From the outside, the evangelical Protestant church in Draper, Utah, did not look much like the churches I was accustomed to. For one thing, it lacked a steeple; its squat square shape would have been more reminiscent of a doctor’s office or company headquarters, if it were not for the large lettering on the side that proclaimed the building as “The Rock Church” in a modern sans-serif, beside a logo made up of the letter R and a stylized cross. The building’s foyer seemed to me a hybrid of a movie theater and a sports arena, and I wandered for a few moments, lost, finding my bearings.
Unbeknownst to the relaxed churchgoers all around me, the redhead in the colored button-up shirt standing between the sound booth and the plates of bread and wine had intruded into a completely unfamiliar world. Not knowing whether the large auditorium should be treated more like the traditional chapels I was familiar with or the Plain White T’s concert I had attended when I was thirteen, I settled for sitting quietly on the third row and observing those around me as they wandered in, trusting the principle that one can learn much about an event from the faces of those in attendance. Outside, friends had greeted one another warmly and chatted excitedly on the sidewalk, evincing a level of familiarity to which I was an outsider. After the countdown on the giant television screens reached zero and the band invited us to stand as they launched into their first piece, I looked around and noted the reactions of others in the congregation. Most swayed back and forth gently, several waving an arm in the air as they felt the music (a welcomingly familiar emotion given my own background as a musician), some sipping coffee and talking quietly to one another.
Indeed, as the service continued, I noticed more and more features that stood in defiance of traditional fixtures of worship, the first being the time-honored relationship between volume and reverence. The symbols of priesthood and authority were likewise absent, and I was at a loss for what title to apply to the man who spoke to the congregation between songs. Was he the pastor? A priest? The lead singer? Categories that I had accepted as either sacred or secular were blurred and combined, and nowhere was this more evident than during communion, which followed after the initial band performance of about half an hour. The guitarist remained on stage, playing a simple, atmospheric line with a contemplative, pleasant, and ethereal mood as the traditional bread and wine were distributed. Then a man (whom I realized was the actual pastor) said a rhythmic prayer from the stage, not like the chopped melodic line of a Lutheran priest during mass, but rather like the accompanied recitation of a poem, a spoken petition to God that seemed magnified, enhanced, and even answered by the peace of the background melody.
The explanation for this redefinition of sacred categories came in the pastor’s sermon. He displayed an image of a hippie bus on the screens (“Not the real bus,” he commented, “I just looked up ‘old bus’”) and narrated how a group of “Jesus hippies” drove from campus to campus and preached in the 1960s and 70s. The pastor’s father encountered them, converted to Christianity, studied as a pastor, and “planted” a church that led to the founding of over 30 more churches, including The Rock. The point, this second-generation pastor explained, is that “God is on the move,” and He can use whatever he wants for the gospel’s sake. With that explanation, suddenly the hippie bus was more than a Google Images stock photo—it was a sacred object. And suddenly, the presence of all the accoutrements of a contemporary rock band in a church was no longer so strange. The pastor’s words carried far beyond a hippie bus; if God is on the move and uses anything and everything for the gospel’s sake, then that also included, in this particular instance, two guitars, one keyboard synth, one drum set, and one full sound crew.
The band closed the service with an energetic piece that took its refrain from John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…” though it was a different lyric that remained with me long after the service had ended: “Taste of His goodness / Find what you’re looking for.” Those words of John 3:16, that God so loved the world that He gave His son, have spread in innumerable ways since the first century—they have been read with wonder in Roman villa house-churches, recited in Latin from pulpits ornamented and plain, copied by the pens of countless monks, printed in ink by Gutenberg’s press, carried by missionaries to unknown lands, publicly proclaimed by itinerant preachers, sung from a millennium of hymnals. In The Rock Church, the twenty-first century’s new collection of sacred objects was on full display in all its aural amplitude, and the peaceful chatter of the congregation testified that among the fold-up chairs, the electronic buzz of amped-up guitars, the tithing box labeled with a Venmo address, and the aftertaste of timeless sacramental wine, this diverse group of worshippers had found what they were looking for. ∎
This article was written for a humanities course at BYU. I anticipate writing a series of articles about different events in the community.
