Mark Coppenger on Blue Like Jazz
2006
Back in 2003, a colleague at kairosjournal.org asked me if I’d read Donald Miller’s book, Blue Like Jazz. He wanted my opinion since the youth director in his Virginia church was much taken with it. I bought a copy and read most of it in one sitting on a plane trip. It was an engaging piece of work, a page-turner, and I liked some of what I read, e.g., his defense of tithing. But reservations kept cropping up, and they were foremost in my mind when my son Jed, who was president of the SBTS student theological club, asked me to give my impressions to one of their gatherings. Here’s the audio, which colleague Denny Burk was kind enough to post.
Afterwards, I wrote up a brief column on it for the Illinois Baptist (the state Baptist paper in my Evanston Baptist Church-planting days), and then Baptist Press picked it up. Playing off Miller’s title, I listed ten blue-like features, including “like Blue Oyster Cult.” (Cf. the SNL parody, with Christopher Walken calling on Will Farrell for “more cowbell.”) When BP ran it, they somehow left this one out, providing the other nine, e.g., “like Blue States” and “like Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
Not surprisingly, Donald Miller was not so pleased when he picked up on it. He posted a response, and then we had an email exchange or two (more cordial than you might think). And then we went about our business.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
2006