What's In A Song?
Turning Our Hearts
by Kevin Twit
Associate Pastor of Christ Community Church, Franklin, TN &
Campus Minister for Belmont University, Nashville, TN

"Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without thinking." Romans 12:2 paraphrased in The Message .

Recently public television aired a documentary entitled, "The Merchants of Cool." The program revealed how the various media conglomerates shape our understanding of what "cool" is, and then steer the buying taste of our youth in this regard. Working with college students, I found this very relevant and so I invited some students over to watch the program. The show featured people like MTV's vice president of brand strategy who described how they go about identifying what "cool" is, and then how they sell that message to our youth. After watching the program, one student said something I found quite perceptive. We were talking about how we as Christians can be set free from slavery to the culture's idea of what it means to be cool. This student raised his hand and asked, "How can we can be set free from trying to be cool when churches seek to hire 'cool' youth directors? All I could say was, "That's a good question." It is an excellent question!

The culture does squeeze us, even in the Church. When we come together in worship it is to have our sanity restored. It is about the restoring of what God says is true about life, rather than being squeezed by the message our culture preaches. Worship is about restoring our sanity because we so often live in a sort of insanity! When we believe that we earn God's favor by what we do, when we believe we can manipulate God to do whatever we want, we are not living in line with reality. That is living in a fantasy world. The world we actually live in is the world in which God loves us because of His great mercy in Christ. Yet we rarely live like that.