The sheep take time to speak ...

Todd Agnew

• Let me tell you about 'My Jesus,' Fall 2005'

• Penning songs for ancient-future worship, Fall 2004

Todd Agnew: Let me tell you about 'My Jesus'

By Buzz Trexler
for The (Maryville, TN) Daily Times, Sept. 17, 2005

Looking around the gallery of public opinion concerning Jesus Christ, there is a wide variety of portraits that have been painted.

For instance, you can find Jesus the therapist, Jesus the revolutionary, Jesus the politician (riding a red donkey, or a blue elephant, take your pick), Jesus the judge of America, or Jesus the friend of America, just to name a few.

Certainly, with all of the varied portraits, Jesus’ question from Matthew 16 continues to ring: "Who do people say that I am? … Who do you say that I am?"

Those who are interested can find at least one songwriter’s answer to that question 6:30 p.m. Thursday at First Baptist Church, 215 N. Kentucky St., Kingston, during the "Reflection of Something" tour, featuring Todd Agnew, Starfield and Inhabited.

Agnew’s sophomore project, "Reflection of Something," offers the wide variety of musical styles that were also found in his debut album, "Grace Like Rain." Ranging from the somewhat funky, "Something Beautiful," to the worshipful "Isaiah 6," to "Blood on My Hands," which offers strains of Fanny Crosby’s "Jesus, Keep Me Near The Cross," Agnew continues to elude those who would categorize his music.

"The record is really bookended," Agnew says in a recent press release. "It begins with ‘Something Beautiful,’ a song where you’re told you’re a reflection of something. God makes you a reflection of something beautiful. And it ends with ‘My Jesus,’ where the last line is ‘I want to be like my Jesus.’"

But before that last line, Agnew gets down to the nitty-gritty in painting a portrait of the Jesus he knows, including:

In a telephone interview Wednesday from Columbus, Ohio, the 34-year-old Agnew said the roots of the song can be found in "consecutive conversations with people describing a very different person from each other."

"It’s not to limit Christ, and say, ‘Hey, you can’t be different things to different people,’ but it is to say, ‘Hey, um, you just said all those things and I’ve read the Bible a few times and I’ve never read that. You know, where did that come from?’"

Agnew said when your relationships take you into mainstream culture with "guys that don’t know Christ, their opinions of Jesus are very varied. They see a very different person and it really got me thinking about it."

The tipping point came when he sat for about 15 minutes on a walkway that spanned the lobby of one church, watching about 2,000 people walk through without noticing one "unattractive person."

"Not that Jesus doesn’t love attractive people, but I just started really struggling with the fact that the American church is really built on what is attractive, and what wins people over, and what makes people’s opinion to be high of the church," he said, noting that the Bible describes Jesus Christ "as a stone that makes men stumble, and that there was nothing about him that was attractive."

More important than appearance, Agnew said, is "how Christ acted himself."

"He always went to the poor, the broken, the lame, the sick, the marginalized, the people that had been unimportant to other people — whether it’s because they are sick, whether it’s because of their race, or whether it’s because of their gender."

Agnew noted that James 1:27 instructs the church this way: "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

"You look at Peter and Paul talking and Peter realizing, ‘Hey Paul, I realize you have been chosen. So, here’s the only thing we ask: Just make sure you take care of the poor.’

Agnew said, "That’s his one instruction on how to start a church: Just make sure you take care of the poor," he said. "And the poor aren’t welcome in most churches I’ve been to, and it’s not that we would put signs out or anything, but they sure would feel uncomfortable. And we sure haven’t gone out and found them and brought them in."

The Memphis resident said he started struggling with the concept of "who is Christ, and why are we worshipping somebody else?

"We still give him Jesus’ name, but it really doesn’t resemble the Jesus that I find in the Bible very much."

Asked about what seems to be a growing consumerism in Christianity, Agnew again gets right to the point.

"There’s all kinds of specific things that we can point out about the consumerism of the modern church," he said. "But what we really usually try to do is say, ‘Hey look, I don’t need to criticize the church as much as I need to encourage people to find Christ.

"If you find Christ, you’ll figure out who he is and what that means."

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