Thursday, September 17, 2009

What Can The Black Eyed Peas Teach The Church?

You've probably already seen this great video. I just saw it on Ragumuffinsoul. He says the following:

"I believe this video annihilates the idea that people want to show up to an event (church) and stand in rows and be sung and talked to.
Safety is overrated.
People want to be a part of something big.
What can we, the church, learn from The Black Eyed Peas?"

I also find the video thought provoking. It's a great video. So there you go.

2 comments:

Pat Tracy said...

Seems pretty obvious that the square in front of the stage - up to the barriers and the sound board - was all people who were trained and well-rehearsed (borne out at least partially by the second part of the video). As smoothly as everything progressed, there were far more than 20 trained dancers in the crowd. However, even if "only 20" the clear aim was to make it *appear* to be spontaneous when it was not.

Was it masterful "Crowd Management"? Yes.

Does it apply to church? If you want to fool people it does. If you put your 'worship service' in an outdoor venue at/near the end of a workday, and invite people to a party (Oprah's 24th season kickoff celebration).

Would these people have shown up to worship Jesus instead of Oprah?

From Section 4 of the video: Will.I.Am: "This is the biggest choreography stunt (10 thousand people) ever pulled off."

Color me suspicious.

Stéphane K said...

Hello Pat (or hello dear suspicious),

I don't know if we know each other. I think you've misunderstood the question. The video was no trick. More than 10 000 fans from Chicago practiced long and hard to get this right. I read that there was 1 leader for every 25 people.

However the video teaches us quite a bit about mankind. Here are a few suggestions:
1-Man loves to express himself
2-Man loves music
3-Man loves to dance
4-Man loves to be an actor, not just an onlooker
5-Man loves to be involved in something greater than himself

From this there are applications to church:
-Display a big God
-Promote creativeness and involvement in worship
- Dancing? :-) I've never done it in my conservative church, but you see what I mean…

Of course man is a sinner. Left to ourselves, we worship the created things instead of the creator. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't much to learn about man and culture by observing events such as the posted video.

Yours,
Stéphane