his lyrics. He came dangerously close to extra-biblical and – it has to be said – unhelpful and un-pastoral material that played into my uncertainties.

Lines such as this for example from To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice, in which he calls out Christians for their haphazard, and often lukewarm lives before a holy God:

But if you can’t come to me everyday then don’t bother coming at all.

You see I don’t believe that is how God feels about us. I know, for a cold stone fact cos I know how I’ve lived in the years since then, that I haven’t come to God every day. I know I ought to have done so.

But I also know now – and if you are reading this and need assurance – that the Bible says that when we approach God we approach a “throne of grace”, and we do so in times of need. And often that need is my lukewarm neglect of God.

If I don’t come to him for a week, and then front up feeling unworthy and guilty, the throne is still a throne of grace. So that line, hasn’t aged well for me. Theologically at least, in light of my nearly fifty years as a Christian.

Steeples and Bells

On a more nuanced, and wider cultural note, another line from another one of my favourites, How Can They Live Without Jesus? doesn’t settle well in our current context. Don’t get me wrong, I love the song, and especially – as I get older – these lines:

How can they live without Jesus/How can live without god’s love/How can they feel so at home down here/When there’s so much more up above/Throwin’ away things that matter/They hold on to things that don’t/The world has gone crazy/But soon maybe/A lot more are gonna know

So, so true. But here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, and it is in relation to these lines in that same song:

For he’s not just a religion/With steeples and bells/Or a salesman who will sell you/The things you just want to hear

That first line in particular.  It was clear that Green – born in 1953 – had that Boomer suspicion of all things structured about the faith. For him, sincerity lay in a lack of structure. The more structure the less real. The less real the less likely to be how Jesus would have done it.

By stating that  Jesus is not “just” a religion with the familiar markings of a church building, and the calls to worship that bells ensued, he was seeking to distance the gospel from the conservative formalism that so many Boomers had rejected in toto in the culture, not just in church.

Green himself was an iconoclast. This is a man, after all, who gave tens of thousands of his albums away for free, and refused to charge for his concerts. He practiced what he preached.Yet let me note an irony about those two lines I just quoted.

The iconoclastic rejection and removal of the former was often accompanied by the uncritical adoption of the latter.

What do I mean by that? Simply this: the rejection of church traditions for the supposed sake of the gospel has left something of a vacuum for a whole generation (or two) of Christians, who are ahistorical, unaligned,  uncertain about Christianity’s place in society, and unsure about how the church’s convictions have shaped the culture, or even if they did in the first place.

Church In the Mall

The seeker sensitive movement is a case in point, though it’s not my whipping boy here. When you hear ex-Willow Creek founder, Bill Hybels, say that when his philosophy of ministry, and church style,  was partly down to the abiding horror of pews and stained glass among his cohort, you realise steeples and bells were not his thing either.

But perhaps in giving that up, Hybels gave up more than he knew at the time. And so did those following him.  Hybels wanted to reach people who felt the same way he did.

Their familiarity with steeples and bells (and itchy Sunday best) had bred contempt. Enough contempt to get them to leave. The places they did love were the malls that were springing up all over middle America.

Non-threatening, user-oriented, ubiquitous and uniform. The mall would be the template for the return to church of those who had given up on church. They would find themselves on an escalator getting coffee before they even realised they were in church!

Hybels reckoned he could entice Boomers back with things that didn’t reek of church and tradition. The dechurched clearly didn’t want tradition. At least not any longer.

This was the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates generation. They wanted progress. They wanted a modern way of doing life that put history, if not to the sword, at least in its place.

And so the steeple and bells clutter had to be cleared for Jesus. The church organ had to be consigned to the vestibule for the sake of the gospel,

Which means despite their external differences, Hybels and Keith Green were on the same page in terms of what they thought people required if they were to become Christian. They required the sloughing off of the religious aspects of the faith.

Hybels felt that people might be willing to give church another try if it felt more like the mall experience they were already used to, replete with felt-needs sermons and a building in the latest colours and music that eschewed the ancient.

Of course, Green was more Brooklyn hippie and Hybels more upper middle-management Chicago, but in rejecting the traditional – Green for mostly principled reasons, and Hybel for self-confessed pragmatic ones – they were not that far apart.

Salesmanship has Won the Day

Yet nature abhors a vacuum. While Green said that Jesus was neither the religious or the salesman option, it has proven far more difficult to dispense with that idea than singing about it. It seems like it’s one or the other.

So as I’ve intimated, it could be the case that the loss of steeples and bells was the final safety brake that, once removed, meant that when it comes to church, it became salesman the whole way down.

