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There was a time in my life when I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what weird was. I could bore you with the minutia of how I determined varying degrees of weirdness, but to keep it short, weird was anything that didn’t look like me. Putting five men in an RV, driving it 39 hours straight through without stopping, and then giving 5,000 bottles of water out to people with a radically different world view than mine has redefined my personal concept of weird.
Each year, on the week preceding Labor Day weekend, a dry lakebed in Nevada becomes home to Burning Man, a gathering of 30,000 pagans, artists, free spirits and wanderers who come together for a week of art and parties, culminating in their erecting a 52 foot tall wooden man outlined in neon. On the final night of the celebration, the man is burned and they throw their art into the fire as a sacrifice. It was at Burning Man that my definition of weird got messed with
In July, I felt the Lord tell me that I needed to lead a team to Burning Man. At first, I resisted. I am not, nor ever have been, overtly pagan (although a few of my high school teachers might beg to differ). I am conservative in most realms, not given to running off to the desert to try and reach those who are celebrating all that separates me from them. Nevertheless, after crossing the initial hurdle of funding, team selection began. The trip changed my life.
After spending those days in the desert, discussing philosophy with a man wearing nothing but a rubber chicken, and watching a group called “The Sacred and Propane” fire off huge propane bombs, things I would have stared at before no longer get my attention. A few days after leaving Burning Man, I gathered with some friends in Washington, DC. In the 100 degree heat and high humidity, we watched a man walk down The Mall in a white tuxedo and a top hat. My friend said “Isn’t that the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?” I had to tell him no. That was pretty mild compared to what we’d witnessed in the desert.
Conversely,
things about the church that would have never garnered a second glance
from me before Burning Man now grab my attention. More then once in the
past few weeks I’ve thought about some of church in respect to Burning
Man and muttered “THAT is weird!” In that sense, Burning Man drew me back
to scripture.
Lamentations 3:40
Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.
Failure to examine ourselves will lead to the fostering of our own peculiarities. The church is full of such idiosyncrasies that, when viewed from an objective point, seem much more weird than the rubber chicken wearing philosopher.
In light of this experience, I offer my redefinition of my personal concept of weird.
1 I no longer find it weird that Burning Man thrives in a harsh setting with no advertising budget.
To say that Burning Man is held in the middle of nowhere does a great disservice to the residents of nowhere, wherever that is. Burning Man is held on the dry lakebed known as the Black Rock Desert. The lakebed is 12 by 15 miles, with an elevation change of only 5 feet from the middle to the edges. Located 100 miles northeast of Reno, Nevada, there is no cable…no cell phone service…no running water…no electricity. If you have an emergency and can somehow get word to someone that you need help, it will take a helicopter 20 minutes to get to you, and if you’re in the middle of the Burning Man camp, they’ll be hard pressed to find you. In other words, be careful.
Once you turn off of I-80, there is nothing but eighty miles of barren wilderness, punctuated by pathetic looking cows that add new meaning to ‘lean beef’. You pass through two towns, Empire and Gerlach. Empire has a Texaco station. Gerlach has a population of just a few hundred It is the larger of the two.
It was in Empire that we met our first Burning Manners, four twentysomethings who had driven out from Boston in a Mitsubishi van that appeared as if it needed to be abandon quickly. It sported tires of three different sizes. The inhabitants of the van were exhausted and out of money, but they each had a firm grip on their $200 ticket to Burning Man.
When we pulled off the highway onto the lakebed, or playa, it was a little like driving on off the planet. We joined in a caravan of SUV’s, vans, rvs, old school buses, and a white limousine.
In each vehicle were between 2 and 20 people who had paid $200 per person to get on to the playa. $200 bought them nothing but a campsite, and that included no guaranteed location. It was every man or camper for themselves on a big grid that stretched several miles from one side to the other.
Before we left, I wondered how the organizers could ever convince 30,000 people to do this when their advertising budget is ZERO. No ads. No flyers. No TV spots. No giveaways.
