When I walk into the floor-level seating section of the Wellmont Theatre, the first thing that hits me is the sound. It rises like a wave that crests, crescendos, and recedes, beckoning me toward the front rows with a twinkling, slow keyboard and a hypnotizing guitar melody. The surge of music, accompanied by earnest voices that both soothe and command, leaves me disarmed, and before I can even get situated in my chair I feel tears rising in my eyes, starting to escape.
I am at Hillsong Church’s New Jersey campus for a mid-morning worship service, and nobody is more surprised than me that I am here.
My older son is down the street at a Sunday school program that’s being hosted in a rented space called “Chill.” The baby is upstairs, swimming in a makeshift ball pit that’s assembled each Sunday morning in the theater’s balcony, surrounded by the young volunteers who flitter around like some new species of black-and-leather clad butterfly. The head pastor ascends the short staircase to stand before us and join his voice, for a moment, to the rising throng. A rotating, elevated camera projects a shot of the singing crowd up on the screen, and I see the congregation. In the reflected glow of the stage lights, everyone looks beatific, like earthside saints.
To be completely honest with you, I hadn’t ever—could never have—been able to view myself as a “Hillsong”-going kind of person. (Working definition: Someone who wears gender-neutral leather clogs with the slyest suggestion of a little heel at the bottom.) The place felt opposite to the cerebral connection I strive to make between my sparring soul and mind. I wasn’t looking for a holy awakening at Hillsong the first time I agreed to go, on a whim, with a friend. I just wanted to take my sons to Sunday school at a place where nobody would ask me any questions. I thought I was above worshipping at a church waving a “WELCOME HOME” banner, sharing the same message Justin Bieber was hearing.
Why I ended up there is because my small, community-based evangelical church felt so politically charged I had to leave, but leaving made me lonely, because I never stopped loving Jesus and wanting to be close to people who were trying to be like Him.
Why I keep coming back is a little more complicated.
Like many people, I was left disoriented by the results of the 2016 election. Most of the blame for the results was lain at the feet of white evangelical Protestants. It was a logical, irrefutable, and heartbreaking deduction, supported by piles of Pew studies and an ever-reddening sea of effusive Christians in MAGA hats. From disoriented I moved to disillusioned, then to outright disgusted. It took awhile for me to leave my church and the arm of Christianity that had raised me up to love compassion, justice and peace. It wasn’t easy to do, and it really hurt.
A month or two ago I read about a performance art piece called Rochester, 1996. It’s an immersive experience that recreates a mid-’90s church service for its first act. Just reading about it, I felt a tired pain issue from an old wound. My hackles rose to defend the church I grew up in, but those same aggrieved feathers were met with a dull awareness of something I’d long accepted. While I may disagree with some of the premise of Rochester project, “church” as we know it on Sunday mornings has always held many of the same qualities of a work of art.
The potential for art in fellowship, in loving God, in worship—it’s a part of what enticed me about what the church could be. But it also became a part of why I’d proclaimed, in 2017, that I was finished with evangelical theology and its culture as a whole. I believe all art to be political—“political” defined both loosely and specifically as a product of its time—and I didn’t want to participate in politics that mixed God up with the idolatry of power.
My experience walking into most any contemporary worship service had gone like this: Somebody hands me a program. There’s a photograph on the cover, something from nature, a depiction of a hummingbird maybe, or holly berries coated in frost. A single word is printed on the front, a word that is less word than ethereal concept: PEACE. JOY. GRACE. The performers are listed in order of appearance inside of the program. The choir, the soloist, the ushers, the speaker. A venerated text is printed on the back. I sit in hushed quiet, taking in the energy that seems to throb and fall without provocation, and I exchange glances with the other audience members, before it begins. Hence my formulation: modern church services are choreographed, sanitized, stabilized works of performance art.
And so it became for me that showing up to church began to carry political implications I wanted nobody to witness. In the voice of the pastors and prayers, I could only hear the one voice, the same voice, that seemed to emanate from everywhere like an unholy echo: Donald Trump’s.
In August 2018, almost two years after the election that drove me from the evangelical movement, my thoughts hadn’t changed—but my feelings of spiritual desertion and desolation were intensifying. It had been months since I’d officially severed ties to my former church home with a hazily constructed text to the pastor. It had been close to a year since I’d stopped showing up entirely. Being spiritually homeless, no matter the reason, is a lonely place. I was trapped between my ideological opposition to what the election said about the church, and my deep and unbending longing to be close to people who loved God.
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Performance art is a sort of compression of the time period that produces it; an artifact told through a passage of time instead of flattened to a canvas or sculpted out of clay. Some artists believe that time itself has a soul, that it’s spread out across the universe inside of every living being, that the story of life itself is a story about the passing of time. Out of one soul, many. Out of many souls, one. This makes the idea of performance art—time’s compression to imply one meaning—especially pertinent to that of a church service.
My favorite art critic, Walter Benjamin, writes a lot about the means of production and the emulsification of art with what’s political. The one thing he didn’t believe could be expressed by any medium, no matter its production, was God:
Man is created in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any human machine. Only the divine artist, divinely inspired, may be allowed, in a moment of solemnity at the higher call of his genius, to dare to reproduce the divine human features — but never by the means of a mechanical aid!
