Missional Imagination

I was chatting to a friend the other day about how we are beginning to say ‘old people things.’ Whether complaining about the way things used to be, the price of fuel, or the size of chocolate bars, there has been a shift in how I think about the world. I still feel pretty young at heart, but as we chatted about this subject, one topic really underpins the old person vibe…

Music.

Music is never as good as the music we grew up with.

Every generation of course has the same conversation. One person hears beauty, another just loud noise. I have a pretty weird set of musical tastes and it seems to cycle every so often, but one thing remains the same; my kids hate my music. We go on road trips and each choose songs to go on there, but my selections normally get the most eye rolls. However, since my steering wheel has the controls for the music, I can normally get two-thirds of the way through a song before having to turn it off. I try to explain the lyrics, talk to them about the guitarist and why his solos are epic, but it normally gets huffed down, and there are murmurs of my music being from “the 1900s.” Accurate I know, but somehow stinging as if I like parlour music played on wind up gramophones. There is a major issue with this though, and in the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about what this says about our world, but also how we engage with culture as Christians.

You see, music is never just music to us. Music carries memories and feelings. A few weeks back we were in a clothing shop for camping wear. As my son tried on a new heavy duty jacket to prepare for the Irish summer weather, a song playing on the PA system stopped me in my tracks. It was a song by Loverboy, a Canadian rock band. Now, you might be thinking about how I knew that random song, but there is a story. When I was 11 years old, I stayed for a summer on an exchange trip with a family in Virginia in the US. The Dad of the family was a former pilot, and I got to watch Top Gun for the very first time with their family. I remember how it blew me away with the speed and the danger and, most importantly, the soundtrack. So, when I was heading home, tucked inside my luggage, was a cassette tape of the soundtrack. I played and played and played that tape until it became unusable. I knew all the lyrics, understood few of them as an 11-year old boy, but it wormed its way into my life. So when standing looking at tents, as the song “Heaven in your Eyes” wafted over the camping equipment, my kids stared at their middle aged Dad, mouthing the words to another song from the 1900s! Even my wife was a little embarrassed, and she’s known me for well over 20 years! I tried to explain, even tried to play it in the car on the way home, but they just couldn’t understand. It was then I realized the issue.

We really struggle to understand other people’s music.

My kids laugh at me, because nothing is ever just a song, just a movie, just an anything. I want to noodle into what it says about us, our culture, and the path it might direct us on. I went down a rabbit trail of why we like and dislike music, but also, why we struggle not only to like other people’s music, but why they would even like it themselves. It put me in mind of a comedian who talked about other people’s houses smelling like their dinner, only to realise that his own house smelled like dinner also, he’d just grown used to it. Perhaps this is the lesson then, even as I direct us to thinking about culture and contextualization. Perhaps as those called to ‘mission’ by Jesus, we have become blind (and deaf) to the soundtracks that are all around us, and are hopeful that everyone else will get on board with ours, rather than us seeking to understand theirs.

Music and the Feeling of Home

This article isn’t really about music, but in some ways it is. I’m writing an article about C.S. Lewis’ comparison of (capital N) Noise, with (capital M) Music. Noise is distracting and divisive. Music is harmony and heavenly. Our issue, it seems, is that we want to subjectively decide which is which, and ours always wins. We can even rationalize it. However, our musical tastes are attached more to our memory that the melodies themselves. I love the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and The Rat Pack, primarily because my grandfather loved them and played them constantly on his record player. I love Massive Attack, Portishead, Alanis Morissette, Prince and Madonna, because my uncle who we stayed with each summer played them on his futuristic CD player. These influences shaped my identity, my personality. So, when a new artist finds its way into our family playlist, I want to remind them that Bruno Mars is just a budget Prince. Or that Taylor Swift may have sold lots of albums, but she’ll never be better than peak Madonna. What I am doing is judging their music by the standards of my formation. I have mistaken familiarity for objectivity. But what has this got to do with Christianity and, in particular, mission?

