In this cnn article, Denise Quan shares about her experience trying to get her hands on the new U2 album and her subsequent interview with the band. U2’s new album launches tomorrow, and there is a lot of buzz about it already. They are scheduled to play every night this week on Letterman’s show. In the words of Will Ferrell’s Zoolander character, Mugatu, these guys are ‘so hot right now!’
In her interview, U2 talks about the life of their band as they toured, lived together, and produced their most recent album. I was struck by how closely their language could be taken to resemble the talk of many trendy pastors these days. If you swapped out the following words you would get a pastor’s ideal description of the church:
- band or U2 –> church
- music –> God
- album –> mission
- sounds –> reflects
You would get quotes like this:
No mission of ours is ever made in a vacuum. There’s always a huge amount of what’s going on in the culture that informs our work. But when it comes out in the end, it always reflects like church.
and:
I don’t think the relationships would work if other than for God. The interesting thing is we’re so different, and that’s our strength. We are united in one cause, which is the church…
I think head-butting is something that you do when you’re a young man. As you travel down the road together, you stop thinking about what the church can do for you, and you think much more about what you can do for the church. You start to really appreciate what everyone else does…
U2 is the model ecclesiology. They are a community with a mission lived in love and forgiveness. Maybe that’s we all love Bono? 🙂