The Christmas season has come and gone, but a couple of months ago, I was brainstorming about Christmas play ideas for our church kids. Growing up in the church has given me an aversion to the classic Nativity Story Play. Familiarity breeds contempt would sum up my feelings on that subject, and while it’s not necessarily a sanctified way of thinking, it’s led me to explore how to visually represent the Christmas story in a different way. Two years ago was our first experiment in this, and I think we hit the nail on the head. We wrote a short 10-minute play called “Light up the Dark.” It was a retelling of Jesus’ first coming through the lens of light and darkness, the inspiration behind the idea being The Jesus Storybook Bible, which is excellent, by the way. The play, and the evening of celebration that surrounded it, are something that I will remember for a long time. Almost everyone from our small church participated in the evening in some capacity. It was beautiful to see and be a part of.
At the beginning of November, it was past time to start preparing for our next play and I sat at my desk trying to outdo myself by coming up with another idea for a “different” nativity play. Nobody asked me to. Nobody even expected me to, but the thoughts between my ears marched on: It’s gotta be better than the last one. It has to be bigger, longer and more powerful. These thoughts, when transcribed onto my page, were a whole lot of white empty space. Oh, I had ideas, but they weren’t it. They were theologically sound and child-appropriate, but not it. Something was missing. In frustration, I decided that we could just do the same play from two years ago but expand it. I didn’t love the idea but allowed my mind to go there. It at least had potential.
Then lighting struck. A great idea. Ok, it wasn’t lightning, but I do believe it was the Creator of lightning. Either way, it struck, and an idea was scrawled onto a piece of paper in such an organized and coherent fashion that when my 6-year-old saw it, he asked, “Mama, was is this even.” It was a window into my imagination. Slightly scary, but as I sifted it down and reworked it into understandable words on a page, I knew it was something. It was indeed a spin-off of the last play, and even though it spun you right into the same old story of Jesus’ birth, the trajectory that brought you there was completely different. Check
One box that I didn’t check, however, was the one to outdo myself. While it’s a few minutes longer, this play is not more powerful or bigger than the last one we did. That reality took me longer than I’d like to admit to make peace with, and in the struggle, a question bubbled to the surface of my heart.
What’s up with my “need” to outdo myself? Why was it so important for me to make the play better, bigger, longer, more powerful?
The answer that I landed on is simple. Hype.
When I hear that word, I think of the moments spent with your sports team in the locker room right before running out onto the field or court together to conquer and dominate. Inspirational words are said, there are shouts, bodies huddled together, unified in the mission, and intensity floods every thought, movement, breath. It’s intoxicating, and I love it. Hyped to the max, the team runs out to music, maybe a mascot, cheerleaders, fans screaming. Everyone’s part of the atmosphere in the stadium communicating one truth. This is it. It’s now or never. Your time has come.
I’ve never played a sport for big crowds, but even in high school, the rush I got from that run onto the court was only accelerated by hitting the shot, stealing the pass, or seeing the opening. It was all-consuming. It pushed me to run faster, look harder, jump higher. As physical energy leaked out, adrenaline filled in all the cracks. The feeling was amazing. Until sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes, the intensity of the hype turned on me, pulling me under its pressure to perform to a certain standard. That usually being perfection.
If you’ve seen the movie Inside Out 2, then you know that the main character Riley also experienced this. Spoiler Alert: At the end of the movie, Riley is in the middle of a hockey game. She has piled suffocating pressure on herself to score 3 goals during the game to secure her spot on the varsity team for the next season, which would, in turn, she had convinced herself, secure her acceptance by its team members. As the game progresses, she becomes more and more selfish, even stealing the puck from a teammate, giving herself more opportunities to score. Then she slams into one of her best friends, who is on the opposite team, injuring the friend and landing Riley in the penalty box. The stress overwhelms her as 2 minutes slowly tick off the clock. Her heart rate skyrockets, her chest tightens, her mind freezes. Panic attacks.
Her two best friends, including the one she plowed over, notice and come over to where she is sitting. They ask if she’s ok, and Riley breaks down crying, telling them all about her inner battle and that she’s so sorry for acting selfishly. They forgive her and hug. Riley’s heart beats at a normal rate again, and she skates back onto the ice. She closes her eyes and breathes deep and long. She notices that the sun is streaming through the big windows, making the ice shine. Inside her mind, we see Joy walk to her brain’s control panel and take over from Anxiety. Riley skates a pirouette, sliding the hockey puck back and forth gracefully as she smiles at her friend, love for the game fueling her every movement.
I want to be the Riley after the penalty box, not the frantic, stressed one, but for that, I must bench hype.
According to Dictionary.com, hype (verb) has several definitions.
- To stimulate, excite or agitate
- To create interest in by flamboyant or dramatic methods
- To intensify (by advertisement, promotion or publicity) by ingenious or questionable claims, methods, etc.