The Soundtrack of Christianity

I learned many of the kid’s songs at church at the same time as my own kids. I now know that Father Abraham had many sons, that Noah’s ark building was quite a lark, and that you never get kids to stand too close together on Deep and Wide, or someone is getting a slap. I’ve also never really understood modern Christian music. It all sounds very samey. As I grew in my faith, I fell in love with hymns. Really old, drudgy, organ heavy, 16th century depth. Something that had 15 verses, no choruses, and a theology that you could build your life upon. But that made me weird in certain circles, especially those younger than 70. What I came to realise was that as we grow as disciples, we’re not so much being taught how to live to be more like Christ, but to become more immersed in Christian culture. We want people to know Jesus of course, but also read the right books, have the right Bible, listen to the right Christian artists. But that quickly becomes our evangelism. Don’t listen to Nirvana, listen to Creed. Don’t listen to Counting Crows, but Casting Crowns. Don’t listen to U2, listen to… well, maybe it’s ok to listen to U2, just don’t listen to Bono! We take our cue from the culture we grow up in, as much as the music we listen to.

Our expression of church, leadership style, dress, aesthetic, as well as our music, tells something about us. Again, none of those things are wrong, but they are part of our culture and memory. We inevitably want to reproduce ourselves. So when we went to Mexico we sang Hillsongs songs that were translated from English to Spanish. At a recent Irish church conference we had a Northern Irish worship team, singing songs written by Americans, as an Australian guy who lives in England was preparing to preach to Irish people. None of this is ‘wrong’, please don’t hear me say that, but are we tailoring our mission towards drawing people into ‘our music’ rather than helping them express praise in their own culture and memory? This might seem natural, but it doesn’t seem to play out with many of our instincts. It takes effort to hear and perhaps appreciate other people’s music. And therefore, to make music of our own.

Hearing The Music of Others

We’ve done a good job packaging Christianity today, with branding and culture spreading across the world. It’s not really from a specific place, but a kind of generic Western, English speaking, vague cultural expression of what we like. But if we are to truly be on mission as the people of God, from every place, to every place, then it requires us to distinguish between the Gospel and our cultural expression of our faith in Christ. It does bear repeating that this does not mean changing the Gospel, but therein lies the rub, if we see churches singing different songs or sitting in circles rather than pews, we immediately feel that they are doing some…

A few weeks ago, our son had to go in for an MRI. We were braced for the inevitable waiting, sitting with that uneasy mixture of prayer, worry, and hope that accompanies hospital visits. When the results came back, the radiologist’s report used the phrase: “an unremarkable scan.”

I confess, we laughed. They had just examined his brain, his wonderful, complicated, teenage brain, and pronounced it “unremarkable.” I turned to my wife and said, “Well, at least they didn’t say he had a remarkable brain. We’d have never heard the end of that!”

But the phrase stuck with me. In medicine, “unremarkable” is good news. It means nothing abnormal, nothing to panic about. Yet in our cultural understanding, “unremarkable” is the last thing we want to be called. Who wants to live an unremarkable life? We want to stand out, leave a mark, make sure our existence gets noticed. We want to influence and be noticed. Being unremarkable feels like failure.

And yet the Scriptures push us in the opposite direction. John the Baptist, perhaps the most popular preacher of his day, the fiery prophet who drew crowds and baptised multitudes, summed up his life’s mission in a sentence: “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30). He understood something we often miss, that the goal of the Christian life is not to be remarkable but to make Christ remarkable.

Our Addiction to Being Remarkable

The modern mantra appears simple. Be remarkable. Whether through career achievements, our social media feeds, or our personal brands (don’t roll your eyes, we all have them!), the pressure is relentless. From motivational posters in the hotel our church meets in, to influencers hawking productivity ‘hacks’, the cultural gospel is clear, your worth depends on how much you stand out. How much you rise above. Don’t be a normie!

Even in church life, this disease seeps in. Pastors build platforms and reach. Worship leaders long for recording contracts. Churches market themselves as if they were tech start-ups competing for customers. Even the ordinary Christian feels the weight. Every one of us is meant to be extraordinary at parenting, evangelism, prayer, and community service. And if you’re not, then perhaps you’re not really useful to God. This is a heavy burden that we load onto ourselves. It distorts discipleship into performance and witness into self-promotion. When we crave remarkability, we begin to believe the Gospel depends on us. Whether it’s our eloquence, our charisma, or our ability to draw a crowd. But if the spotlight is always on us, how can it ever fall fully on Christ?

