"We do have that unity, you just are failing to realize it, or some people are failing to accept unity” 

Going back to the original quote that spurred me to write this article, I think we need to take a look at how the scene has been united in the distant past, the not so distant past and now. Since the inception of this Christian dance movement roughly 14 years ago, so much has happened. We simply cannot look back and say: “Wow, look where we started out and how far along we are today!” Don’t get me wrong though, in many cases we have shown great improvement, but we have had our ups and downs and our biggest rise and falls have been in the level of unity that we have shared over the past 14 years.

When we started this scene, there was pretty much Scott Blackwell, MYX Records, and about five “techno” bands. Scott, being the one with the most club experience, almost single-handedly, forged out this entire scene. I know I’m over simplifying, but he truly was the figurehead or poster boy for our movement. In him, we had a leader. No he didn’t always know what to do and no he didn’t always make the right decisions, but he was the leader. Everyone looked toward him when figuring out the next step for their local scenes. During this time, groups like Found united Christian club-goers around the US and NGM and those tied to the World Wide Message Tribe established active groups of Christians who were ministry focused and were united in their tasks and understood where they were going. They still had disagreements at times, but they worked through most of them without dividing each other and remaining focused on the end goal.

Starting around 1997, N*Soul Records started to suffer from internal divisions. We’ve rehashed all of this time and time on the boards, but the details are not important for this discussion. Scott eventually left the label and Phillip Kim was fully in charge. This change practically destroyed this scene. Many of us, those closest to Scott, allowed ourselves to be consumed with bitterness about what happened. Dance music started to disappear completely from the shelves at our local bookstores. Even our local scenes started to break up. By 1999, Tastyfresh.com was almost a useless site because we did not have message boards yet and there simply wasn’t any information to add to the site. The community simply started to stagnate and die off because the leadership had either disappeared or simply stopped leading in the same capacity as it had for the past 5 years.

Starting probably about 2000, a group of people finally realized that if we were going to continue to exist, things really had to change. So, between 2000 and 2003, Tastyfresh.com started to morph into the online community that it is today, several members of the community started their own labels and we started to see the emergence of new leadership in the form of DJs, producers, promoters and even fans. The only problem was, we knew that we wanted the scene to still exist but we really didn’t know how it should exist. Because of this, we all started to carve our own paths. This is where I feel we started to build a false sense of unity.

You see, at this point in time we recognized that we were all different parts of the body of Christ. We started to get a solid grip on the idea that some of us were called to minister in the church while others were called to ministry outside of the church. That was a huge revelation for us. What we missed was the fact that we needed to be fully united. We had not set any common goals. We lacked strong leadership to look toward and to submit to. We simply decided that we wanted to follow God’s will and started to walk. Instead of being the body of Christ and truly walking in unity, we were an amoeba oozing our way in about 15 different directions. This was the Era of Self-Leadership. Everyone wanted to be a leader and so everyone became one.

As a body, we were falling all over each other. We were still holding on to the bitterness of the N*Soul split. We couldn’t find enough common ground spiritually or politically to even have a deep discussion. Just about every possible division that could arise did during this time. People chose to separate themselves from our community over all of these petty fights believing that nothing would amount to anything again with the Christian dance scene because it was a waste of time. Our egos and our tempers were out of check, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Between 2003 and really the first half of 2005, these same things held us back. Things have gradually been getting better, but we still are not fully united as one, not in the way Jesus prayed that we would be. I firmly believe that we are getting closer to this now though.

So today, we are starting to not only recognize that we are all parts of the same body, but that this body truly needs to work together and move in the same direction to accomplish our calling. “We do have that unity, you just are failing to realize it, or some people are failing to accept unity.” That statement is not 100% correct. I think a more accurate statement is: “We are deep into the process of becoming one, but we are not one yet.” One question that would seem obvious to ask is if we can ever truly be one in the same way as Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Father are. The answer doesn’t matter; we are called to be one regardless of how achievable that goal is. So let’s look at what causes a body to not be united as one instead.

A Disorganized Body of One

The population here at Tastyfresh is very diverse in two specific areas: political views and spiritual views. No matter which side of these debates a person is on, their views of politics and God are mashed together in ways that seem diametrically opposed to someone else on the site. This isn’t the root cause of our disorganization or disunity, but it is a conduit to quickly explain some of our issues. It is one of the main reasons why we don’t allow or rather try to avoid such debates on our forums. Here’s the picture:

Person A: Strongly believes in a free market economy, personal responsibility for ones actions without government involvement, help for the poor should come from individuals and corporations instead, homosexuality is a sin… just like stealing or lying, everyone has a right to live including the unborn, the elderly, and the disabled and that the Bible is God’s holy word given to a series of authors over hundreds or thousands of years and can be taken literally.

Person B: Strongly believes that it is the government’s responsibility to help the poor whenever and wherever there is need through a redistribution of wealth, that the free market system only creates more poverty in the end and should be regulated by the government on just about every issue, that homosexuality is a normal condition that there is no need to “cure,” a woman should be able to end a pregnancy for any reason, the elderly should be able to end their lives anytime they wish and the disabled should have their families make this decision for them, and the Bible while a good book is flawed in areas and parts do not apply today although the teachings of Jesus are valid and worth trusting in and following, but just not too strictly.

How do you get these two people to work together? Both claim Christ. Both want to help build some sort of scene. Both disagree on almost every political and spiritual issue. Both believe that they are 100% correct and have no doubts about it and can even back their positions up using the Bible and other sources. As proven in the past, this is a recipe for some major fighting. On top of that, you can infer that while Person A dislikes government involvement in their life, the probably believe that a strong church “government” is a good idea while Person B was probably hurt in the church during their youth and feel the exact opposite.

The follow-up discussion from the last article in many ways showed just that. This is the reality of Tastyfresh. We are a mixture of these two extremes in belief. Many of us are in the middle and sometimes they get lost there amongst the shouting of those on the extremes. Those in the middle just want everyone to get along and work together. Those on the extremes want to do the same, but feel adamantly that the group on the other extreme has to change their views before that can happen. It is as though the people on each extreme have set-up their leaders and expect everyone to simply follow them.

The truth is the people in the middle have it right. We need to just work together and let our extremes fall away. I’m not saying that those on the extreme should compromise their beliefs, but I am saying that they should really examine them and weigh them against what God is trying to do within our scene. If we set-up a leadership for our scene that is more concerned with everyone’s personal spiritual and political beliefs rather than the work God is calling us as a scene to do, we will miss out on what God has in store for the larger club scene and perhaps put up even more stumbling blocks in the lives of those in the club scene who are looking for real answers to the problems in their lives.

Until Next Time…

• How does Tastyfresh get it’s power?
• Is it something that will always be here?
• Is Tastyfresh even really a power?
• What powers does it have?
• If Tastyfresh had a constitution, what would be the most important passage?