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imuybemovoko · 4 years

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I die inside while dissecting Jesus music

For this fun little exercise in self-torture, I’m going to find a weird worship song and dissect it. Today I feel like saying death-cult a distressing number of times so I’m going to find one that talks about how the next world is supposed to be better for this one.

I’m probably going to regret this. And probably cope by blasting metal while I do this.

I’ll go with a bit of low-hanging fruit for this first one: Even So Come. It’s attributed six ways to Sunday because like seven different artists/groups have a recording of it somewhere out public, but this lyric site thingy says Chris Tomlin. Some of these songs get wildly popular to the point where even as a church guitar guy (read: very large fan of this shitty music) I tended to find it a bit confusing to tell who originally wrote them. This is an example. I think it was probably Kristian Stanfill but uh... I can never be 100% sure. I’ve been wrong about ones I was way more sure about before.

This song is repetitive as fuck, like a lot of these, because what helps indoctrinate people more than literally singing the same words for 15 minutes?

Let’s get into this shit.

The song

I’ll spare you a few minutes of your life if you want to keep it. I already linked the lyrics, but I’ll give this a quick listen to make sure Stanfill doesn’t literally freehand some new lyrics during the video; if he does, I’ll discuss that too I suppose. The whole point of this is that I’m listening to this shit so you don’t have to. But if you really want to, then go off I guess. I can’t and honestly wouldn’t try to stop you. Unless this shit is triggering to you. In that case please don’t listen. It used to fuck me up hard when my brother would blast songs like this in the shower after I deconverted. I don’t want that happening to anyone out there. Tread with caution.

Okay. I wrote that while I was listening, and apparently he doesn’t yeet off into new spontaneous lyrics at any point. I think that’s more of a Bethel thing, but I don’t remember it being exclusive to them so I had to make sure.

Ok, let’s do this more or less in order. I’ll take it a verse at a time. But first, let’s talk formatting. The first two verses aren’t separated by anything, and the third is after the first chorus. After the third verse they play the chorus again, then the bridge. The AZLyrics entry under Tomlin lists it twice; Stanfill plays it twice. When I was on the worship team at a church, we’d typically play the bridge four times for extra drama. After this, they end with two tricks. First is that they play the first half or so of the chorus, then a whole chorus right after it. Again, this is for extra drama. The leader of the worship team at my old church would tend to point to one part of the song as the “climax” and we’d do a fair amount of this kind of shit leading up to it. In this particular case, it’s actually most of the chorus, leaving off only the “even so come” lines. The break is at a lyrically appropriate place more often than it’s just like “haha 2 bars into the chorus” or something like that because of course the message has to be consistent. After this, they fade the song out by repeating the last line or two, like, umpteen times to foster a contemplative mood. (It works. I’ve been on both ends of this dynamic. If you’re in a more charismatic crowd, my experience suggests that this final repetition is the most likely point where someone’s going to fall out and start speaking in tongues or something. Also, in those circles sometimes one of the vocalists, most often the team leader because of course, will give some kind of “word from God” to the congregation.) That’s the format, and it’s a very common one. At church camps and retreats and events like those, often they’ll loop choruses or bridges or ending tags or, sometimes (but far less often), verses and extend a song like this one to like fifteen or twenty minutes. In a typical church service they don’t really do it that way though because people might get impatient or something.

On to the lyrics of this song. I’ll address the verses in order, then the chorus and bridge, then talk ordering, because doing this chronologically would get annoying as fuck. The first verse is as follows:

All of creation All of the earth Make straight a highway A path for the Lord Jesus is coming soon

Notice the equivocation in the first two lines here. The author most likely believes this is an accurate thing to equivocate, and so do most of their audience.

The next two lines are a similar repetition, using both modern and more Biblically-flavored language, in reference to Mark 1:3. The particular language used is not altogether different from most English translations. These lines, both in the sense that the author intends and in their function in the song, are meant to prepare the listener for what follows: “Jesus is coming soon.” A reminder of the inevitable apocalypse most Christian sects teach and, in their view, the second chronologically of two most important events in the entire history and future of the world (the first being the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ). Every verse of the song ends with this reminder.

To boil the message of this verse down into one word:

(I have entirely too much fun with this image lol)

The second verse:

Call back the sinner Wake up the saint Let every nation Shout of Your fame Jesus is coming soon

“Call back the sinner” implies a return to origins and contains an implicit reference to the prodigal son in the parable in Luke 15. The implication is that being a “sinner” (and I’ll discuss the dichotomy in a second here) is a life of running away from God either by ignorance or by choice, and that they were originally with God. The typical narrative on the mechanisms of the fall of man seems to suggest otherwise because only Adam and Eve were technically originally with God and everyone else starts out separated because of that lovely little generational curse thingy, this is a bit of an odd take, but in light of the evangelical perspective that not only a god, but their god is so self evident that people have to make the active choice to not believe, this makes an entire hell of a lot of sense, and “calling back the sinner” could entail saying “lol stop wasting your energy running from what you know.”