John the Baptist: Patron Saint of the Unremarkable

Consider John the Baptist, or ‘Crazy John’ if you’ve watched The Chosen. Few figures have ever generated more attention in a short span of time. People flocked to hear him. He lived with prophetic eccentricity, dressed in camel hair, and ate locusts and honey. I mean, that’s weird enough as it is! And yet, when his disciples pointed out that Jesus’ ministry was drawing larger crowds, John didn’t flinch. He didn’t rush to protect his market share, branding or attendance figures on ChurchSuite. Instead, he responded with breathtaking clarity:

“A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ … He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:27–30).

John knew who he was, and more importantly, who he was not. His role was never to be the light but to bear witness to the light. His voice mattered only because it carried the Word. His baptism prepared the way for the One who would baptize with fire and Spirit. In John we see a life oriented away from the self and toward the Saviour. His greatness was precisely that he did not cling to greatness. He was content to fade as Christ came into focus. That is the strange, liberating vocation of every Christian; to live in such a way that Jesus becomes more visible and we become less.

Biblical Decreasing

This rhythm, leaders stepping back so that others, and ultimately God’s purposes, can flourish, runs throughout Scripture. Moses leads Israel to the edge of the Promised Land, but it is Joshua who carries them across the Jordan. David gathers resources for the Temple, but it is Solomon who builds it. Elijah anoints Elisha with a double portion, gladly handing on the prophetic mantle.

The apostles understood the same principle. Paul writes of himself and Apollos:

“What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed… I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:5–7).

Their ministry was significant, but not ultimate. They were jars of clay carrying treasure not their own.

And at the heart of it all is Christ Himself, who teaches that “the last shall be first” (Matthew 20:16), who blesses the meek (Matthew 5:5), and compares his own death to a grain of wheat falling into the ground to bear much fruit (John 12:24). The Son of God embraced decreasing, not only in his humility before the Father, but in His self-emptying unto death, that we might share his life.

But if this is the model of Jesus, why do we struggle with it so much?

Why Decreasing Is So Hard

But let’s be honest, this is a difficult thing for us. It cuts against every instinct we have. I sketched out a few ideas on why we likely struggle so.

First, decreasing feels like a threat to our identity. If I am not remarkable, then what am I? Our sense of self has become so tied to achievement and recognition that obscurity feels like erasure.

Second, recognition is addictive. We crave the dopamine hit of applause, the subtle affirmation that we matter. Even in ministry, a sermon that gets a few ‘amens’, or a compliment from the person at the front can leave us secretly hungry for more.

Third, weakness feels shameful. Paul writes of his thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12), but most of us would rather boast of successes than admit frailties. To decrease feels like failure, not faith.

And finally, the modern world has weaponized visibility. Online, irrelevance is the great fear. To go unseen is to be unheard, and to be unheard is to vanish. Our generation is less afraid of persecution than of being ignored. It’s the old adage from media, even if they are talking about you in a negative way, they are still talking about you. I used to listen to a political podcast that used every episode as a lament to the public fascination with Donald Trump. They decried the fact that everyone talked about him all the time. Meanwhile, every one of their podcast titles had his name in it, and they spent 90% of their time talking about him. Why? Because that’s how you remain visible and relevant. I often wonder if those who are deemed ‘influencers’ in the Christian world are exhausted at the need to be constantly on, constantly talking, posting on Instagram, creating content.

No wonder John’s words sound alien. “He must increase, I must decrease.” Everything in us resists that downward movement.

The Strange Freedom of Being Unremarkable

And yet, there is true freedom here. To decrease is not to disappear but to be freed from illusions of grandeur. Or ‘notions’ if you are Irish! If Christ is the Saviour, then I don’t have to be. If the Spirit gives growth, then I don’t have to manufacture it. If God’s glory is what matters, then my reputation doesn’t need to carry the weight. This is liberating for ordinary Christians whose faithfulness may never make headlines. In the eyes of the world, unremarkable. In the eyes of Christ, radiant.

The apostle Paul captures the paradox wonderfully, “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). The fragility of the vessel highlights the glory of the treasure. Weakness is not a liability to the Gospel but the canvas upon which God paints his power. An…

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