The Burning Man Marketing Secret? They offer a valuable service. For a week at Burning Man, they seem to scratch the itch that everyone has for authentic relationships. It doesn’t mean that it provided the relationships for them, but at least there was the illusion that others cared about you.
I’ve never been anywhere where there was such a general feeling of good will, whether it was real or imagined. It was as if the desert was a party and you were the guest of honor. We would walk down the street and shout ‘howdy’ at some guy who was making coffee, and the next thing you know, we're sitting in his teepee, drinking coffee with he and his friends.
Part of our mission was to hand out 5000 bottles of water as a prophetic gesture of what God wanted to do in their lives.People were so touched by our generosity that they often tried to repay us. If we left the RV, we would return to a stack of gifts in our camp…hand painted cards, candy, or plastic trinkets. Burning Man was a place to feel like you had friends.
Two of the most universal feelings in the world are those of loneliness and ostracization. Who didn’t go through Jr High feeling like the weirdo, and how few of us every got past that? Take that same person who’s always felt outside the norm and put them in a crowd of 28,000 wackos, and they feel great. People go to Burning Man to feel like they fit in. Burning Man is an instant, if temporary, community.
We made quick friends at Burning Man. I wish you could meet them.
· We met Ursula one night as she stopped by for a free drink of water. She ended up staying for chicken dinner. Ursula told us how she’d spent the summer in northern Canada planting trees. She works at a coffee shop in British Columbia now. Ursula believes in destiny, but doesn’t know what hers might be.
· We also met Matt at dinner time. It seems Burning Manners prepare for everything except their meals. He told us of his conversation with his mom when he left.
“Will there be drugs out there, Matthew?”
· Liz wandered in to our camp one evening as we sat with guitars and congas, singing worship choruses. She sat down and started to sing along. When she told us that she was studying to be an aroma therapist, one of our team members told her the story of the woman anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume. She began to cry and told us “I’ve never heard that story! I had no idea there was anything in the Bible that related to me!” Later, she returned with a vial of 20 year old rose oil and placed some on our wrists. When she left that night, I reminded her that she’d told us how she believed that everyone she met had something for her, if she could only learn what it was. I told her “Liz, this is what you take from us: God loves you and has a plan for your life.” Tears again welled up in her eyes and she said “I’ll take that.”
When we left Burning Man, we went to say farewell to Ursula, Matt and Liz. They shouted “It’s the water guys!” and introduced us to all their campmates. They made us feel like we were life long friends, and whether we are or not, the feeling was intoxicating.
That’s how they build this event with no advertising, and now that I’ve seen it, I don’t find it weird. I like the feeling. I think if people were made to feel like they belong somewhere, they’d do anything to get there.
In light of this,
2. I do find it weird that the church strives to convenience people when people really thrive on challenge.
Getting to Burning Man is a challenge, but it’s a challenge people rise to. The church in America has done everything they can to remove all challenge from attending, in hopes that if it’s convenient, people will stumble into a walk with God.
We ask them what time they want the service. How loud do they want the music? Pews? Non Pews? Pastry? Non Pastry? Tithe? Don’t tithe? Nursery worker? Not a nursery worker? And then when God steps in and it’s not quite so cozy, they don’t like it.
Let
me make it simple for you. Following God, pursuing him, is not as easy
as getting to Burning Man.
The initial decision is, but in the actual pursuit there are multiple obstacles,
most of them self-imposed.
Some of the trinkets we received at Burning Man didn’t make the trip home, but one did. A man with multiple piercing and a long pony tail gave me a sticker that says “Burn Your Ego”. I stuck it on the bumper of my minivan.
I don’t know what “Burn Your Ego” meant to him, but I know what it meant to me…intimacy with Christ may cost me everything I hold dear, but it’s worth the pursuit, and once you arrive there, you’ll understand why people go through the trouble to get there.
