About the Sacred, Secular thingy

Now, before people go off and think that I’m harping on Ms. Bowman, let me say that I think her stuff was tight. She does bring up a VERY important point about Christians dichotomizing the sacred and the secular. That it doesn’t exist. That “it” is all owned by God. There is no such thing as music that would be considered Christian as opposed to secular. Music is music. Business is business. Education is education. Work is work. I can’t imagine calling work sacred or secular. So, I appreciate the concern that she has for THAT matter. However, this is not to say that there are no such “secular” tendencies within cultural activities. There ARE distortions of what these things should TRULY be in which they need to find their rightful place within God’s Creation through Christian transformation. And so, I don’t want to ignore THAT. For example, in business, we have unions. Now, as much as we may not appreciate HOW FAR unions have gone, we can say that some sort of “policing” needs to be done, because business execs (who have sinful dispositions) tend to “lord over” (or to use the terms, “power trip” or “walk on”) their laborers. These are but manifestations of sin in the world. Therefore, in order to stem these tendencies, we need to “police” them to see that they don’t get out of hand. So it is, in this sense, that we could say that industries such as the music business could be “secular.” But this can be found everywhere because sin is found everywhere.

Still, Ms. Bowman’s point stands. To play (or not play) a particular style of music or be in a particular line of work does not mean that one is “more spiritual” than another. The pastor’s, priest’s or minister’s position is no more spiritual compared to a bricklayer. Some time ago, when I was out of a job, I received some advice from a friend in which he said, “There is no job that is dishonorable, Brandon.” Flipping burgers at McDonalds is as much of a spiritual act of worship as is the work of a pastor, priest or minister and so, we should not disparage or look down on those who do vocationally do those things.

Anyhoo, I just wanted to stress, that those points in which I disagreed with Ms. Bowman about, did not mean that I was in total disagreement with everything she spoke about.

Peace,
Brandon