The Resurrection Will Not Be Televised: Introduction

Over the next few days I will publish the totality of one of my final papers The Resurrection Will Not Be Televised. Feel free to comment and give me your opinions.

Introduction & Overview:
“Hip Hop is dead,” proclaimed Nasir Bin Olu Dara Jones in 2006 echoing the sentiments of a disgruntled generation abandoned by the institutionalized version of its first love. The rapper known as Common announced in 1994 that he “used to love H.E.R.” a solemn ode to how Hip Hop had changed and not for the better, like a girl growing up too quickly caught up in the fast life.
“The Church is dead” is the rallying call of a disenfranchised generation. After witnessing the Church’s influence wane to the point where many people have never even heard of this once giant behemoth of societal ascendancy. The Church, who the bible says is the bride of Jesus, has been unfaithful. She has whored around with the fraternal twins, money and power. Augustine of Hippo put it best when he said, "The Church is a whore, but she's my mother" (Campolo).
So like a chicken with its head cut off can continue to run around because the body just has not figured out that it is dead, although seemly moving neither the Church nor Hip Hop has figured out it is dead. It is argued that society at large is better off existing in the incarnation of the proclamations that the Church and Hip Hop are dead. But the truth is that this symbolic proclamation of death is just that, symbolic and not the experienced reality. Death is pronounced when the entity is removed from the source and purposes that birthed it. It is as if to be removed from one’s origins is to be cut off from the source that dispenses life into it. The gospel according to John in the fifteenth chapter conveys this idea using the metaphor of branches connected to a vine. To further push the chicken with its head cut off metaphor, Jesus as the head of the Church has been detached from the current purposes of many in the Church, or at least that is how those who decry her death perceive it. Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ,” when he offered his opinion of the Church. In light of this it is important to partake in the conversation about moving a generation from mass marketed systematic institutions back to the cultural revolutions of social justice from which they were birthed.