**These are 100% true events that I witnessed and partook in from my time involved in the evangelical church from ages 14-26. Names of individuals, groups and institutions have been changed. **
Every time I post one of these blogs I lie awake and think “Oh God why did I open this entire can of worms?” I guess thanks for not coming to me with pitchforks and torches quite yet. I know religion is a touchy subject. It’s a very personal subject… but after all this time I feel least equipped to judge anyone’s faith, as I realized figuring out my own turned out to be enough work in and of itself… and as much as i cringe thinking about even setting out to write all of this stuff… in a way with each post I am feeling more and more closure within my own heart… letting go more and more with each confession. This process has helped begin the process of making peace with my experience…leading me closer and closer to forgiveness for all people including myself. It' has reminded me that I’m allowed to close a chapter whenever I choose, and that it’s more than okay to do so. I wonder if these writings have made some of you sad or disappointed… as maybe I was your youth group leader, or worship pastor, or “spiritual” guide at some point or another… but I hope you don’t feel that way, as I am neither sad nor disappointed in anything. Please hear that these writings are not necessarily an abandonment of my faith in God or belief in the existence of such a power… but more so an admittance of the great unknown. There are very few things we can know in life… and the rest is speculation and the continual perpetuation of stories and ideas. When history is a big game of telephone, which people killing each other (literally) for the position to tell the narrative… how do we find the truth?
The Blooms Crusades Chapter 3: That Time I Discovered Cool Church (The Fate of Christian Celebrity)
I remember discovering cool church when I needed to do a senior internship for my high school. One of the directors of the program was actually a mom at the church so when I presented the idea of the doing my “math and science” senior project on the subject of “worship music” nobody saw a problem with it. So when it was my turn to do my presentation I was trying to quantify in numbers and scientific terms the experience I had just had being a high school intern at probably the coolest church I have ever gone to. In church world there is like “sleek, suburban cool” which is you know, those high end churches with the many satellites and the jumbo screens and all, and somehow they all bought the same exact brand of chair, you know the soft brown ones that link together on the side?… but the church I interned at in high school was more like “raw cool” and had a very natural and spiritual feeling about it. I think I started interning at a very golden age for that church because even now I always remember there was a really powerful and real thing happening when I went there...Something you could really feel. People at the cool church were much more open about hearing directly from the voice of God and acting directly on it… whether that be raising your hands during a song, jumping up and down (which I later adopted as I leveled up), or going up and telling someone something about their lives or their situation… what I learned later was called a word from God.
This experience completely shifted my worldview and destroyed the old paradigm of Christianity I had built in the southern baptist church experience, which was much more conservative. I felt like I was learning that worshipping God didn’t have to be so “reverent” and could take on many forms. At the cool church, everyone was really young and also really attractive. I had never seen a real life fedora being worn at a church before, and not by the worship leader...it was insanity. I couldn’t pick the pastor out from the rest of the congregation because everyone looked 25 years old. It was like a huge hangout before the worship started, and then out of this sea of the top 250 hottest Christian 20-30 year olds in Atlanta, would come the pastor to preach.
For my internship hours I would hang out with my “mentor…” Who I realized later as I grew up that he was a young adult working part time at this cool church. He was probably around 24 years old. He was CHILLIN. I remember him and the other young adult worker girl openly talking about drinking the night before. My mind was exploded. Everyone was so… cool. I would show up and he would help me record a song in the studio, or show me different stuff on the guitar. The church had a whole music studio in the basement, it was sick. He introduced me to third wave coffee. There was one time he even took me up to Athens because I was about to go to college there. It was actually with this mentor from the church that I was inspired by the initial idea for all of my artworks to paint them on wood…It was a wooden stained painting installed in a lunch spot in Decatur he took me to one day. On Sundays I would help set up the church and run cables. That’s there I learned the foundations of audio engineering and live production.