I wonder at the technology surrounding me at the theater where the church meets. The fog machine, the amps, the twinkly keyboards and the screens in front of me at Hillsong Church. Are they bringing me closer to God? Or are they blocking Him out?
On some Sundays, a live sermon is preached on stage at the campus I attend. On others, our service links in with the other Hillsong services taking place on the East Coast. Often, Hillsong NYC’s lead pastor, Carl Lentz, who has become a minor celebrity in his own right, delivers these messages. Lentz preaches so intensely that veins bulge out of his neck and chart a visual course of the lifeblood inside him. He sips from a black cup and engages with the audience from the stage, with slightly irreverent, self-deprecating jokes reminiscent of an under-caffeinated youth pastor. He’s lively with a scripted sort of recklessness that’s as charming as it is hard to categorize. Carl carries a charisma that has to be seen to be believed. (In a past life, I might have called it an “anointing.”)
Whenever Lentz shows up to preach to us I’m so worried about him that I pray the entire time he speaks, because the cynical part of me is so convinced that anybody this visible, this beloved, is doomed. I see headlines like “Is Bieber’s sexy pastor just using him for fame?” and I laugh and shrug, and then I try to be objective about the possibility that that could be true. I don’t want to be blindsided by anything I love, even if it’s church. Especially if it’s church.
My husband attends a service with me, and I try to explain to him the force that keeps carrying me here. “It’s so fake that it feels real,” is what I settle on. He nods with understanding. I don’t know why I want to be at Hillsong, but I think it has something to do with the spectacle of it. Instead of pretending not to be an art performance; instead of burrowing into denial about the fact that we’re all grouped together here to imbibe a presence, to consume an experience—Hillsong leans into it with gusto. The keyboard winks at us while fog spirals upward along with our open palms. Take, take, the music implores us. Here, we have more than enough.
As far as criticism of Hillsong, let’s just say … there’s a lot, and I am familiar. There’s a bunch of articles online by folks who “infiltrated” Hillsong and rejected it on the basis of shallowness, or because it wasn’t progressive enough. There are interviews of Carl that aren’t the most flattering, and watchdog bloggers who posit that Hillsong is a cult of a person, or that it’s less of a church and more of a bunch of groupies for a talented band. The celebrity following certainly doesn’t help the church present a more serious vibe (which is kind of messed up, if you think about it—why do we think that Kevin Durant isn’t allowed to search for Jesus?). Hillsong might not ever be—something—enough to be accepted as a legitimate gospel venue. It’s too young, or hip, or popular. They have too much money, and too many Instagram followers.
I get it. I don’t even always disagree.
But I also wonder if this criticism is slanted by our understanding of capitalism, of consumerism, of scarcity and holiness—all of which have been shaped and corrupted by American politics. As Benjamin observed in his sketch “Capitalism as Religion,”
Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. A vast sense guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.
It appears to me that what critics of Hillsong take issue with is its stance on guilt. There’s either too much of it, or not enough of it, being implied in its theological machinations to satisfy either the secular progressive or the neo-conservative among us. Thankfully, I have realized, am neither.
Instead of the spectre of Protestant guilt, “Church” at Hillsong returns again and again to the worship, the spectacle, the singing. The energy of a thousand people feeling very, very earnest. It’s inviting on the ground level, and it’s transformative, the way the church is supposed to be. Kids (now… adults) like me who grew up at youth conferences and church summer camp recognize the beckoning and addictive “concert stylization” of worship. We aren’t bothered by it, necessarily. Some of us are even comforted. This worship methodology is how we were taught that God was supposed to sound.
In Rochester, 1996, an implication seems to be that a church’s inherent performance aspect robs it of its humility; takes us out of the element where God can really speak to us and draws us into something broken, and bizarre. While that implication is certainly discomfiting, there is an aspect of truth to it that’s hard to argue with. It’s problematic in the way that Church itself is problematic, no matter where you go.
The problems with Hillsong, I realized, are the same problems of any church in the age of mechanical reproduction. They’re just more blatant, more pronounced — and for me, that makes it not just easier, but possible to participate. Perhaps I’m longing for a church environment whose problems I can see and diagnose, wrap my head around and pray for.
Whether we go or we don’t, church community says something relavatory about our deepest impulses, our stances on politics, our understanding of who we are and where we think we belong in the landscape of culture and class. Perhaps the fog machine obscures our view of God. Perhaps every piece of machinery, all of the technology we hold in our hands and imbibe through our eyes and absorb through our brains, does the same.
What shall we then do?
If attending an evangelical church is a political act, it needs to also be a desperate act—a decision born out of wrestling against, and ultimately succumbing to, a deep and unabating spiritual longing. A decision that I have to chisel out of a mire of guilt, confusion and fear—a choice to look straight at the imperfections of that which I have no choice but to defend. A thing I have to rescue, then release, before I can ever really see it illuminated, a thing I try to consecrate with trembling hands that seem to betray and drop what’s precious at every opportunity. A thing not unlike salvation, itself: Immediate but evolving, elusive but assured.