The next line engages in a bit of common guilt-tripping. Saying “wake up the saint” implies that believers and churches have fallen asleep in some sense, and that’s actually a perspective referenced in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, each church getting a different flavor of messaging like this. When churches and saints are called to “wake up”, it means to cease engaging in whatever behavior is apparently polluting their message, i.e. forgetting the original reason they’re doing this, normalizing “worldly” practices, bad leadership paradigms, etc. Thus, I’m inclined to read this line as something like “you’re better than the rest of humanity; act like it.

Also of note is this dichotomy established here between “sinners” and “saints”. This is, on paper at least, the only important distinction in evangelicalism. (In practice they have a lot of shitty perspectives on women because of Paul’s writings as well as some class and/or racial biases, unconscious or conscious depending on the particular congregation.) A “saint” is a “true” Christian, one who is “set apart” from the world by God. A “sinner” is literally anyone else. In addition to their entire laundry list of harmless actions that are considered sins, Evangelicals (and probably many other Christians honestly) will say that to be non-Christian is a sin. In my old church and its affiliates I often heard that to remain non-Christian for an entire lifetime is the only unforgivable sin, identifying it with the “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” referenced in Matthew 12:31. There are a wide variety of perspectives on what this “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” actually means, and I can really only confidently speak to Calvary Chapel’s perspective on that. In any case, this song makes use of the “sinner vs saint” dichotomy common in Christianity. I analyze it as a typical “us vs them” with an added twist that says “the ‘them’ can become us and that’s better”.

After this is a reference to the passages in the Bible that speak of the Gospel being spread to “every nation” and things such as that, and that every nation will come under Christ’s lordship at the end of time. Then there’s a reminder that the singer is awaiting this apparently fast-approaching end.

The third verse:

There will be justice All will be new Your name forever Faithful and true Jesus is coming soon

This third verse is mostly a reference to events predicted to occur after the second coming of Christ. In Revelation, among other places, there is a described sequence of events in which the world comes absolutely fucking unglued, falls under the thumb of a tyrannical world government run by some guy who lets himself get possessed by Satan, and then is yeeted by God and soaked in the blood of Satan’s armies at the final battle. A bit later, for some reason Satan has to be let go for a bit, but he loses hard once again. After this, God yeets the unbelievers into hellfire and makes a new world which he rules forever. In short, the collapse, battles, and Great Divine Yeet are what this “justice” describes. The remaining lines speak of this renewed world run by Jesus himself. Lastly, we have the reminder that this is all going to happen before very long here.

There’s a bit of a double-reference thing going on here and in the second verse too, and I’m honestly not entirely sure what to make of it, but it shows up often in contemporary Christian music. They’ll switch between referring to God in second person (Your name forever) and in third person (Jesus is coming soon). It seems ...most likely to be a matter of convenience, and I’m rather inclined to treat it as that because the other things I think of seem either counter-productive or very, very outlandish. Like, are they alternating between addressing God and addressing the listener? Maybe, but the message of this song is so much more listener-directed that I find that thought kinda weird.

In any case, that’s the verses.

Now let’s get to the chorus. This is repeated after the first two verses and again several times after the third, and it contains a lot of deeply cursed metaphors. I mean holy fuck.

Like a bride Waiting for her groom We'll be a church Ready for You Every heart longing for our King We sing Even so come Lord Jesus come Even so come Lord Jesus come

So the first two little couplets here refer to a metaphor found in several places in scripture where the church is the “bride” of Christ. This. is. CREEPY! In the old testament, the role of the wife is often analogous to that of property, so that’s deeply gross. Further, Paul says men are the head of women, i.e. have great authority over them, and women should be subservient. Jesus doesn’t honestly do a whole hell of a lot to resist this, and powerful women throughout most of the scriptures are either defined as attaining their power in “God-honoring” subservient ways like Esther or as dangerous demonic influences operating under the “spirit of Jezebel”. (”Jezebel” is literally a scriptural term for this kind of thing; one of the church letters in Revelation uses it. Many evangelicals/fundies add “spirit of” because of their borderline-animistic take on spiritual warfare. I might describe that in more detail in a later post. It’s a metaphor based on an old-testament queen who is presented as manipulative and narcissistic, taking the real power in the kingdom from her husband by manipulation and doing a great deal of damage with it.) Thus, in this context, I find the “bride” metaphors inextricable from a tyrannical, abusive relationship in which the man, or in this case Christ, is the absolute head. Biblical ideas on marriage and family life are an entire problem too, establishing what I feel very confident in describing as an abusive power dynamic. Thus, this song references a metaphor by which Christ is described as having abusive control over his people. @kristian stanfill thanks I hate it. @whoever the fuck wrote the bible thanks I hate it. The couplet in this song is describing a situation in which the church is waiting to submit to an abusive authority and it’s fucking disgusting and I hate that I used to live that way.

The next line, “every heart longing for our king”, indicates that it’s normative to strongly desire this power dynamic and expresses a probably-genuine (mine was) desire for more of Jesus on the part of the writer and the singer. So with these preconditions established, they say, “we sing, even so come, Lord Jesus, come”, repeating “even so come” and on twice for added weight. The chorus and bridge are, by the way, where this seems to get deathculty.

