Tim Challies has interviewed Derek Webb about his new CD, Mockingbird (which sounds very good), his thoughts on social justice, favorite books, and more. Interview: Part 1 & Part 2.
From Part 1...
It's like once you come down the aisle responding to the call for salvation - you come down the aisle and you pray the prayer and as you're walking out they give you your little gift bag. And your little gift bag is all of your politics and sexuality and culture and art and all wrapped up, it's all been thought out for you. Just take your gift bag and you're going to be fine. And we just can't be people who are satisfied with that. That is completely oversimplifying issues that are very difficult and very detailed and are very nuanced. We must have a more meaningful discussion about these issues in the church because you simply cannot be as predictable as we have become as the Western church. You cannot be that predictable and follow Jesus. You cannot! Jesus was not predictable in his politics. I do think Jesus makes quite a few very political statements, but he was in no way predictable. There were moments where he might have looked very conservative as we might try to put our terms and categories on him today and look back, but there are also moments where he looked like a flaming liberal. There is nothing we can do about it. If your concern is in following Jesus and that is what you really want to do, as opposed to following some kind of subcultural caricature of a political idea, you're going to have to be willing to follow him back and forth and back and forth. You're going to have to be willing to have people, even in the church, call you a liberal, which can be very derogatory when used by these people. I think the more we align ourselves with political parties in the church the more it makes it impossible to follow Jesus.
From Part 2...
I think that one book that has been tremendously helpful to me is a book by this guy Steve Turner, it's called Imagine. Steve Turner's a guy who studied at L'Abri under Francis Schaeffer, and he wrote this book. It's probably the most thorough and biblical and liberating treatment of how a Christian might engage in the arts. It is one of those books that will take the roof off the house. I read it every couple of years just to remind myself of what's true because when it comes to the arts the church has really mixed up ideas about what the role of art is in culture and especially church culture. So that book really has blown my mind a number of times and I think that should be required reading for anybody.