One of the unique things I remember noticing about this church very early on was that it was in some ways “famous” around Atlanta and I would probably guess more areas. There was definitely a celebrity air about the leadership, musicians and the culture in general…certain names evoked a mythical aura that would induce murmors in the room. Everyone was super cool and super down to talk about alcohol, which was sick to me. I participated in their high school program at the time, which was probably about 6-8 kids… and one of the high school volunteers (an adult) shared a testimony once about him wanting to quit weed. My mind was incinerated, I couldn’t comprehend the idea of ANYONE smoking weed let alone a leader of this youth group, who was also WILLING to talk to us kids about it. Yall can make your own decisions about that situation haha… anyways the services for the church were at like 6 or 7pm on Sundays…and I remember thinking like “holy shit some people at this service are actually drunk. (sometimes I’d smell alcohol on people)” And then people were ripping cigs on the sidewalk. I was like what in the sodom and gomorrah is going on at this place??? My mind was absolutely blown. Please remember that I was saved into the conservative baptist church, where no one really even talked about anything negative at all…. just this perfect facade plastered on everything… smiles and all. Needless to say… experiencing the cool church totally opened my eyes in many ways.
The music, though, was on a completely different level. It was excellent, but also really raw. They werent using lasers & autotune like the other churches but I still think a slight haze… which never hurts. But everyone at that church could play their asses off and it was definitely understood in the greater atlanta worship community that not just ANYONE could play at the cool church. You had to have the in… you had to rip.. and back then they didn’t have a morning service they could book you for if you weren’t good enough for the main band. It was truly SHREDDERS only. Like if you didn’t own a “flight case” just go ahead and get the fuck out of here. I also remember sensing a hierarchy amongst the congregation itself… Idk its hard to explain. It just always felt like it “meant” something more to know certain people, or to have access to certain things, or even to sit in certain places. It was all very subtle, but very much there.
The church had a young pastor but then there were also these mythical father and uncle pastors that sometimes come in from other churches. The whole church was a network sharing the same culture and philosophy - including the music, programming and approaches to preaching. It was the first church I had ever attended that had produced and published its own music… which was revolutionary back then to me. I felt like it was really integral in my introduction to this church, since the first piece of media I received from the church was a CD of one of their live recordings. It inspired me to think about recording my own music and I thought it was pretty amazing that this church just down the street had its own bands and recordings.
Over the course of the next 8 or so years, I was involved with this community. I was continuously involved but just barely on the outskirts of its inner workings. I never would have considered myself a part of any major decisions there. I led worship there later, achieving my high school fanboy dream. I did conferences and retreats with them. I saw the church itself expand to its own new building and I helped with opening another location in Athens. in a strange way though, I also never felt I really “belonged there” in the sense that it never felt like my church… I performed a lot of functions there and knew a lot of people there but in a way I felt that it didn’t matter if I were there or not (and not in like a sad-me type way but its just the feeling I’ve always had there and it is what it is) but a lot of my friends went there and we led worship there together and it was mostly always a good time. The music was good, the musicians were good, the sound system was good, and the audience would jump around. so it was all good.
I saw quite a few of those musicians that I met during my high school internship going to to achieve wide success in the Christian music world - writing international hit songs and touring all over the world. Other leaders ended up renouncing their faiths later and going in completely different directions. We’d never talk about those people again. It was during this experience at cool church, which began in high school, that I was introduced to the idea of a famous Christian superstars, or even the idea of being “famous” for being a Christian. I met, in person, the first Christian celebrities there. And somewhere along the way, the seed that is a dream of christian stardom was planted in my mind.
The Fate of the Christian Celebrity
So, I know Christian celebrities have been around since Jesus’ time (lol) but I’ve stayed somewhat connected as far as following the the story arch of this particular brand of Christian celebrity unfold, that is the story arch that represents the culture of Christianity that I experienced in from my particular perspective in my particular time. My generation grew up with the idea of megachurch… we consumed music from multi-million dollar worship “churches”, brands, artists and “bands.” Every church that sings songs crated by the “big few churches up there” pays a royalty to fee that continues to pay (and enrich) these massive worship groups and artists.
