U2's thick ecclesiology: aesthetic over institution

cartoon

"U2: Seeking An Ecclesiology" by Tripp Hudgins for Sojourners-excerpt:

...What I want you to see is this post from the New Yorker. Do we truly have a "Church of U2" and is it in the cloud as well as the arenas around the globe? Can they send their sonic tracts anywhere they want? With 33 million downloads, is this a form of evangelism or is it simply "offering something beautiful?" It is so wed with making money to support the mammoth (and fading) music industry, that it's hard to know where the market begins and the ekklesia ends.

Of course, trying to disentangle those two is always a right mess. Ask Henry VIII. It ain' easy.

But this is why I'm so damn curious about it. Even the New Yorker gets it:

The story of U2 might be this: having begun as a band that was uncertain about the idea of pursuing a life of faith through music, they have resolved that uncertainty. Their thin ecclesiology has become thick. Today, they are their own faith community; they even have a philanthropic arm, which has improved the lives of millions of people. They know they made the right choice, and they seem happy. Possibly, their growing comfort is bad for their art. But how long could they have kept singing the same song of yearning and doubt? “I waited patiently for the Lord,” Bono sings, in the band’s version of Psalm 40. “He inclined and heard my cry.”

Yeah. There it is. And the connection to the new album? Here: "It expresses a particular combination of faith and disquiet, exaltation and desperation, that is too spiritual for rock but too strange for church—classic U2."

Right. There.

There is our "authenticity." There is the new ecclesiology that we see emerging. It is not an institution in the brick and mortar sense. No, it is an aesthetic. It is "authenticity' that is too spiritual for rock (the pure market) but too strange for church (sorry, Pope Francis).

What we're seeing is four guys from Ireland with way the hell too much money showing us what we have been wanting all along: a new way of being the institutional church. 

-Tripp Hudgins