To understand this next shift in my thinking, you have to understand that I’m not a very artistic person. I’m creative in the sense that I can come up with ideas and communicate them, but not through the arts as we think of them. For me to walk into a camp of artists is like walking on foreign soil…in light of that,
3. I no longer find it weird when people express themselves in ways I never thought of.
The underlying reason for the existence of Burning Man is paganism…people who not only don’t know God, they deny his existence. The result is a lot of misguided worship, and manifests itself in a lot of strange art.
Man has always related to deity through art. The OT makes much reference to dancers, banners and pageantry. God delighted in worship in all forms.
Art has always been a form of worship, but when you take away the deity that the art was to be directed to, it warps it. Just down the street from our RV was a plaster cast torso, suspended by rope and punctured by jumper cable grips. Near the statue of the man were multiple art installations depicting male and female genitalia. Some of the art was, shall we say, interactive.
Not all of the art was gruesome…some was beautiful….Someone had sewn huge wind socks, at least 80 feet in length, and lit them from the inside with a black light. At night, they looked like glow in the dark octopus tentacles.
Some of it was mobile…I saw one golf cart with a taxidermied Marlin bolted to the roof. Another was equipped with a bolt-on pipe organ and would shoot a 30 foot propane flame out the back.
At Burning Man, I came to value creativity over slick presentation.
Our Celebrations Pastor, Adam Mosley, said it well:
“When we left, we sort of admired someone who might use a professional multimedia presentation. At Burning Man we learned to look at a guy who had put a boat on the roof of his bus and think “That’s great! Whose idea was that?”
I think God likes our rough, creative ideas better than professional presentation. I have a gut feeling he delights in our most creative attempt to get his attention, because it shows our heart. With this in mind,
4. I find it weird that the church world appears to have been made from a cookie cutter.
While worshipping a God that values creativity, the church has managed to squash it at every turn.
“FAST COMPANY”, a business journal geared for postmoderns, features column with travel tips by sales people and executives who are away from home regularly. In the September 2000 issue, the writer said “When I’m on the road, I always go to church, because no matter where you are, it’s exactly the same.”
While I understood his desire to find a comfortable, familiar setting while in a strange city, his words still perturb me…because they’re true. Particularly in America, we have homogenized worship to the point where our distinctive, given to us to by God to be celebrated, have dissolved into a evangelical unitarianism.
I have a theory about how this happened. Nearly 90 percent of pastors are classic linear thinkers. They think in steps, they process in steps, they write in steps, and they preach in steps. This is what gives us the standard preaching style of three or four (or twelve!) points. If the congregation can merely master these in order, their immediate crisis will be solved (at least until the final amen).
About 80 percent of our congregations linear thinkers. That’s why they like their pastor. He’s one of them. Unfortunately, he’s not like most of the general population, which includes at least 50% strict spatial thinkers…people who relate better to stories and pictures than points and steps. We have written these people off with our strict interpretation of how the gospel should be relayed. We are guilty of converting the message and life of Christ to an Americanized three point outline.
Search the scripture…what do we really know about the essentials of serving Christ? Jesus summarized it “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.”
Search the scripture…what do we really know about the core of celebrating Christianity? All we know for sure is that there was some worship and some teaching and a lot of spending time in one another’s homes…the rest of the time, they were actually doing ministry in their community…of course, what good did it do them. Sure, they got to see 3000 people getting saved at one pop or blind eyes opened, but did they really have a good service on Sunday? They didn’t care. The central worship and teaching time was of such little consequence to first century Christianity that they didn’t bother us with the details. We literally don’t know what they did, because in their eyes, they were giving us the essentials in the form of reaching their world.
SCC likes to think of itself as a creative church, but we haven’t scratched the surface. What would happen if we really got creative on Sunday mornings?
· What if you got here and rather than a corporate address, we broke into five groups and a leader among you shared what they felt the Lord was saying to the smaller group, then you prayed about one another’s’ needs?
