You Know it Don't Come Easy
Counting the Cost of Embodying the Gospel
You Know It Don’t Come Easy
Counting the Cost of Embodying the Gospel
by Daniel L. Bacon
Inherited Forms, Forgotten Flavour
If you found the genre-flavour pairings in my last essay to be oversimplified—good. You’re right. They were. The truth is, any attempt to describe the gospel in tidy categories will always miss something essential. But that’s part of the point: we’ve inherited these gospel genres not because they are complete or definitive, but because they’re the forms we’ve received from those who rarely learned to love the art itself.
Genre as Limitation or Trap
Genre isn’t inherently shallow. In music, literature, and food, genre is a means of creative limitation—a way to train attention. But in church life, genre becomes a trap when we repeat its forms without experiencing the heart that gave rise to them. We sing the same refrains, preach the same promises, and serve the same courses Sunday after Sunday, and it all sounds vaguely like the gospel. But we have no taste for it. No voice for it. We’re playing inherited instruments without learning to love the music.
The Blues and the Gospel
It’s not that the gospel no longer speaks in churches. It’s that we often treat it like a script rather than a living presence. We fulfil the formula, we follow the rules of genre, but the result is lifeless. The blues isn’t just a musical style—it’s what emerges from a certain kind of ache. The same is true of the gospel.
What I’m saying is that there’s a reason why gospel music, protest music, and the blues feel more alive than many of our Sunday services: they are born from experience, not convenience. As the old saying goes—immortalized in the lyrics of Ringo Starr and echoed in the hearts of countless musicians—“You got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues, and you know it don’t come easy.” It's more than just a truism; it's a prophetic word.
Suffering as the Source of Song
It’s a reminder that genres, like the gospel, cannot be inherited like an heirloom. They must be lived, suffered, and sung through. The blues cannot be performed authentically by those who have never tasted sorrow; likewise, the gospel cannot be proclaimed meaningfully by those who do not love the art. Without this love—without the bruises and blessings of experience—our churches become karaoke halls of spiritual mimicry. We mouth the melodies, but the Spirit doesn’t move.
If a church has never wept over the state of its soul, it cannot preach the gospel of mercy. If it has never gone without, it cannot speak of provision. And if it has never known longing, it cannot proclaim hope.
Genres that Emerge, Not Perform
The genres of the gospel are not chosen—they emerge. They are not curated for tone or crafted to impress. They rise, as it were, from what we’ve been given to carry and what we’ve been called to lay down. This echoes the paradox in Madeleine L’Engle’s For Lent, 19661, where she writes not of choosing what to give up, but of discovering that Christ has already chosen what must go.
She begins with the idea of “my Lent,” but it becomes clear that her Lent only becomes Lent when she relinquishes the right to define it. So too, our gospel genre only becomes gospel when we stop trying to control its tone, its boundaries, or its appeal—and simply live it.
Revelation, Not Performance
A community’s genre is not a costume or a marketing strategy; it’s a revelation. When churches try to bypass the aforementioned dues, they end up faking it. But when a people have suffered, and surrendered, and still sing—that’s when the gospel comes through in Technicolor. Not because they picked a genre to play in, but because the genre found them, and said, this is what must be sung here.
Without love, we mimic what we haven’t lived. But when love leads, something far more beautiful than a genre arises: a gospel that sounds like our own voice, trembling, cracking, full of God.
The Medieval Imagination
Medieval Christians knew this intuitively. Dr
’s Jesus Through Medieval Eyes (2024) reminds us that Jesus wasn’t always or only preached as moral teacher or sin substitute. In the medieval period, Christ wasn’t just preached; He was longed for. He was the knight who broke through the gates of hell to rescue the beloved. He was the bridegroom whose wounds were not only symbols of suffering but invitations to intimacy.These were not flights of fancy, but methods of theological embodiment—methods of remembering that live and breathe.
Genre as Memory, Not Marketing
Dr Hamman’s gift of these medieval images reminds us that genre, rightly loved, carries memory in its marrow. It becomes the wine skin that doesn’t just contain new wine, but reminds us what wine is supposed to taste like. Without that love, we’re left with only formula—like reciting vows with no intention of faithfulness.
That might sound strange to our modern sensibilities, but it reveals something vital: they didn’t just repeat gospel formulas—they embodied gospel presence. Their love shaped the genre, not the other way around.
Recovering Our Vows
Above all, Hamman’s work is a call to remembrance. She restores our attention to something we as the people of God have stopped practicing in an age obsessed with innovation and branding, and invites us to slow down and remember what, or rather whom we love and why.
The Knight Christ and the Lover Christ weren’t marketing strategies—they were lived realities, born of longing, devotion, and the sacrificial imagination of a people who saw Jesus not as an idea, but as a person who could be followed in every facet of life.
To see Christ as Knight or Lover is not to be sentimental or archaic—it’s to recognize that our imaginations, when shaped by love, can become sanctified vessels of grace. The medieval church didn’t always get it right, but they were not embarrassed to feel. And maybe that’s what our current genres lack: the courage to feel and the humility to create as those who are being created.
Love That Sings Its Own Blues
Our churches often inherit gospel genres like relics passed down, but fail to inhabit them. We proclaim Christ the Victor but have no battle scars. We declare Christ the Shepherd but refuse to go out looking for the lost. We recite Christ the Bridegroom but remain emotionally distant. We’ve mistaken genre for gospel, and the performance for love.
As I wrote last year in an essay entitled Love Is Meaningless, the phrase “I love you” can often feel empty—not because love itself is lacking, but because love is not a rigid shape to be recognised but fluid—capable of filling any form it’s poured into.
However, when the church says, “Jesus loves you,” but does so with a borrowed voice, or in a tone that doesn’t see or understand the person in front of them, it’s not love we’re offering, but cultural nostalgia that we mistake for a faithful presentation of the gospel. In doing so, we smash the pots we should have filled with love and attempt to remake them in our image.
A Gospel that Overflows
Just as a shattered vase can still hold a little water in its shards, so too the gospel in fractured form may still carry truth. But the love of God is not meant to be rationed in remnants. It's meant to overflow. And if our genres don’t help people recognize that overflow then perhaps it’s time to revisit what they were meant to hold.
What we need is a return to love—the kind of love that sees what is the case and sings anyway. The kind of love that gathers the broken pieces, learns their shapes, and gently remakes a life that can hold more gospel tomorrow than it could today. The kind of love that sings its own trembling blues not because it’s the latest trend, but because it must.
Only then do the genres become alive again—not as formulas, but as windows. And through them, the church remembers not just what the gospel says but, like recovering a dead culture, we get to learn again how it sounds, how it tastes—how to drink the wine, speak the vows, and live a life shaped by love, faith, and hope in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.