Disclaimer 1: If you read the blog regularly, you might be thinking at this point that I have a man-crush on Bruce Springsteen. While that may be, it doesn’t change the reality that The Boss is just framing my mental landscape very complimentarily.
Disclaimer 2: At a certain point, this metaphor falls apart.
Disclaimer 3: I’m not entirely sure where that point is.
As an actor, I was trained to build a ‘fourth wall’ between myself and the audience. All of the action took place on the stage and the audience, while an intellectual counterpart/character in the performance, just sat there; the receptor of entertainment. The fourth wall is sort of what makes something a stage play. If there’s no fourth wall, it’s a speech, improv, or perhaps, stand-up. In the Rock arena, it’s similar. The Rock Star band sets up the stage and plays to an audience that is part of the music but the stage is still an impenetrable barrier where the normal person isn’t welcome. We’ve all seen what happens when someone rushes the stage.
The stage is a fortress and you are not welcome on it.
Which is what makes Bruce Springsteen the bomb. In this video clip, he not only breaks the fourth wall (yes…it’s been done before, but this is a marvelous example, OK?), but he partakes in the festivities of his own show: by sitting down and gulping down a perfect stranger’s beer. Bruce slaughters the fourth wall and then joins his own party…and all the sudden, it’s not his party. It’s our party.
Think about the pulpit.
No, think about it.
Books and classes teach that preaching behind the pulpit is many things with one of those being a stage behind the fourth wall. Now no one teaches you this, but it’s simple to observe. Does the message walk among you? Does the messenger sit in your seat and drink from your cup?
Bruce is instinctively reacting to the times: a new generation of participant saying,
“Be one of us”
So how am I trying to help? Bruce Springsteen! Church leaders can take a lesson from Bruce and Smash The Fourth Wall. Let what happens on the stage, chancel, middle school auditorium floor pour into the people. Step down. Step into. Step out.
Step up!
The church is starving for a compelling new narrative. Are you telling it, or publishing it? Are you living it, or speaking on it? Both fundi’s and emergents. Both and everything in between. We just want to see Jesus.
The true new frontier is finding the collaborative intersection between the nature of being “set apart” and “one among” at the same time. Some call this incarnational. Some call it relational. Some call it Emergent. I call it…Christian. Jesus was not a right wing fundamentalist anymore than he was a left leaning doctrine cleansed emergent. Christ was the center, pushing the boundaries of prophetic promise and eschatological ontology (or fulfilling prophetic words spoken about him at the same time as he was imagining into existence a whole new way of being human).
There’s a new humanity to be lived.
Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Of course, that statement has nothing to do with plumbing, unless you call the water of the church, young people. Citing 
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