"Jesus Is My Boyfriend"

I’ve recently got into the music of Samuel Lane, a worship leader from the Vineyard churches, well-known for their tradition of intimate worship music. His songs are beautiful evocations of praise to God, which draw me in, and help refresh my relationship with Christ.

Some appropriate for corporate settings, others suitable as performed songs of personal experience, they have, nevertheless, been very helpful in renewing my faith during recent times of dryness. As expressions of spiritual devotion, they are basically love songs to Jesus; very reminiscent of Matt Redman’s songs, though perhaps more passionately delivered. And I need that energy.

As such, though, they also fall victim to the frequent criticism, of being ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ songs. The thought goes that songs in this genre are lyrically weak and over-sentimental. Indeed many are. They are bereft of profound theological content, and continue the usual evangelical weakness, of ignoring kingdom issues of justice and liberation.

But I think there is also a discomfort about the use of emotion in worship, and particularly the idea of men singing love songs to another man. The development is often blamed therefore for the absence of men from Christian church services. We need, it is claimed, more ‘manly’ worship.

Perhaps that is true. But I think the reaction is also a symptom of a deep dis-ease with emotions and feelings as such. This reflects hetero-sexual male discomfort with the expression of emotion, ill-at-ease especially with the homo-erotic overtones of love between men.

Perhaps we need a deep healing in our psyches, to own our own emotional lives. Obviously worship is more than emotion, but must not be less than emotion. Our praise to God should include our whole being: including emotion, will, and intellect. The expression of intimate love for Jesus is after all not a twentieth century invention.

Look at nineteenth century pietist hymns of devotion, in both protestant and catholic churches. Some of it was certainly cloying in its sentimentality, and justifiably died out. But it did articulate heart worship: for them, at that time, in that culture. And who would say that much contemporary worship music will necessarily last beyond our period?

Furthermore, the use of sexual love as an analogy for spirituality, is an authentic part of the Christian mystical tradition: for example, the Englishman Richard Rollo, and the Spaniard St. John of the Cross. Even Meister Eckhart’s language of self-annihilation was more like the ego-loss of sexual ecstasy than the eastern experience of nirvana.

Even more, is the example within Scripture, of the Song of Songs. Rightly, scholars have criticised the church for allegorising this as about our relationship with God. But although the church’s Neo-platonic discomfort with sex and the body was responsible for this in the past, there is now an opposing discomfort with seeing our spiritual life in such erotic ways.

So Jesus is my more-than-boyfriend, not less than that. We need to break through into the encounter with the living God: always present, seldom felt.