- To trick; gull
Each of these definitions aligns with my lived experience, as hype is not always bad. The helpful part of hype is the part tied to excitement. It’s necessary to get ourselves or others excited about something at times, but I’m afraid that hype is more often than not an exaggeration of a thing, puffing it up and leading to deformity. Riley tried so hard to hype up who she was as a hockey player in order to get noticed by the coach that she did things she never would’ve done otherwise. She tried to create interest in herself at the expense of all else: her values, her friendships, herself.
So, what drove the hype?
There are many different drivers of hype, but in Riley’s case, it was fear. Fear of not being good enough, and she’s not the only one battling that fear. It hounds me, stocking my every idea, always in the shadows waiting to pounce, and when it does, I become a deformed version of myself. A distortion of what I was created to be, and consequently, everything that flows out of me is out of proportion. If the fear of not being good enough is allowed to dominate my heart, it’ll decide what I do and say, and it often uses hype to accomplish its purpose. Hype is the perfect cover for fear and is very convincing. This use of hype is rampant among us as individuals, as well as among us as groups of individuals and one of those groups, I have noticed, has become obsessed with hype. The Church.
We, as a Church, have become swallowed up in it and completely lost our identity. The culture of hype has become embedded into the culture of the Church in general. Church has become about doing whatever we do bigger, better, faster. It’s become about how many people you’re reaching with your message, which is inevitably measured by followers and subscribers instead of by the integrity behind the voice speaking the message. It’s become about how many seats are filled on Sunday, instead of about how many hearts are filled with the fruits of the Spirit. It’s become about the shine of the programs instead of the depth of relationships. Thankfully, I see an awareness of this bubbling up, which hopefully leads to reform, but reform is just the beginning.
A realigning of the heart is what’s needed, not a modification of behavior. If the warp within our hearts as the Church is ignored to address only its outward manifestations, healing will never come. It’s like putting a cast on a bone without setting it first. Complete healing is impossible, no matter how perfect the cast.
I’m calling us to set some bones. I’m asking all of us to stare our fear of not measuring up to some intangible standard in the face until it bows before the cross. Was not the cross enough? Didn’t God the Father and God the Son prove once and for all that you and I are accepted? Not because of what we do but because we are created and chosen children of God. That’s our identity, and the One who secured that identity is the antithesis of hype. God the Son de-robed Himself of all heavenly glamour and power, was born as a common baby, lived as a common man, and then died as a common criminal. It was in His complete obedience to the Father in the drab daily things that the power we try to manufacture by hyping everything up was released.
Hype assumes that the substance behind the veneer is less than. That’s why we try to improve it, make it better. The problem is that Jesus is the substance of our message, not how good or not good we are. In our attempt to mask our fear with hype, we end up with a message that either tries to improve Jesus or ignores Him altogether. This is tragic and ridiculous. The truth about Jesus makes over-the-top promotion completely unnecessary, and that truth is this: For every “what if I’m not enough?” there is a “but I was and am” from Jesus.
This means that we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not about us and whether we’re good enough or not. We aren’t. We need help, and we have it. Not in hype, but in Jesus. We need to put our pursuit of exciting ourselves and others toward godliness to the side and replace it with the joy of knowing and being known by God the Father. It wasn’t because of excitement that Jesus did what He did, it was for the joy that was set before Him that he endured the cross (Heb. 12:2). His joy sprang up from a deep satisfaction and rest in His relationship with God the Father. He was the Beloved Son, and out of that flowed life and well-being.
When Joy took back the control panel in Riley’s mind, it released her to be her again, and the joy of the Lord is waiting to do the same for each of us. Not in the passing-away flesh but in the deep richness of the inner man that I put on in Christ. Joy is mine because it’s given to me. All I need to do is take it and put it on. Indescribable, eternal joy, with Christ and in Christ. I’ll trade that for fear any day.
So, since hype is so destructive, let’s call it out and free ourselves of it. I’m finding that many voices have been trying to do just this in recent years. Many a church has become sick of itself, and for good reason, and I think the glam and glitz that a culture of hype has brought is getting cleaned out and cut back. At least it’s getting identified and named. This is a process that’ll take time, reflection, and a change of habits. Thankfully, other voices are also calling our attention to this problem. They also want to bench the hype on a church-wide level and are faithfully raising awareness, calling for change. I say “amen,” but the culture of the Church is not the only problem. We create culture by the way we act, and I would like to focus my next article on a different kind of hype that I see lurking. Hyped-words. Not the ones spoken from the stage, the ones we speak to each other. Along the way, we’ll identify a couple more of the drivers of hype to try to understand and dig out the root. I hope that together we can free up space in our hearts for good, healthy things to grow. Hope to see you next time.
Listen to Wendy’s interview, ‘Hard is Only Half of the Story: From Small-Town Girl to Missionary in Serbia,’ on the When She Leads podcast here.
In this episode, Brenda sits down with Wendy Zahorjanski to talk about her life story and the writing of her book, her calling to serve Jesus as a missionary, and the continued work that she and her husband, Danny are doing with their church community in the city of Kragujevac.
Wendy is an author and missionary and you can find her book, “Hard is Only Half the Story: Real Adventures from My Journey into the Unknown” on Amazon.
You can also find Wendy on her Instagram – @wendy.zahorjanski
