Rainey Blogs on Some Days

The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) is the biblical passage that a worshipping Jew recites more than any other passage. It is recited daily in the morning and evening prayers, on the Sabbath, and as part of many liturgies. But when it says, "The LORD is one," what does it mean? I like to think of God as often working in the world incognito and showing up in places that you would least expect Him. For example, I think God goes undercover as a pop musician sometimes and His truths show up in the poetry of the songs. One of the recent times this happened for me was a few months ago after I had gotten the Jackson Browne  CD, I'm Alive , from the library. I was struck by this 1970s and 1980s star whose songs were so content-rich. Somehow though, when he was at the height of his popularity, I mostly missed him and his everyman lyrics of love, loss and pain. (I managed to miss Shakespeare too, but that is another story.) So I explored his music to find out what all the fuss had been ...

When I was growing up in Southern Illinois, my grandparents liked to vacation where they could listen to country music. Most Saturday nights, my grandfather had the Grand Ole Opry on the radio--AM 710 on the dial--so I became familiar with names like Roy Acuff, Grandpa Jones, Minnie Pearl, Ernest Tubb, Chet Atkins, Porter Waggoner, Dolly Parton, and Tammy Wynette. This was not the new, Disney-commercial, theme-park fancy, Grand Ole Opry-land. This was hardcore Ryman Auditorium Opry. But one year, we broke with tradition and went to Florida. I think it was 1976. I had never been to Florida, never more than a state away from Southern Illinois. My grandpa always avoided driving through cities on our trips, preferring to take the bypasses and go around them. He said this would save us time in the long run and avoid the big traffic jams that always occur in a city. So early on, cities were places of great mystery for me that we always avoided. I will never forget what he said about New Yor...

This is a satire piece that I wrote to express my feelings toward many of the songs we sing in church today: they are long, but short on lyrical content. Similar to what I remember about disco. During the 1970s, many people were saved out of disco to become Christian believers. Few would have thought that people could ever be saved into disco. Times have changed, though, and no Christian worship industry executive, pastor or theologian could have predicted the meteoric rise of a new type of worship music churches are currently using throughout the U.S.: Disco Worship. Disco Worship Fast Approaching Pop Worship in Popularity According to spokesperson Sergio Vandermaas of CRLI (Christian Royalties and Licensing Incorporated), the company that tracks worship song popularity and pays royalties to artists, CRLI has added several Disco Worship songs to their top song playlist and may even add a new Disco Worship category to their other category—Pop Worship—for tracking song usage. “Over t...

With the success of American Idol on Fox Television, the network decided to try to reach the more conservative Heartland population with its new “American Idol Preacher's Edition.” The show pits preachers from around the country against each other in a competition for who will be America's next “idol” preacher. Although producers of the new show considered using “experts” in evaluating preaching, they finally decided that anyone could evaluate preaching and decided to stick with their popular trio of judges from their prime time American Idol program: Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Simon Cowell. In early rounds of the competition, the three judges seemed tentative with their remarks and dismissed some preachers rather arbitrarily. By the time the competition reached the finals, though, they were back to giving their usual insightful, reflective feedback that quality of the preachers’ performances. Here are a few excerpts of the comments of Jackson, Abdul, and Cowell during a r...

Thursday, the temperature climbed into the 60s and we felt the warmth of spring, but it turned out to be teasing us because it is raining and cold again today. We managed our first softball practice last night for my daughter Rachel's 7th and 8th grade girls’ team. Then we came home and watched Survivor and the series finale of ER, a show I greatly admire because there seem to be so few good ones anymore. ER lasted 15 years. Saying we watched the finale is mostly true. Marcia and I lasted until the final segment. We fell asleep during the last set of commercials and missed what happened in the final scene, and whatever final message appeared before they launched the credits for the last time. We woke up and it was over forever. There remains an ever so slight and subtle lack of closure for me because we missed the end. What I saw when I woke up looked like every other week, with credits crawling across the bottom of the television screen as channel 4 news anchor Chuck Scarborough t...