Adventures in incredulity, v1.0

A few months back, a leader in our faith community got up and made this cool announcement about how iTunes had lent its support to one of our CDs and we had made the charts there.

A few days later, he received an e-mail from someone who had attended the church that day, expressing their “disappointment” that he was endorsing a band that was not explicitly Christian.

Come again?

This is nothing new, believe me. I’ve heard rumors of it, but being on the direct end of it is something differently entirely. You want to scream, shake their shoulders, sit down with them, reason, but in the end all you can do is silently shake your head and keep on doing what you’re doing.

Frankly, it also hurt. I don’t quite know when faith became something you lived out and struggled with only on Sunday mornings, but it’s obviously shifted. I don’t know what this person expected to find when they listened to Maida Vale’s music: “Jesus is a friend of mine?” (either you know, or you don’t)

Somehow the expression of full-humanity, of longing and fulfillment, of love and rejection, of sin and redemption failed to connect with her. If we have to turn our backs on being fully human in order to be a Christian band, then perhaps we don’t want to be a Christian band.

Maybe we weren’t ever a “Christian band”.

But maybe if struggle, transcendence, fun, desire, and doubt can be part of faith, then, well, we’ll let you put two and two together.