Remember that in referencing the coming of Jesus, they reference ideas that this world is shitty and being dead and in heaven/having the world destroyed by God and replaced is going to be a hell of a lot better. The Bible and many churches, particularly evangelicals, will even use language like “dying to oneself” to refer to the process of laying down one’s life for the cause of Jesus. Thus, death metaphors infiltrate their literal daily living. The general attitude that’s expected for people to have in those circumstances is one of “I won’t seek death actively but I will welcome it when the time comes”, and coupled with the way the other forms of abuse broke me, this had me fantasizing about dying in third-world countries for getting too annoying about Jesus. So that’s pretty wack, I suppose. This belief system is one that puts death on a very disturbing pedestal. This entire song is about preparing for the return of Jesus, which is going to bring a hell of a lot of death if it happens as they predict. This very deadly event is what “Jesus is coming soon” entails, and it’s one of two possible interpretations that I can think of to apply to these “even so come lord Jesus come” lines. The other is that they believe that Jesus is present with them when they worship (Matthew 18:20) and they seek to experience this presence. But the preparatory nature of this song, in my experience at least, puts very strong priority on the first sense, even though it can be, and in church settings often functions as, both. These lines are a plea for personal transformation and for the apocalypse. In the vanishingly unlikely event that the Christian version of the divine turns out to be true, billions will die in wars and disasters (some actively caused by God’s agents) and many of those same billions and many more people, including me, will be victims of the Great Cosmic Yeet and land in hellfire forever. And they want this to happen sooner rather than later. That’s literally the main point of this song.

So we wait We wait for You God we wait You're coming soon

This is the bridge. It’s typically repeated kind of a lot. Like, I mean holy fuck they repeat this. It’s literally just “we’re excited for the second coming of Christ”. You know, in case someone needed a reminder that they want billions dead, even more people yeeted into hellfire, and the entire world destroyed. Evangelical and fundamentalist strains of Christianity are literally a death cult.

So with that rant-filled analysis out of the way, let’s see if I can talk formatting without dying inside again or getting too pissed off.

On the lyric site I linked above (and I’ll link it again so you don’t have to scroll through whatever literal mountain of text and cursed images I’ve produced) this goes verse 1, verse 2, chorus, verse 3, chorus, bridge twice, weird most-of-chorus tag, chorus, the last two lines like several times over. Thus, already we have multiple repetitions of most concepts found in this song. Also, this two verses-chorus-third verse-chorus-bridge several times-chorus twice-ending tag format is quite common in contemporary Christian music, in the studio recordings, official lyrics, and chord sheets you’ll find out there. But I cannot stress enough that this structure, especially the bridge and latter choruses but the entire structure including the verses, is extremely modular. Anything can be repeated, or repeated more times. Anything can be re-inserted in another place. This is mostly a Bethel thing in my experience, but there can be instrumental breaks for one of the vocalists to yeet out entirely spontaneous lyrics. There can be massive empty instrumental breaks, or instrumental breaks with spoken words in them. And I’ve seen even less of that, but parts of other songs can be inserted just about anywhere too, and I’ve actually participated in that one on occasion. To an extent, any music can be handled in ways like this, but it seems to me like contemporary Christian music is consciously designed that way because its target audience goes nuts over long, “spirit-filled” songs played at church camps or an extra spicy church service.

It’s also worth noting, and if I end up doing a whole lot of these I’ll probably explain this in a great deal more depth, that these songs can get reasonably similar to one another. I think that’s because to a very large extent, the words and structure matter a hell of a lot less than the way they set the mood. You can get the same impact on a crowd of willing Christians from probably literally any combination of these songs. I always had my favorites but that didn’t seem to matter that much.

I’m inclined to say some of the same things about a lot of modern music, actually. It has common structures, a lot of music is interchangeable for certain moods, etc. But I can’t say a thing about the modularity of modern music. A song seems to be way more of a distinct unit in most environments. Mashups do happen, but massive repetitions of one piece of a song generally don’t in any context that I’m aware of. They’ll jam out on an instrumental for a while at concerts sometimes, but you really don’t get this, like, singing “Crawl on your belly til the sun goes down, I’ll never wear your broken crown, I took the road and I fucked it all away, in this twilight how dare you speak of grace” more than like the twice they do it in the studio recording from most groups like you do in very many Christian music settings. (The example chorus I put here was from Mumford and Sons- Broken Crown. It’s an amazing song, I totally recommend it lol it was the first one that popped into my head for this purpose.) Some other commonalities are present in a lot of modern music, but for the most part, that modularity would just come across extremely weird. I think just about every time I’ve either seen or been involved in the playing of Even So Come at a church, the musicians engaged in at least some degree of modularity, most often by repeating the bridge but sometimes uh... holy crap. Because of the extreme prolific use of these songs in church or retreat settings, I’m inclined to list the modularity as the single most important aspect of the formatting of this song and of many others.

#ex christian #contemporarychristianmusic #worship #i probably need therapy #dead inside

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