Ethos (cont'd part 3) - MTV

I preface this by saying that MTV is not what it used to be. We, as a society, have gone from screaming at the top of our lungs, "I want my MTV!" to one who really couldn't tell you when they saw an actual music video on the channel. [By the way, if you are not at least in your 30's you will not remember that you were supposed to "want my MTV!"] With this disclaimer being given, I must continue a thought started around a month ago.


I was listening to the radio when during one of the breaks the announcer mentioned a story that was aired on "MTV News." This of course made me chuckle because I didn't know that MTV had a news team. I began to picture in my mind what this team and show would look like, and then I had somewhat of a revelation. MTV is (was?) not about reporting the news, but it was about making the news itself.


The question I now ponder is one akin to the "chicken and the egg" scenario. As a creationist, I believe that I know the answer to that question, but I digress. The question is: Do things happen on MTV because the world is a certain way, OR do things happen in the world (styles, likes/dislikes, attitudes, etc.) because MTV is a certain way. In other words, who is actually defining the culture? Knowing that the world has grown larger than MTV, I began to thing about the entertainment industry as a whole. As a general rule, the media actually creates what it wants the culture to be, and the world follows suit. Some may not want to admit to this because we want to believe that we are not lemmings, but it is true.


Examples: A style of hair is seen on a television show and one month later every woman is seen with that hair. We witness anything from a car to a style of sunglasses on the screen and we have to have one like it. Our speech is not derived from free thinking, but from a collection of movie and television quotes. There was an old black and white movie with an actor (I think Cary Grant but I don't know for sure) that set the culture as well. At that time, every man wore an undershirt. In the movie, the actor took off his shirt and did not have an undershirt on. After that, men stopped wearing undershirts for a long time.


In other words, MTV (etc.) puts a style / a song / a personality within our view; calls it cool or rad or scrumdillyuptious and we follow with our tongues hanging out. Then, we conform to what the industry says we should conform to. We become like the Borg of Star Trek fame. We are collective, we are one... at least until that guy gets a new style of pants.


The "church" as an institution is no different. Even those who have considered themselves "on the edge" slip into a category of their own. All we do is follow the trend. With this said, I like to be at least a little trendy. I have no problem with either throwing away or flaunting your bell bottoms, whichever the wind is blowing today. However, sometimes we (in the church world) are content to follow the cultural leaders rather than to be as God intended us to be, and that is to be culture changing / culture defining.

With all of this being said, I believe that there needs to be an integration of (1) looking for the best methods to communicate to the society and in the time that we find ourselves, and (2) be creative within our worlds to set or define a new culture that the world would look to. We can speak about changing a heart, but when is the last time we changed the city. I am not speaking about picketing or anything, but when is the last time that the biggest thing (in the sense of the BEST thing) in any city had God's name on it? Our goal should not just be to get one more person into our church, but to really effect the ethos of our communities. This is a grand plan, but we serve a grand God. To paraphrase a pastor: "Don't be afraid of the deep water." To quote the Bible: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

We (the Church [big "C"]) need to stop being content to react to or even put a Christian twist on the darkness, but we need to simply shine the light. This is a new light, one that has not been seen but is from the Creator Himself. From a post previous... it is a song that has never been sung!