· What if we met, sang one song and went to the hospital to pray for healing?
· What if the meeting switched to Sunday evening? What if, like the Chinese did for forty years, we met at 2 AM in the forest? Would that be church to you?
In a recent celebration, I felt the Lord tell me “My rain will come on the winds of change.” I mulled that over for a week…wondering what the changes would mean for me. Later, He told me “If you don’t like the wind, you’re going to hate the rain.”
God likes variety. He likes change. He smiles on it.
After 3 minutes at Burning Man, Adam said “Everything weird is normal here, and everything normal is weird.” I am ready to break the weird barrier on what we’ve always called normal, because I think it’s weird that we’re so uncreative in our celebration of a God that values creativity in His children.
5. I no longer find it weird that people will go to great lengths to escape their reality.
Burning Man is described as an alternate reality…and for many people, that’s exactly what it was, and opportunity to get away from their real lives.
· The first person we met after entering the gates was Britt…he yelled at us through the window of our RV to stop on by for some ministry. Later he told us he was a minister with the religion of mind therapy, a shaman priest. We ended up parking our RV 30 feet across the street from his bus. We had a lot of long conversations with Britt, and they gradually made less and less sense. He seemed to trace all evil in the world back to the prehistoric pollution of the Nile.
· Within hours of arriving, we met Anthony, a ski instructor who lived in Italy and raced sailboats during the summer. When pressed for the details about his life, he’d tell us ’there are thirty thousand stories….why bother you with mine?’
We asked a lot of questions of our fellow Burning Manners. The easiest one to get answered was “Do you believe in destiny?” They all liked the realm of potential. Their least favorite was about their jobs back home…“What do you do in the real world.” They would refuse to answer, just walking away rather than discussing their home and job. These people didn’t like the real world, so pursue a made up one.
These people were divided into achievers who had done it all and losers who had failed at everything. 30 foot RV’s parked alongside $500 VW minibuses. There is no Burning Man middle class. The thread that ties them all together is the belief that there is more to life than being CEO of a dotcom or eating out of a garbage can…they just can’t seem to find it. Knowing that so many people are looking for other answers,
6. I find it weird that so many believers are satisfied with their present reality.
For every lost person at Burning Man who is trying to escape from the futility of their lives, you can probably find one pew warming Christian who’s present is no more rewarding than those of the Burning Man people, but have come to accept it as the norm, and they like it that way.
We go to church. We raise our kids. We don’t take risk. We pray, but only enough to bless our meals. We trust, but only in the things we can pull off ourselves. We give, but only enough to appease our conscience. It’s a boring life, but we’re satisfied. That’s weird.
I’m not into escapism, I’m into pursuing something more, and that comes with a deep, obedient relationship with God. You may know the Lord, but your relationship has come stagnant. Can I be bold?
I find it weird that you may not be willing to stir it up…. to chase after true answers with a fraction of the passion that these people chase after in futility.
One Sunday morning, a member of our congregation told me “We really appreciated that our leadership is hungry for God.” I told them that hungry didn’t adequately describe how I feel.
I said “I am radically dissatisfied with my reality… If things don’t change, I’m going to die.” If I can’t experience more of God than I already have, I’m ready to go home. If I can’t be used more, if I can’t be more persuasive, if my time is done, let’s close the book before my life becomes a mockery…but as long as I have breath in me, I’m not satisfied with how things are.
The verse that is quickly become our byline…
I have meant no disrespect, but I’m convince we’re a little bit weird. In some respects, I think we’re a lot weird.
· I’m hungry to challenge people for God rather than treating believers like they need to be protected from every little thing that may make them uncomfortable.
· I am sick of our reality, and am so committed to seeing the streams God wants to pour into our lives that I plan to be impossible to be around until we see it…and if that’s weird, sign me up.
I challenge you to join me in rethinking what’s weird and what’s normal in your life, and pursue a walk with God with more passion and intensity than a Burning Man in the desert.