Vocies In My Head Podcast Episode #270 - What Mister Rogers Can Teach Us About Worship

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your Your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James. I'm glad you could join me this week for a few minutes. Today I am excited to be able to talk to you about Mr. Rogers a little bit more. I know I've been talking about Mr. Rogers, uh, probably more than anything else lately, but I've really been enjoying running this Twitter feed called @MrRogersSay, and it just seems like there's a real place and time for that type of interaction to happen. People are really hungry for it. This coming Friday, at least I think it's this Friday, the new Mr. Rogers documentary comes out, Won't You Be My Neighbor. Unfortunately, it's not playing anywhere near me for at least another month as far as I know, so I'm doing my my best to try to find a way to get a screener, but I'm hearing such good things about it from people who have reviewed it. It just feels like we're in a time where we need to hear wisdom of people like Mr. Rogers. What you may not know is that Mr. Rogers actually has a lot to say to us about worship, and I found a really great article this past weekend. It's been shared a lot from even just the link that I shared it from. It's not my article, it's actually from Pathéos, and. It's a section called Ponder Anew, and I wanted to share some things from this article with you today and maybe some food for thought, add a few comments of my own along the way. But it's a really good article, and I would encourage you to check it out if you have a chance. It's called What Mr. Rogers Can Teach Us About Worship, and it's written by Jonathan Aigner, I believe is how you say his name. I'll let you look it up, but A-I-G-N-E-R, uh, Jonathan Aigner, A-I-G-N-E-R. And I believe it was written back in February, but I just found it over this past weekend and really loved it and wanted to share some thoughts about this article. So what I'm going to do, I've highlighted a few points that I wanted to look at and, and address and allow the article to speak for itself. But the reason I come back to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood again and again is because of the way that Mr. Rogers on that show and in his life even embodied the neighborliness of Jesus. And the whole show was built upon, um, Jesus' command to love our neighbors as ourselves. And Mr. Rogers was unique. You wouldn't know this necessarily unless you had studied about him, but he was very intentional in the way that he lived his life as a disciple of Jesus, that that entire show was built as a vehicle for evangelism. He was considered an evangelist by his denomination. And the reason I say you wouldn't know unless you read about him was because he really used Saint Francis's words of 'Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words,' sort of as the motto. He didn't preach sermons. He didn't use scripture passages. He embodied the gospel. He embodied the teachings of Jesus through what he did on that show. Uh, you know, I, I shy away from the word evangelism a lot because I feel like there's a lot of negative connotations in our society about that. It always feels like you know, we're trying to put something over on somebody or try to get them to make some sort of a commitment that, you know, will— whether they're ready to or not. Um, and, and true evangelism in the sense that Mr. Rogers did it, and in the way that we're going to talk about today, that has to do with actual worship. It's not necessarily a preachy, altar call-y type thing. It's actually learning how to embody and live out the neighborhood, the kingdom of God, and what it means to love all people as though they are our neighbors. So, uh, the article, uh, Not Just a Good Feeling: What Fred Rogers Can Teach Us About Worship, and by Jonathan Eigner, and starts out just reminding us that 15 years ago we lost Mr. Rogers. He was a Presbyterian minister, he was a puppeteer He was a television friend and neighbor. And Jonathan points out in the article that he has a 3-year-old, and with rare exception, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is about the only show that they'll let their 3-year-old watch, um, because it's just something that they have found has been a good experience and part of the discipleship for their child. And he says in this article, and I'm reading directly from it now, Says Christian culture and the slick, distracting, disorienting worship it produces is the anti-neighborhood. It's more like the endless, mindless string of Warner Brothers cartoons, good at capturing attention, eliciting a few laughs, but leaving a greater void than was there before. And pretty soon it's not enough. Then you have to jack up the volume higher, make your scenes shorter and your dialogue quicker. Maybe that's why Christian worship has seemingly forfeited any spark of creativity, preferring instead to ride the all-powerful waves of commercial entertainment. I'm skipping down in the article a little bit. It says Mr. Rogers was the alternative, not just a cheap copy of other children's media that tried to teach a few lessons, but a real authentic alternative. Instead of cheap laughs, short bursts, and visual thrills, he insisted on refined, carefully crafted scripts, honest conversation, and relentless confrontation of tough subject matter. The homemade sets, threadbare puppets, and a complete lack of special effects were simple yet symbolic. They honored the viewer's innate tendency toward creativity. And imagination. And when it was time for pretending, that was clearly delineated by a trolley's daily transformation from a living room toy into a vehicle for mass transit in the neighborhood of make-believe. I, uh, I, I found that part of the article very helpful. I felt for some time that pop culture, pop Christianity, pop evangelism, whatever you want to call it that we so often try to put on in our churches. It's— it always seems to be chasing after a kind of energy that we're trying to produce rather than just being authentic to who we are. It feels like in many ways we've jumped onto the bandwagon of being an entertainment culture where you have to make the next thing bigger and flashier and more of a spectacle each time. And I was thinking about a