The “Jesus” You Never Heard Pt.1

“You might as well say ‘Jesus sucks another $&%#’,” he exclaimed, to the shock of everyone in the meeting. I understood his exasperation. The “Jesus” problem was tiring all of us, but a problem worth working through together.

Manufacturing was set to begin shortly on the just mixed and mastered Twilight – my second record – when the buyer for a major Christian book store chain had eleventh hour objections to a lyric of mine. I was being banned.

The problem line was in the song “Jesus,” a simplistic tune updating Matthew 25’s “What you’ve done to the least of these my brothers you have done to me.” I put it this way: “When we love the least / When we love the weak / When we love these / We love Jesus.” That was palatable for the buyer.

The first verse was not: “Jesus brings a meal for tips / Jesus turns another trick / Jesus raising two alone / Jesus drives a heavy load.”

Banned. That’s not good, I thought, especially being banned by a store responsible for selling 27% of my first album’s approximately 100K unit total. And there seemed to be nothing I could do about it but go along with my label’s decision to pull the song from the record – and quickly, so the already much-publicized release date wouldn’t have to be pushed back.

Then I had an idea. I got on my computer and looked up the buyer’s home phone number and placed the call.

“May I speak to _______________ please?”

“This is _____________.”

“This is Shaun Groves in Nashville.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding embarrassed or afraid.

“I’m not angry,” I quickly reassured – which wasn’t entirely true. “I know about your decision not to carry my next record because of the Jesus song and I wanted to hear your side of things. All I’m hearing is what the label is telling me. And all you know about my reason for writing it the way I did is what they’re telling you, and I just think when two Christians disagree with each other they shouldn’t have to do that through a middle man. Is this a good time to talk or would you rather me call you at work sometime?”

He was kind. Not at all what I thought he would be. He listened, as it turned out, to the music his many stores sold because he cared about what was being fed to the Church. And also, he explained, because his stores have a no return policy for all music purchases. He was afraid he’d have angry or confused customers wanting their money back when they heard Jesus portrayed as a prostitute.

And as the conversation unfolded it also came to light that he personally was uncomfortable with Jesus engaging in a sex act, and Him doing so for money was even more disturbing. “Jesus doesn’t sin,” he said.

He and I heard each other out and hung up agreeing to disagree.

Then came the sometimes-heated meeting – the one that erupted in the “You might as well have said…” exclamation I’ll never forget. Three folks from my label, one of them an attorney, my manager, and two representatives from my distribution company. They called the meeting to convince me the right decision was to pull the song from the album and be done with the controversy. I was there to suggest a different solution to our problem.

I proposed we not allow a book store buyer, as good a man as he was, to decide what was and wasn’t biblically true and appropriate for the Church to hear. Instead, I asked that we send the song and a lyric sheet to a panel of theologians and pastors we choose together. I asked that we not tell these experts what the controversy was all about or who’s side we were on, but simply ask each person to look the lyric over and let us know if they thought it was theologically sound. Then, I promised, I would submit to the panel. If one of these men thought the song was immoral or inaccurate or heretical in any way and for any reason I would stop fighting to keep it on the album.

I chose theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, and Will Willemon. And pastors like John Piper and Tony Campolo. And of course my own pastor, who’d not only allowed me already to play the song in our church services but also taught me the lessons it was based upon. The rest of the room threw out names like Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Max Lucado and Charlie Peacock – people the label’s founder Michael W. Smith had easy access to already. They named Scotty Smith, Rick Warren and Bill Hybels and other well-known pastors at the time.

These were the leaders of the American churches. If anyone should be determining for us what the Church should and should not be taught it was this panel and not a well-intentioned bookstore buyer with a return policy and potentially disgruntled customers on his brain, or a label staff with an upset distribution company on it’s back, or a distribution company with promised deadlines to live by, or an overly sensitive song writer asserting his right to artistic expression.

The CDs and lyric sheets were sent out immediately.

And we waited…

Read part 2 and part 3.