Baptizing Justin Bieber

A few months ago, I read a beautiful article in GQ written by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Akner is a Jewish reporter who had been assigned to research and report on a Hillsong Church plant. The growing (and befuddling) Mega-Church in the heart of New York City.

She begins her article by telling a heart-breaking story about the day that Justin Bieber was baptized by one of Hillsong’s pastors “Pastor Carl”

Justin had hit bottom, he was quickly making the transition from celebrity to notorious villain, he had treated just about everyone around him horribly, and the media was reporting all of it.

So Justin moved in with Pastor Carl and his family, and after a few weeks, he had a moment of looking in the mirror where he realized that he had come to the end of himself.

He had ruined his own life, and all of the wealth and opportunity had only fueled him toward his own self-destruction. So Justin Bieber breaks down crying and he asked Carl to baptize him. Carl offered to make a date and set up a time for Justin Bieber to be baptized, but Justin said “No. I want to do it now.”

Justin Bieber didn’t want to be Justin Bieber one moment longer.

So they head to a swimming pool, but word had gotten out that Justin Bieber was going to be baptized and hundreds of fans invaded what was supposed to be an intimate ceremony. So finally, Pastor Carl asked a friend (Tyson Chandler of the NY Knicks) if they could baptize Justin Bieber in the bathtub in his apartment.

Here’s how the GQ reporter says it:

And that is an image that will stick with you, let me tell you: Justin Bieber, on his knees in Tyson Chandler’s bathtub, wet and sobbing against Pastor Carl’s chest, so unable to cope with being himself that he has to be born anew, he has to be declared someone entirely different, in order to make it through the night.

I love that story

Actually I love this whole article, you can tell the reporter is playing a chess match in her head between just cynically dismissing this really cool church, and the strong pull she was feeling toward these people that she was beginning to like.

But the story is incredibly interesting to me because of the question that has been rattling around in my head the past few years. “How far can Christianity stretch in adapting to what Western Culture says is the “Good life” without becoming something entirely unrecognizable from the movement Jesus started?”

After a few weeks of investigating the Hillsong Church, the GQ reporter says:

I was witnessing the logical conclusion of an evolutionary convergence between coolness and Christianity that began at the dawn of the millennium, when progressive-minded Christians, terrified of a faithless future, desperately rended their garments and replaced them with skinny jeans and flannel shirts and piercings in the cartilage of their ears, in a very ostentatious effort to be more modern and more relatable. Which is why, today, you can find ironically bespectacled evangelicals in Seattle and graphic designers soliciting tithes with hand-drawn Helvetica flyers in San Diego. You can walk into mega-churches all over the country where the pastor will slap on a pair of leather pants and drop the F-bomb BOOM how do you like me now??

I actually appreciate what the people at Hillsong are trying to do, and it seems to me that they at least recognize the tension in what they are doing. Sure, they have a special reserved seating for celebrities, but they also have reserved seating for disabled members and single mothers.

I love that they are baptizing people like Justin Bieber and Kevin Durant, but at some point we have to ask what are we trying to baptize these people into?

If Justin Bieber is tired of being Justin Bieber, than what kind of person does he think Jesus is making him into?

Celebrity Church?

In his great book “When Church Was a Family” Joseph Hellerman tells a story from back in the 2nd Century A.D. when something happened in a small town named Thena in North Africa.

Apparently, there was a famous actor who converted to following Jesus. We know that this man was a famous actor, but we don’t know his name. We know that his conversion created quite a controversy among his brothers and sisters in Thena, and his story gives us a glimpse into just what the first kinds of Christian community looked like.

Today when a celebrity converts to Christianity in America, we respond by placing them on a pedestal, putting them in every Christian movie, and giving them a ton of Dove awards. We show them as a trophy of God’s grace, and thank God that now even Biber is a Believer.

We take pride in having our Christian values represented by a celebrity in an area of the public square that is highly esteemed by the popular culture.

But the early church, living in a time, which was much more hostile toward their faith, didn’t do this at all.

The early Christians had huge problems with the theater because of all the immorality that went along with it, and so most Christians just didn’t participate in that culture at all. They didn’t attend the theater.

And since they had a problem with attending the theater, imagine their position on people who made their living acting in the shows.

And so, when this actor converted to Christianity in this small town in 2nd-century Carthage, the first thing the church asked him to do was to quit his profession. They believed that a born-again actor could be a real testimony to the entertainment industry…By cutting all ties and disassociating himself from it forever.

And by the way, that actor actually did it. He quit his job. He weighed the cost of discipleship and decided that it was worth it to be in Christian community and so he stopped acting in the local theater.

That may sound like an intolerant, harsh requirement of the early church, and maybe it was. But I’m pretty sure that the reason it sounds like the Christians back then were asking too much of their convert, is because Christians today have developed the habit of asking too little.

Meeting Jesus at a Big Boy

So back to that GQ Reporter, as she is reflecting on this really successful, really cool church. She, as a Jewish woman, tells an entirely different story about how she first was introduced to the story of Jesus.

When she was in 8th grade, she was hanging out with her friends having fun in the parking lot of a Big Boy’s and waiting on her parents to pick them up, when a woman in her 20’s approached them and gave them a tract about Jesus.

This strange woman told the kids she loved seeing them laugh and having fun, but that there might come a time when life didn’t feel so sweet, and in that moment, she wanted them to know they could reach out to God, and He would give them comfort.

As soon as the woman walked away, these 8th graders did exactly what you’d expect. They began to laugh and mock this woman, and her tenacity to approach them like she had the answers to questions that they weren’t even remotely considering in their possible futures.

They ridiculed her and what she stood for. They saw her as a loser and were glad to see her go.

But then this GQ Reporter follows up that seeming tangential story with this:

I have been to an ultra-Orthodox camp. I attended a Hasidic high school for a year before everyone agreed that it was a terrible idea. I did the remainder of my sentence at a Modern Orthodox high school. I have immersed in a mikvah. I have climbed Masada more than once. I have stuck notes into the cracks of the Western Wall. I have fasted on Yom Kippur. In the throes of postpartum depression, I sat on a bathroom floor and begged God for peace, not quietly but loudly, my husband on the other side of the door holding our baby and asking if he should call someone, if maybe we needed to get some help. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in that parking lot, I was having the most religious experience I would ever have in my life. I think about that woman all the time.

This story, which seems to be a departure from the rest of the piece, is right at the center of the article. I think the reporter is doing this intentionally.

She’s reflecting on the time in her life when someone cared enough to risk not being cool, talking to a group of kids when cool was all they cared about.

And at the time, it meant nothing, it must have been embarrassing and awkward, and yet today this secular Jewish reporter says it is the singular most religious experience of her life.

It haunts her.

Not because the woman was relevant, but because her faith had made her not place a premium on how she was seen by others.

I’m still working through this in my mind. I care a lot about trying to tell the Gospel in relevant ways, and I’m glad that people like Denzel Washington, and Rene Russo are Jesus followers in Hollywood. I want Christians to be involved in making culture and I think most of the criticism I read from other Christians is just baptized jealousy (because deep down we want to be famous too).

But at some point, I think we have to ask the question, “When we baptize Justin Bieber, what do we think that really means?” The reporter asked the question: “Can Christianity really be this cool and still be Christian?”

Maybe a better way to say it is: “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world, but give up their soul?”

Photo via Buffer, with author modification