little bit this week because our church has been doing VBS, Vacation Bible School. VBS seems to be the, the common abbreviation that, that we give to it. And actually, our church does a good job with it. I don't— I'm not saying anything about it negative, um, and my son loves it. He's 5 years old and the kids love it. I think they have a great time. But I do notice a tendency, you know, as I'm looking at the, the big light show— we had a fog machine when you walked in and black lights, and you know, it was all about becoming a secret agent for God, or an agent, not a secret agent. But then I noticed, you know, the, the videos, the music, the things on the screen, the excitement to get everybody built up. And you know, it's, it's good fun. It's Bible school and it's for kids and it's something special and it's something different. But I thought about how often in the church it feels like on a regular Sunday that many places I've been, have gone to, and maybe have even been guilty of doing this myself, that we've turned worship almost into that high-energy VBS mode on a Sunday morning? Because I don't know, are we afraid that the gospel of Jesus is not flashy enough? Are we afraid that it's not going to capture hearts and attention like the spectacle that we can create? Are we afraid that we, we're not going to be able to have something as imp— you know, not gonna— the gospel is not going to be impactful if we don't I don't— jazz it up. I don't know what to say exactly. I'm still trying to think through how to say this. But when I look at something like Mr. Rogers, I know just from reading a lot about him, he was really opposed to the idea of he himself, like, getting hit in the face with pies or being sort of a clown or talking in a silly voice or being anything other than just himself. He was just himself, this calm person, this person that talked to children like people. And there was something about him that, you know, people to this day, they talk about the way he was not trendy, the way he was always maybe kind of a, kind of a geeky looking guy and just kind of wore his sweaters. There was nothing cool about him, but there's something lasting about him. And there was something consistent about him, and there was something there in that day after day and the way that he lived his life and the impact that he had, um, off of the television as well. You would see him in interviews, and you would see him with relationships and people that knew him. He worked very hard as a disciple to cultivate that sort of a life, and so I have so much respect for him. I was telling my wife this week, I said, you know, in North Carolina, at a church I was serving at there for a couple of years, we had a lady that kind of was like that in the children's department. She was not our paid children's pastor. As a matter of fact, we had a paid children's pastor there that went another direction. And I don't think— this is nothing against him, but I don't think he was nearly as effective as a lady in our church who was named Shirley. And Miss Shirley, there was nothing spectacular or flashy or anything that you might find necessarily impressive as the world standards might say. She was a little bit of a plump lady, she was older, but she just loved kids and she would come in and just be herself with them and Again, nothing against the children's pastor that we had for a very short time, but he was all about big, huge, and loud and bigger games and, you know, just the spectacle. And the kids liked it for a time, but I think what really made the lasting impact was Miss Shirley, who was consistent and was there and stayed and was there week after week after week. She was not a flash in the pan. She wasn't something that was there just to play on their emotions. She was just her honest self. And so I find that to be something beautiful when this article brings that out, that children's media needs to be authentic more than anything else, not just, not just cheap laughs and short bursts of visual thrills. I think there's something to that. The article all points out— he says it in kind of a funny way— he says, there's another of my pathos neighbors. We'll call him Mark Driscoll. He says it's all about Jesus when it's really all about macho posturing, masculine warrior god he's creating in his own disordered, insecure, barrel-chested image with a He-Man hermeneutic and an easily offended male dignity. Pastor Mark is the ultimate Jesus-y rock star, procuring roadies out of Christian culture celebrity worshipers. Um, but he says that, you know, Mr. Rogers was clearly not that, you know. He was not a star or celebrity or even an actor. Matter of fact, doesn't say this in the article, but I know the only time that Mr. Rogers ever was in an actual show as an actor, it was one episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and he played a pastor on that show. He was a very Mr. Rogers-like character. Once again, he was just himself. Even when he was acting, he wasn't really acting. He was very much himself, telling people how proud he was of them. And anyway, he was just himself. He was a person. He was a fellow human who dignified the feelings, concerns, and creativity in children. That others often ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed. So I'm going to go back to the article now and read from it. And it says, these are the things that Christian worship must be for the church and the society. And, and I think that's very important. By the way, this is me again, not reading, but, but I want us to hear this because this is ultimately a podcast about worship today. Even though I'm talking about Mr. Rogers. These are the things that Christian worship must be for the church and society. It's got to be a real alternative, almost a diametric opposite of the saccharine and substanceless commercial entertainment. Its job isn't to distract believers with good feelings. It's supposed to remind us of who we are and in whose story we play a part. Its songs aren't to transport us to a trance-like meeting with deified emotions, but to ingrain in us the many ways in which God has chosen to say, "I love you," and that God can love us just as we are. Its words and sacraments aren't just to make us feel good for a time, but to fill us, mold us, and empower us to be God's prayer