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UK churches keen to host heavy metal bands after duet with organist is a hit
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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This isn't appropriate. Churches are places of worship, not rock concert venues. Or anything for that matter which isn't somehow or in some way worshipping God.
The thing is, a lot of C of E "Churches" are just ran by "modernists" who are basically just closeted agnostics at this point who only do stuff for money, unfortunately.
I'm not from England, but i do pay a lot of attention to music and, broadly speaking, religion, and I'm not entirely sure this is a fair take. Places of worship are not traditionally meant to be exclusively worship zones; they can and should be places to engage the community. An example is that old (medieval) german churches traditionally gave free beer to their patrons as an incentive to attend mass. One major criticism of modern religion is their inability to adapt to modern youth, and this seems like a creative way to engage the community.
Additionally, a lot of "heavy metal" (which is separate from Rock) is basically classical scales but sped up and using distortion. For me personally, there's a subgenre of metal that incorporates operatic vocalists that i find surprisingly fitting for such a sitting.
But people who are coming to concerts aren't going to typically stay for Jesus.
The main reason churches are losing youth/young adults is due to a failure of keeping a community of them. Churches creating young adult fellowships and youth fellowships are important. There is definitely an audience there, as non-denominational churches know this and know to keep a Christian centre, hence the youth go there.
Free beer as an incentive to attend mass is a bad example as well, you should attend mass because you want to go to mass.
Maybe the reason we don't go to church anymore is the lot of you are more interested in our musical tastes than the pedophiles hiding within your ranks.
Of course we care about paedophilia. You have to be deranged not to
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54433295
This you guys?
Why are you more concerned over the Church of England than the BBC with the whole Jimmy Savile scandal?
Didn't Jimmy Savile regularly dine with the Supreme Governor of the church? Was he not a family friend?
I think you missed the point.
The point that you want the BBC to take the entire fall for something your Church's leaders were involved in?
Or the point that you would rather prevent Christian children from hearing distorted guitars than confronting the real fact why children don't want to be around you guys?
No, my point is that you cannot just do "whattaboutthisissue"
I'm not whataboutting the issue. I'm saying bringing in the metal heads with their distorted guitars might make your community safer for children.
If they want Jesus I don't see the problem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ they're VERY welcome.
Reminds me of this picture:
Not sure I'm following your points here. You suggest that the church needs to keep and maintain a community, but doing things that attracts such potential members is inappropriate? I'm not really understanding what the idea to get new members is. Outreach and knowing your audience are important factors in growing a community.
One way to attract members is to showcase that the things that matter or are interesting (within reason) to potential members matters to the current members. People tend to be attracted to people that at least appear to understand them. Highlighting that everyone around you is wrong and doesn't get it kind of pinpoints a major underlying issue with the church today.
Unfortunately, the reality is that every group needs a way to attract members and increase attendance. I'm providing one from 1400s Germany, and some areas in Germany are, to this day, prolifically religious (bavaria, for example). Maybe it turns out it was a good idea to do what you can to keep members?
But you'd want an audience that is actually religious- not coming for the free beer.
That's the part I'm not understanding. So how do you recruit new members if you exclusively advertise to people that already agree with you? Your audience is explicitly people who already are part of your group, and that number continues to decline.
There are two groups to try to entice - current members who are losing interest, and non members who are currently non believers. If you only create events that are catering to current and active members, you alienate the others and won't grow
Are they preaching the Gospel at this metal concert?
That isn't the point though, it's to first better engage the community, then preach later. there's an art to proper outreach. Convince the community that you're part of it, then they express interest in your organization. That's when you go for it. If it's all preaching all day, that simply won't attract new members. And overly preachy metal music would probably chase almost everyone away. And who would want to hang out somewhere that's just non-stop preaching? That sounds horrible
Not everything is completely black and white. In fact, that kind of exclusive thinking is what drives people away. The point here is to improve the image, encourage the community to get more engaged, and just be there. Potential new members will come along.
Honestly, the mindset of "why bother if you aren't preaching" sounds very similar to a business caring only about its stocks. What about research? Quality control? Community outreach? Those things are important for a good company to thrive, as opposed to one looking only at short term profits. Look at what's happening with Boeing. They're focused on stocks only, the same way some churches only care about preaching. and their image is tanking, and everyone is wondering what happened.
If your goal is to acquire more members, then you need to find a way to reach other people in a way that makes sense to them, not you. Imagine trying to teach English to non English speakers. You don't just do it randomly in the town square, spouting off the virtues of English speaking. you need to entice people to even want to not only learn English in the first place, but from you.
There's more tasteful things to do than a blasphemous band which is literally called "Pantheist".
Appealing to people who'll never have any taste or want for God isn't going to be helpful. People need to know the good news.
Now you're making assumptions, and have already missed the point entirely. This would be the engage the community portion, not the get new members portion. It's a long process. You can't just proselytize at every moment, it simply doesn't work that way anymore.