David Lee Roth goes to church with me.

 

Somewhere around junior high, I found Van Halen. Kinda like how some people find Jesus. And I couldn't get enough. 

I listened to a lot of FM radio back then. It was a blissful escape from life to hear all the top ten songs of the week mixed with the best of everything else that was popular.

But something stuck with me for a little longer with Van Halen. Cheap Trick was good. Michael Jackson was good. Gerry Rafferty and Steely Dan were good. SO many others from different sub-genres were good, but Van Halen was amazing!

Guitar solos, attitude, that driving beat, and just great songs. 

Keep in mind this is back before the internet and when I thought any rock band was made up of good friends who knew each other since they were kids.  In my mind, Van Halen was this.

So in my youthful excitement for all the things in life, I was excited for both Van Halen and church. And my mind sometimes would wander and imagine how cool it would be for Van Halen to become members of my church tribe.

I remember going to church and church related activities and trying to imagine what it would be like for David Lee Roth to be there and trying to help him understand why the way we did things at church were the right and best way.

For example, in my tribe, worship services were to be "done" without instrumental music - all songs were just words and voices.  Also, you needed to dress up or at least dress modestly for church gatherings.

How could I get David Lee Roth to get on board with church things AND keep them making excellent music and being the band I'd worked them up to be in my mind.

Hmmmm...would we have to change the lyrics to Running With The Devil?  Could there be a way of hearing the words to the songs they sang from the angle of church?  Was there some way of helping all the church people, especially the preacher and elders, to get on board with seeing Van Halen as a kind of missionary group to the world at large?

I know, I know...it's goofy. But as a young person, some musicians/groups were a large and deep part of my mental reference group for life and identity. And I identified with David Lee Roth and Van Halen for a lot of different reasons, at the time, knowing the little I knew about...anything.

I did a LOT of mental gymnastics in the course of a couple of years, trying to figure out how Van Halen would fit into the important world of church and God.  Eventually, my musical world expanded to Rush, Ratt, and all the hair bands and other FM accessible groups out there and I didn't spend so much time trying to imagine David Lee Roth serving communion at church.

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All that to say that, to some degree, deconstruction includes things like that - trying to fit together pieces of your life that you find to be really important to you at the moment, even pieces that don't seem to have any commonalities at all.  

Kind of like trying to fit a car's shock absorber or a table saw into a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle of some fuzzy kittens drinking milk - all the motivation in the world probably isn't going to help you make it happen, but because the pieces are important to you, you're not likely going to give up easily.

So how do you decide what gets to stay in your life? Or what should stay in your life?

What or who is the final decision maker on what is valuable, important, and of ultimate truth or worth?

Does "the church" get to make the choices for what is included?  

And if the church gets to play a role like that, how much does church depend on scripture versus tradition versus the baked in cultural preferences and biases of the church members or leadership?

And if the church has a valid role in helping shape people *IF* it depends on scripture as its source for truth, how does the church interpret scripture?

And how should scripture be approached, read, interpreted, and applied to life?

[SIDE NOTE: I'm not asking for responses here - I'm not new to this.  I'm asking rhetorically as a part of the flow of what I'm doing here.  I know enough people from my tribe and other tribes to know that some have already begun answering these questions in their mind and are thinking of how they can write a response that will win an argument they've had going in their mind with some straw man they regularly debate and, respectfully, I am 100% not interested in hearing the same canned answers, many of which I used to use and give.]

And did God give, provide, or shape the development of scripture so that we'd for sure interpret it this one exact way and so that it would make us all into very similar people, culturally speaking, if we all were interpreting it correctly?

And if any of that's true, what would David Lee Roth say?  "Might as well jump!"

And that's important because so much of my church world background depends/depended on a very fine series of complicated filters for a person to have to pass through before they'd ever get to an extremely small set of beliefs and behaviors that would be/would have been acceptable to God.

So, occasionally it's helpful to take your David Lee Roth with you "to church".