A couple of weeks ago I had a great evening seeing a tribute band at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester. I had been given tickets as a birthday present by a friend. Elio Pace and his band played the ‘Billy Joel Songbook’. It took me back 40 years!
I had previously been suspicious about the idea of a tribute band, fearing it might be something like a poor karaoke performance. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The quality was outstanding, and about as close as possible to attending a genuine Billy Joel concert.
There were a number of reasons why the concert was so good. First, the musicians were high-quality professionals. The guitarist was a member of the current line-up of Queen. The saxophonist had played with Amy Winehouse. Second, they clearly loved the music of Billy Joel. Elio Pace expressed near worship for him as the ‘greatest singer-songwriter ever’. You got the sense that they loved the music that they were playing. Third, they played the songs exactly as they had been written. They did not alter or adjust them. They did not play their own songs instead of Joel’s. Pace was at pains to stress several times that he was playing a song ‘just the way that Billy meant it to be played’. Fourth, they played the full range of Billy Joel’s oeuvre. They did not just play the well-known hits and crowd favourites. They played more obscure album tracks. The 30 songs they played gave a representative cross-section of all his work, from all different eras of his composition. You gained a sense of the whole man. Finally, it was clear that Pace knew Billy Joel personally. He was able to share personal anecdotes about him. He has been invited by Joel to host a concert in which his very first band united to play together again for the first time in years. They played from their personal experience of the man.
It was an excellent evening, and I was left reflecting that church is essentially called to be a tribute band for Jesus. He has ascended and returned to heaven to sit at the right hand of His Father in glory, but has commissioned His people to continue His work on earth. Our task is to glorify Him and make Him known by preaching, proclaiming and practicing His message. We are not free to change the words, or to replace them with our own. We distort His reputation if we only repeat His most famous words, and the popular truths that people want to hear. To do Him justice we need to speak all His words in balanced proportion, words of judgment as well as comfort, words that challenge as well as encourage, and words that are more obscure and difficult as well as those that are easy.
If we are to be a truly faithful tribute band that honours Him appropriately and gains Him new fans, then we need to be people who hold Him in the highest honour. We need to be convinced that His word is truly precious and life-changing, that He is the greatest teacher of all history. We need to have a longing that others will come to recognise this for themselves. More than that, we need to know Him personally, so that we can speak for Him, not just from the distance of having heard His words but from the intimacy of a personal relationship with Him. We need to be authorised by Him to act on His behalf.
Of course the parallels are not exact. Jesus is with us by His Spirit, and He empowers and enables us to continue His work to His glory. However the analogy teaches us something important. Our work and ministry is all about Him. We sing His songs, His way, for His glory, from our passionate appreciation of Him. When the church fails to do this, we fail in our mission.
One day the Lord Jesus will return and we will all see Him in the flesh. In the meantime the church is the tribute band that prepares us for that day.
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