This is a part of the Wish They Were a Worship Band Series, guest written by Shannon Lewis. 

Thankfully, I first heard Robert Smith and his boys when I had only recently come out of my “suicidal Atheist” faze,  and had begun to doubt my then wavering belief in non-belief - else I may not be writing this today.  My first tastes of the Cure’s dark,  beautifully depressing Disintegration c.d. would have likely pushed me clean over the edge just a few months before, but instead they connected with me on a far deeper level that mere desperation.  You see, the goth culture - of which the Cure was part - had tapped into something true that even too many ‘Christian bands’ missed: what Cornelius Plantinga Jr. called the “Not the Way it is Supposed to Be”-ness of this world.  The Cure’s music carries with it a Psalm-like despair, a passionate plea for some sense of meaning in a world that has clearly gone wrong, recognizing the falleness and fallibility at the core of life.Maybe that is why, as a young believer, trying to make sense of my new-found faith, I learned “Disintegration” note-for-note from beginning to end - every swirling layered guitar part I learned by heart.  Those songs connected me to something true in a way that very few so-called “Christian bands” did at the time.  So, it is not only concern for Robert Smith’s soul that makes me wish that the Cure were a worship band - it’s that only very recently have artists seeking to worship God begun to delve into the raw honest joy and pain that truly Biblical face-to-face encounter with God is.Let’s not fear to sing, preach from, or live the hard parts of the Bible - those passages that bring to the forefront the immediately less appealing faces of God - when God seem confusing and unmanageable.  Let’s sing of the falleness of man in its fullness, and not just as a concept, so the Gospel will make sense, and our hearts were truly rejoice with passion when we sing of God’s answer to the deep problem of sin.In all honesty, I don’t wish the Cure were a ‘worship band’ per se - they already are.  In as much as their songs are true and good and a reflection of creation as it is, their music is already bringing glory to God, and that music is an irrevocable gift of God clearly at operation.  I only hope that, if he does not, Robert & the Cure will one day recognize the giver of this wonderful gift for who he is: the one come into this world to make things right - to put things back the way they should be.

- Shannon Lewis Shannon is the Associate Music Director at Saint Simons Community Church, as well as the founder and director of The Hope Farm, a non-profit ministry with the goal of sowing, cultivating, & harvesting worship for our great God, through live worship events, outreach concerts, in-house worship training workshops, musical training, worship leader mentoring, Biblical teaching, songwriting, songwriting workshops, conferences, and consulting.

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