So where did it all go wrong Rod? The problem is in imitation, not that imitation itself is wrong, but misunderstanding what to imitate is the problem.
Some time ago, I can’t remember when, I blogged about “artarchetypes” a fun play on a play on words that categorizes personalities, current levels of growth and maturity, etc., and refers to Jung’s archetypes. My play on words referred to something that we unpacked in graduate school concerning levels of artistry. We called them, for our context,
guitarchetypes. Of course, these apply to any discipline in the pursuit of art, and for that matter, life in general, I think. The three guitarchetypes were imitator, musician and artist. These three are hierarchical and mutually inclusive, each of the lower levels are included in the higher levels. Someone who is only an imitator, cannot be a musician though they play music, but even an artist is an imitator, but on a very different level because what he imitates if very different than what an imitator imitates.
In fact, Jesus said only what the Father told him, and did only what he saw the Father doing. So Jesus, himself, was an imitator. He also told us that apart from him we can’t do a thing. So we, too, are expected to imitate. Paul felt confident to ask the churches to imitate him because he was imitating Jesus.
But when you imitate someone, what exactly do you imitate? The way he walks? His voice? The way he dresses? His activities?
Just this morning I was talking to a friend about some musical things and we began to compare certain artists with others. Ok, I’ll confess, it was Led Zeppelin and Dream Theatre. The issue was groove. We lamented that despite the fact that we can listen to a flawless recording these days, most have absolutely no soul. Things are so pieced-together, punched-in, pro-tooled, and phixed that when all is said and done, there is really no connection to the person who’s name is credited and the music that is heard on the recording. Back in the day, people actually played and made mistakes and injected the music with life and character. He brought up Ingwe Malmsteen. You would get the obvious dropped notes now and then, but it had life. All the subsequent imitators polished their Ingwe chops but forgot about the music. I mentioned that I’ve noticed this in countless other innovative musicians. A great musician starts with music and layers their innovation on top of it. It’s the icing on the cake. Player/fans lick off the icing and leave the cake. It happened with Eddy Van Halen, who actually played solos between his two-handed hammer-on licks, but all his imitators were just infatuated with that new lightning fast technique and so forgot to insert it into some music. The magic I felt when I first heard
August, and everything after was quickly forgotten when I heard a dozen subsequent bands, whine their way onto the radio for the next few years. I even heard a quote from a famous mid-20th century composer who was asked why he hated Claude Debussy so much. He answered that he liked Debussy just fine, it was all his second rate imitators that he couldn’t stand to listen to.
Certainly all these folks were worth imitating, but few actually imitated anything more than the superficial and fewer still applied what they imitated to anything that was already their own. We are left with lossy second and third generation copies that no one cares to bother with anymore. In the music world, it has become so bad that the imitation is not of music at all anymore, but more often, hairdos and fashion.
An artist on the other hand, can imitate B.B. King and end up with “White Room”, or imitate Bob Marley and produce “Roxanne”.
Maybe I could say that an imitator lifts, verbatim, a riff or solo. A musician imitates a style and infuses his own. An artist imitates innovation and comes up with something completely new. Jesus didn’t come with anything new. He came to fulfill the law. But the result was teaching unlike anything anyone had ever heard.
Let’s say that every year I help the Missionaries of Charity for a couple of weeks in the summer. I could get my trip underway and each of the three archetypes would observe what I’m doing in three different ways. The imitator would say that I’m flying in a jet. The musician would say that I’m headed to Calcutta. The artist would say that I’m ministering to homeless people. Each of these would imitate me in drastically different ways.
It is very sad that most of us are imitators only. We rarely get beyond imitating methodology. If we see someone being successful, we imitate the most obvious superficial aspect of what they do. Usually the medium or the method for what they are actually doing.
A few years ago revival broke out outside the church. It happened in England in warehouses, and other unlikely meeting venues, it happened in North America in college gatherings. Great things were happening in terms of new found relationships with God. This naturally manifested itself in the music born of the worship revival. The new excitement was noticed by the Church of Waning Excitement and desired to have the same thing within. So they reached out to embrace the most obvious thing that resulted from the revival. Music. That, of course, is much easier than imitating what was actually behind the revival, because who would buy a CD of prayer? Who could market recordings of a solitary person crying out to God in the middle of the night? How could you demographically target a recording of confession and restoration. So no one understood what the music was born of, what spiritual excitement had spawned the music, They just wanted the music. So they brought it into their unrevived churches where it represented nothing, expressed nothing of what already was, and in fact, exposed how far adrift things had already gone. Since it was music, this new kind will obviously have to replace the old kind. No other conclusion could be reached if you think that the music caused the excitement rather than having been a result of the excitement. If you want to have a worship revival in your church, you’ve got to pray, not borrow the coolest, hippest, newest music about whose expression you know nothing. The question should never be, “what are they singing?”, but rather, “why are they singing?” Peterson says, “I don’t want to live as a parasite on the first-hand spiritual life of others, but to be personally involved with all my senses, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.”
Imitation of methodology results in meaningless doing that produces church addicts and lifestyle-righteous, consumeristic congregations. People come to church to be a Christian rather than coming because they ARE Christians. Too often, people are drawn to being a pastor, not to pastoring. Or to being a worship leader, not to leading worship. In the church, entire careers hang on methodology. A preacher’s entire career can falter when a methodological shift occurs, even though the purpose of the new is the same as that of the old. A guitar playing worship leader will be left out in the cold when the music once again becomes piano driven. But if the preacher’s drive is to get the message he’s been given to be heard, he will embrace whatever means is required to get that done. If the worship leader’s drive is to play guitar and sing hip songs, a stylistic change will leave him in the dust trying to do what he has already been trying to do, but no one will be listening.