for the world. The refined and elegant words of the Church's liturgy are not a self-important system of smoke and mirrors. No, they are riven, saturated, and caked with powerful, eternal significance. That's what happens when your worship is not a passing style to entertain you, but is backed by an eternity of truth, honesty, and authenticity. I really appreciated that part of the article because I could not agree more. That is what the church's liturgy is for. That is why I hold it so sacred and so dear. It's why I feel like the consistency of coming week after week, again and again, bringing ourselves to the table, bringing ourselves to hear the word of the Lord, uh, to allow ourselves to be discipled together in ways that are lasting and good and consistent. I feel like these are ways that we truly are the church in the world. They'll teach us to be the church in the world. They teach us to be like Jesus. And the church should expect something of us. It should expect us to be active participants, that as we listen, we are actually engaging. And towards the end of the article, Jonathan Eigner, he comes back to this and he says, like Rogers expected of his young viewers, liturgical worship expects more of the church. It assumes that we are indeed the thoughtful, imaginative people our good God created us to be. You're expected to not merely sit back and relax, but to listen, to receive with open minds, open hearts, and open hands what the Spirit would impart to you. So ultimately, this article is about embodying, embodying worship in a way that doesn't mimic the darkness around us, and it doesn't mimic the need for constant entertainment and constantly being force-fed things that are more sensational. And churches can fall into that if we aren't careful. If we aren't really trying, we can chase after a feeling rather than chasing after the Spirit, which is chasing after us. I know this from one who leads music from week to week. If I'm not careful, I can try to manipulate a feeling from another week or another time. And what we actually want to do is create a space for the Spirit to move among us in whatever way that may be. It could very well be that some of the most meaningful and most powerful powerful worship is happening without our even knowing it. Maybe because simply we've been there again and again, simply because we've showed up and allowed God to do his work in us. It could be that on some Sunday when we didn't think it was that spectacular, when we didn't think anything really truly great had happened, it could be that that's the week that something formative and something that really has started to shape the hearts and the life of a person is going on. It could be that there is a seed planted that week that is beginning and will grow and continue to grow and will carry on this thing called discipleship in our lives. We just want to create space where that can happen. We don't want to put on the biggest show in town. We don't want to be a spectacle. We want to do something like what I think Mr. Rogers was doing. We want to embody what it means to be the neighborhood, what it means to love our neighbors, what it means to live out the kingdom of God, to live out the Sermon on the Mount. And when we think about the Beatitudes and the things that it, it tells us about who we are, about what it looks like when the kingdom of God is lived out, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Those are the kinds of things that we are hoping to embody. We are hoping to show this upside-down kingdom, and those are the kinds of things that we need to be focused on in the house of worship. Well, that's about all I have for you today on this episode of Voices in My Head. I'm hoping to have very soon some, some more really great guests, one of which we're just about finished scheduling the time for Nikki Lerner to come on the podcast. An amazing worship leader doing wonderful work, especially in multicultural worship. I just talked with John Tibbs yesterday, really great artist, kind of reminds me of John Mellencamp of Christian music. He's going to be coming on the show soon. I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling And so I don't know how consistent I'll be able to do the podcast every week because summer is picking up, but I'm going to do my best to keep bringing it to you as much as I can. And I just appreciate you being a part of Voices in My Head. By the way, just as we close out today and before the benediction happens, I want to let you know that the outro is wrong at the end of the show on one point. The outro. I haven't had a chance to change it yet, but I'm no longer booking through PairBooking. You can actually just go to rickleejames.com/bookings and you'll find an offer sheet on the website. You don't have to go through the booking company anymore because PairBooking has now gone out of business, so they're not working with artists anymore at this point. So we're back to booking through just me. So just wanted to let you know that even though it says go through pair booking on the outro of the show. I'll have some more news for you soon about a new music video we're shooting, about the new album as it is being mixed and mastered, and the new designs that are coming your way soon. I've got a lot of the perks for those who donated already sent out, and many more are on their way soon. And I can't wait to share the new album Thunder with you, and hopefully I can come to some of your churches and some venues in your area and share songs from the new album in the coming days. Well, thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. God bless you, and thank you for being a part of this week after week.

Thank you for joining me here this week on the Voices in My Head podcast. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page on Facebook at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing at my author page on Amazon.com. Make sure to follow my calendar on the website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website by clicking on the link for Pare Booking Agency. That's P-A-R-E Booking. And finally, it would mean the world to me if you were to leave me a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet.

And now the benediction.

May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.