Every so often a tradition experiences a rupture. I am thinking about the early days of hip hop in relation to music. DJs started playing a break in one track and then mixing it in to a break in another (or even a second copy of the same track) to keep the beat going, over which people would 'break' dance and rap. Shortly after, the advent of sampling then changed everything - you could sample a piece of music, a drum beat, a snatch of vocal and loop it or mix it in with other samples to create new tracks. This was a whole new approach, a creative bricolage, that challenged the traditions of music making at the time. Some people said it wasn't authentic, but rather stealing other peoples’ music. James Brown was one of the most sampled. He is referred to in the tune 'Talkin all that jazz' by Stetsasonic where they have this killer line: 'Tell the truth, James Brown was old ‘til Eric and Rakim came out with "I Got Soul" '. In other words he should be thanking the hip hop culture for giving him a new lease of life rather than complaining. In many ways sampling brought the archives alive to a whole new generation.
Hip hop has a strong association with Jazz, and indeed could be said to be carrying forward its traditions. Jazz was very much the music of the underground dance halls and clubs - its creative improvised format liberated it from the music that had gone before. In the hip hop tune ‘Jazz Thing’ Guru cites a list of the jazz greats and concludes "this music ain't dead, so don't be misled by those who said that jazz was on its deathbed... The nineties will be a decade of a jazz thing. I love jazz music". This track is hip hop - its beats and samples and rapping - and yet it is also jazz and seeks to locate itself in the tradition of jazz. Its jazz retains 'a new format'. The tradition ends up being renewed and carried forward rather than remaining stuck.
What's this got to do with youth ministry? Everything! Most of us involved in youth ministry have to wrestle with how to deal with our traditions. Tradition is an amazing gift. Without the heroes who have gone before, we wouldn’t be doing ministry. But it can also get stuck and need renewing. Just like the traditions of music we need creative visionaries who risk rupture and reclaim our traditions in new ways to carry them forward.
In New Testament and The People of God, Tom Wright introduces the notion of “faithful improvisation” by using the example of discovering one of Shakespeare’s lost plays, but lacking a scene in the fifth and final act. He suggests what would be necessary for that play to come to life would be a trained group of Shakespearean actors to improvise the missing scene. These actors wouldn’t simply wing it, but rather, they would immerse themselves in the first four acts and the other plays of Shakespeare. They would then act out their parts, striving to be faithful to the developing plot and character portrayals. Wright suggests as Christians, we have a script consisting of four parts – creation, the fall, Israel, and Jesus and the church. The fifth and final act is the church’s ongoing improvisation of the developing story. He says that we, as Jesus’ actors, are called to inhabit the world of the Bible and then act out that worldview for a new day.
Faithful improvisation frees us from the tradition, but it does not free us to do whatever we want. In order to improvise we must know the author, our God, the history of the church, the scriptures, and other improvisations of the church. The better we know the tradition, the more knowledge we can draw on to revise it. Jesus was more faithful to the tradition (i.e. the law) by getting to the heart of it rather than getting caught up in the trappings. The Spirit calls us to join in with what God is doing in the world and to improvise.
One of ALOVE’s essentials is Mission – “Going into the world to find Jesus and point him out”. We need to do this, not by simply abandoning all tradition, but investing in loyal radicals in our youth groups to help them, and the church, reinvent itself. With faithful improvisers, Christianity won’t be ‘on its deathbed’ or the preserve of old guys in lounge suits saying ‘nice’.