Letting My Thoughts Fly with Eagles
Essay Posted January 29, 2008 by James E. Nelson
On a recent trip to Omaha we stumbled across Eagles Nest church. I’m not acquainted with the church other than the big billboard campaign they had a few years ago when they changed their name. Their former name (Victory Church) was so ‘80s, and I can understand why a church would think that they would have a difficult time marketing themselves in the new millennium with a name like Victory Church.
Actually I can’t, but having studied church marketing in some depth, I’m pretty sure I get it. The modern mega-church has largely replaced old fashioned evangelism with new fangled marketing. Evangelism is so 70s. If you do evangelism, you can only reach one person at a time, but a good marketing campaign can reach tens of thousands with one well placed ad. It’s a way of using Jesus’ money wisely (if I may unfairly paraphrase the books written by the church marketing gurus).
When viewed from a marketing standpoint, “Victory Church” sounds a bit too “in your face,” like the church might actually try to evangelize you, or give you a gospel tract, or something. According to the church marketing types, that’s all very threatening to modern Americans. Today’s contemporary church wants to be welcoming and comforting, not threatening; they want to pat you on your back, not be in your face. Thus, “Eagles Nest,” which conveys safety and yet freedom, replaces “Victory Church,” which sounds triumphalistic. I’m guessing the name change was pure marketing genius.
Stumbling across Eagles Nest in Omaha would have not been at all memorable for me, except that the Eagles were playing on the radio when we passed by the church. This serendipitous confluence of events caused me to put things together in a way I had never done before.
The Eagles (the band, not the church) were a truly remarkable phenomenon back in the late 70s. Every time they released a song it seemed to immediately shoot to #1 and then stay there until you were sick of hearing it. In order to do that, a band not only needs to be popular with its core group of followers, it has to appeal to a very broad spectrum of listeners. Very few bands have managed that. I would put the Eagles in the company of the Beatles and Elvis on that front. At the end of the day, certain other bands sold a lot more records and were therefore “bigger” (in the way we measure popularity in pop music), but the Eagles’ ability, during their heyday, to go straight to #1 with song after son was just a bit eerie (or eyrie?—sorry, I couldn’t resist).
A bit too eerie for fundamentalist pop culture watchers. I was taught in high school and Bible college that the Eagles (the band, not the church) had sold their soul to the devil. It was satanic music. There was no concrete proof to this claim, but we were told with great certainty that the very fact of their singles repeatedly went to #1 on the charts was proof of some satanic deal. This was pre-Clear Channel, so music marketing was a bit more hit and miss than it is today. Even the biggest hits had to work their way up the charts week after week before finally climbing to #1. Except for the Eagles.
At YouthQuake, a youth conference put on by Miller Memorial Bible College somewhere in Saskatchewan, we were told how the Eagles used backward masking to place demonic messages in their music. The speaker played several examples. I could never hear what the speaker claimed to hear, but playing their tracks backward did indeed sound spooky. (Of course, playing the Gaithers backwards sounded spooky too.) At Big Sky Bible College Doc Habermas pushed the same message. Mr. Eldridge (the Dean of Students) even confiscated some kid’s stereo system until the end of the term because someone overheard him playing his Eagles albums in the dorm. (As the sons of the Vice-President and the Chief Financial Officer, who were roommates and big Cheap Trick fans, said, “We learned an important lesson from that incident: If you listen to music in your dorm room, always wear headphones!”)
The whole furor over the Eagles back in the 70s seems a little odd now. The various band members have gone on to successful solo careers, and they even managed to wow the world with a reunion tour. But in the end, Don Henley and Glenn Frey (the Eagles front men) were more tragic figures than the sort of towering cultural icons you would expect from folks who had made a Faustian deal with the devil. Christian rock superstar Randy Stonehill’s homage (“Teen King” on The Sky Is Falling album) to their lonely and empty greatness seems far more accurate than evidence that they were in league with the devil.
In the end, this is a meditation on popularity. We Christians are quite schizophrenic when it comes to our understanding of popularity. When it suits us, we use our popularity to prove that we are tight with God. Similarly, we use the other guy’s popularity to prove he is tight with the devil. The fact that the Eagles were unusually popular proved that they were in fellowship with the devil. The fact that Eagles’ Nest church is one of the most popular churches in Omaha proves that they are in proper fellowship with God. (The possibility that good marketing—nothing more, nothing less—was the source of both group’s popularity never entered the discussion.)
Jesus was ambivalent about popularity, and his life bore out his ambivalence. The same crowd that was wildly excited about him last year was shouting, “Crucify him!” this year.
But neither his ambivalence nor his life experience keep up us from using the popularity scale for our own end. And I certainly don’t want to imply that it’s only the Evangelicals who do this. Orthodox converts love to point to the remarkable growth of Orthodoxy in North America as evidence that it is the correct version of Christianity. At the same time, when faced with the overwhelming popularity of the mega-churches and the prosperity gospel, they observe that Arianism (one of the original heresies) was far more popular than Orthodoxy back in the 4th century. Even though Arian churches were everywhere and full to overflowing, and even though Arian leaning Bishops were common, they were wrong about Jesus Christ and ultimately (after centuries) faded away. Although the truth ultimately prevails, the lure of falsehood is always more popular with the people.
Popularity is a lot like money. It’s neither good nor bad, but it’s easy to turn it into either an idol or a bogey man. If we have it, we equate it with God’s blessing. If we don’t, but the other guy has it, we associate it with the devil’s influence. But both money and popularity have such a powerful attraction to us that we seem to be unable to remain ambivalent about them.
But the other day, driving by Eagles Nest church and listening to the Eagles on the radio, what struck me is how truly fleeting popularity is. The billboard campaign of a few years ago made the Eagles Nest look very exciting. Driving by the church campus it looked all so pedestrian. Back in the 70s the Eagles were hot stuff. Today they get sandwiched in between forgettable music on the easy listening station. I wouldn’t even recognize Don Henley or Glenn Frey if I saw them on the street.
But whether one is popular or unknown, it is possible to create something of lasting value. A couple days prior to our serendipitous journey past the church with the radio on, we spent a day at the Dallas Museum of Art. There among the busts of forgotten people with their noses chipped away, was a beautiful marble sculpture of an eagle sculpted by an unknown Greek sculptor. His name is forgotten; the purpose of the sculpture is unknown. But that bit of sculpted marble is a thing of enduring beauty. In two thousand years will the Eagles “Hotel California” or “Desperado” be remembered as great music? I certainly have no idea. In two millennia will Eagles Nest church be an enduring monument to God’s grace? Looking backwards it worked out quite well for the church in modern Thessaloniki, but not so well for the church at Laodicea. I won’t try to predict the future of Eagles Nest (nor my own congregation, St. Thomas in Sioux City, for that matter).
But whether one is Don Henley, a member of Eagles Nest, or just a writer of essays like me, in the long run whether one is wildly popular or completely unknown, it counts for nothing. The only thing that matters in the end is whether we create something, or participate in something that endures.
Copyright © 2008 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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