I suppose when I say “Christian Celebrity” I’m talking more about the idea of one… the archetype of one… whether that is represented in an individual, entity, or movement. Or even how, in general, we’re obsessed with the idea of fame, Christian or not. Either way, as time went on… it turns out many of these so called faith “heroes” were anything but angels behind closed doors. You can go look it up… there’s documentaries and scandals left and right about this stuff. I came to find out that the band and the church that was my first worship CD ever given to me (the one that even inspired me to become a worship leader in the first place)… turned out to be raging alcoholics and also abusing the youth at the church. It’s one of those things where nowadays stories like these are a dime a dozen… that it’s like we don’t even have the capacity to grieve it anymore. It’s just normal now. Another pastor cheated. Another one stealing money. Another one touching the kids. Another. Another. Another. But when I think about all this stuff it’s really sad to me. Forget these rich famous people…fuck em… I’m talking about all the rest of the people out there to followed these movements, PAID A LOT OF MONEY to support these movements, spent time and energy volunteering for these causes, and ingested and replicated the cultures of these movements…all to realize later that this was all about them in the end.
But look at everything now… what was the fate of all of these ideals? Spiritual heroes? “People with the answers"? And while there really is no excuse, since everyone must answer to God themselves within their own conscious… I often wonder if mixing this sort of wordly idea of “success,” “clout” and “fame” into the framework of a spiritual system was not destined to implode from the very beginning? And what’s also strange too is that I don’t doubt that the beginnings of many of these fallen heroes was insincere. I was there, I’ve been there. There was a completely spiritual feeling and realness about everything. But I wonder if it’s just like a ship in the ocean, turning 1 degree off course slowly over time… barely noticeable… until everyone realizes its hundreds of miles off course. The culture (both within Christianity and out) slips under the temptations of power… what you can really get away with… one compromise after another until the base values beneath are completely different than what is presented…
But you know, yall, I’ve wrestled with this idea a lot. I’ve had to reflect on my own motives throughout my time as a Christian. And while sometimes my yearnings for God were genuine, there were many times they were not… just kind of learned behaviors, words, and sayings to basically do the right thing… or to “appear” to be in line with whatever the status quo of the culture was at the time, or to earn a place or identity in the community. I, myself, began to climb the ladder of “Christian notoriety” getting opportunities to travel, play larger stages, and write songs with and tour with some of the “Worship Leader Heros” from my youth. I guess in the end, for me, it started to create this persona that I wasn’t sure was me after all. I always felt there was a huge pressure to “be someone” and to make sure to not let people down or be too hypocritical (though that was impossible). The pressures of “platforms” and “titles” I think, looking back, created a mechanism in me that was unable to acknowledge certain flaws within myself… because these institutions and communities would always tell you you were a certain thing and treat you a certain way. And then you add the complication of recording and releasing music under these ideas, god forbid becoming a millionaire off of them. Even with my music, I’ve felt a really strange relationship with it over the last few years because I would never write or sing those songs again… even if they still are true to me in a lot of ways.
But anyways, I don’t want to traverse down that rabbit whole yet, one that we will traverse at the end of this series. But to wrap this up, I’m still thinking about everyone. Even though I don’t call “God” “Jesus” anymore doesn’t mean I still don’t reflect on and treasure certain aspects of my experience in the Christian faith. I just think… at least where I was in my particular time… we got really wrapped up in the commercial aspect of God… the culture began the pimp God out through media, “movements,” and the idea of “famous Christians.” We made God a means for our own satisfaction… the satisfaction of power and ego. And just like that ship… the idea grew further and further away from its original intent, and a culture was created that resembled little of what God actually may be like.
I am allowing myself to be free from the bondage that I need to “be” anyone in the realm of faith or even in this world. I came realize that the very same moment I ever considered myself to be “needed” by God, was the same moment I found myself completely off course.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for Chapter 4.