For salesmanship has indeed won the day in our churches. We’re still trying to do the attractional thing that lowers the bar for attendance. How can we get people to hear the things they don’t – or so they assume – want to hear, but telling them it in a way that they might want to hear?

Even those of us who would view the evangelistic efforts of the likes of Hybel and his ilk as theologically deficient at best, and pastorally destructive at worst, are fairly aligned with the idea that we are there to attract people to our events and our talk-series. Indeed our social media presence says as much.

We are constantly chasing a smaller and smaller number from a shrinking sample group, while encouraging that same sample group – strung out from life and commutes and weekend sport – to bring their friends.

Yet I wonder, if we’d stuck with the steeples and bells, where we might be now? Surely not in a worse place. In fact the resurgence of interest in Christianity, and the movement of younger Christians within Christianity, is often in the steeples and bells direction.  Did we see that coming? We did not.

We are living in a rootless world, in which so much of modern life is an unstable chimera. We have little direction, are disabused of history, and uncertain what we can trust. And in the midst of all of that we are seeing the traditional forms of church become more compelling to a younger generation. They want something to cling to.

Liturgy is back. Or liturgy-lite at least. We’ve got a hybrid version of formal and informal worship in our conservative, evangelical church planting movement.  Yet even that was something of a false start. Even the Gen X crowd were more interested in aesthetic when it came to the traditions (steeples, bells, candles were oh so ironic in a Kurt Cobain kinda way).

Post-Ironic Steeples and Bells

But now?  We’re not even ironic any more, we’re post-ironic. And – irony of ironies – we’re seeing a surge of  interest among young people who have never been to church before, in the extremely non-ironic forms of the faith: Roman Catholicism of the crunchy variety, and Eastern Orthodoxy of the “dunk-the-baby-twelve-times” variety.

And many younger evangelicals are nibbling around the edges of Rome, espousing its longevity, its transcendence, its monolithic nature (which of course it isn’t), and the fact that it does strangeness well.  Everyone’s into Pints With Aquinas, Bishop Robert Barron, or the Hallowed App.

And that’s why steeples and bells are having a moment. Which, I suspect, will last more than a moment. Many young people – faced with the nihilism and sexual desecration of the age, are going all steeply and bellsy.

Steeples speak of a time when the most compelling – and tallest – building in the town was the one with a steeple. They speak of long time. Steady, rhythmic decades. Steeples pointed to God, and God looked down upon steeples. There was a time when transcendence was in ascendance.

And bells? Well they speak of short time. They toll for the daily pitter-patters of our lives, and remind us that once we were not dictated by the distracting ping of our phones, the endless scrolling, the always daylight nature of our suburban lives, or the secular calendar of the end of financial year sale or Black Friday.

Put them together and we have a different way of looking at time. One that is richer, longer and full of meaning. Faced with the bleak post-ironic nihilism of our day, we find we want something more, something old, or at least older than a 1990s warehouse. That’s why steeples and bells are making a comeback.

And we’re seeing it in the famous and famously new Christians – the Russell Brands and the Ayaan Hirsi Alis. Such types have completely bypassed the liberal churches that had assumed they were the ones ready for the trickle/onslaught of post-Christians who wanted a religious-lite faith, a watered-down-enough-to-be-palatable Christianity more in line with modern sensibilities.

Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has converted to Christianity

Turns out, ain’t nobody got time for that!  If the likes of Brand and Hirsi Ali are going to do this thing, they’re going to do it right, all steeples and bells and stuff. They’ve seen the modern world and the grimacing skull behind the smiling face, and they don’t like what they see.

What steeples and bells tell us is that God works through history. Yet along with the enervating and eviscerating post-liberal ideologies, Christians decided too that history was their enemy. So we uncritically chucked it away too.

Of course, not every Christian culture through history had steeples and bells, but our Western culture did, and those steeples and bells were accompanied by, a deeply formed and discipling way of looking at the world – humanity, morality,  politics, art, institutions, economics,  progress -, from which  the West is now coming adrift.

But lest we finish with you feeling I have been harsh on Keith Green, let me acknowledge the beauty of these lines:

My eyes are dry/My faith is old/My heart is hard/My prayers are cold/And I know how I ought to be/Alive to You and dead to me/But what can be done/For an old heart like mine/Soften it up/With oil and wine/The oil is You, Your Spirit of love/Please wash me anew/With the wine of Your Blood

Keith Green intended that as a personal lament. Sitting here in the post-Christian wreckage, it could just as well be the cri de couer  of our culture.