U2 has a new album releasing in November 2026. They have released a few songs from the album which are vintage U2. The latest release is The Greatest Show on Earth. The song is about relationship using a wedding mass as the structure of the song. The song’s meaning is contained in typically layered lyrics and music for U2 and I see multiple meanings - even one probably not as the band see it. Here’s the video:
The amazing thing about art is that we bring our own experiences, dreams, feelings, and eyes to bear upon it and derive meaning. Come to think of it, that is how we should approach scripture as well. In The Greatest Show on Earth I could not help but see a message about the Church and how we may interpret our own decline and how we may be looking backward rather than forward. Is our nostalgic desire for a return to a time that never truly existed holding us back? Is this nostalgia actually hastening the decline of denominations and churches?
If I couldn’t sing How love’s the hardest easy thing And if I couldn’t sing you my life Hiding here in the spotlight And if you couldn’t hear me
“Love’s the hardest easy thing.” Oof, that hurts a bit but it is true. Love should be easy, but we make it a hard thing. It may be hard to truly love as Christ followers are. The rhetoric of online conversations sure points to a difficulty with Jesus’ commands like love your neighbor, much less love your enemies. Beyond those ideas, it becomes hard to remember the dreams and hopes we have.
If this is love And love is all we’ve got You can show me what it is I can show you what it’s notIf this is love Don’t act surprised when you get hurt Even if our dreams lay in the dirt We were once the greatest show on earth
We even argue over what love is. The logical knots Christians tie ourselves into trying to complicate love so that we can not love is astounding. The best definition of love I have found is that of my friend and theologian Tom Oord.
To love is to act intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being. (Oord)
It really can be that simple, but we layer desire and assumptions upon love. We even claim that God’s love is something that leads to God punishing instead of discipline. If what the Church often displays as love is love, then we should not act surprised when people get hurt. Interpersonal and relational truth is obscured when we turn love into a weapon of never ending complexity. I wonder what it would look like if the Church could just say “love is” rather than attaching our baggage on the word.
I think the line “we were once the greatest show on earth” is what sparked me to see the Church in this song. I texted a pastor friend the video and said “this is about the church” almost as soon as I heard it. I believe that one of the root causes of the American church’s decline is that we keep looking back and assuming our past defines who we are and who we will be. We see our past as a time when we were the greatest show on earth. The evangelical church had cultural prominence. Churches were filled because it was expected that people went to church on Sunday.
The church had programs galore. We even laid many extra large churches up as malls. Church growth strategies became the way that denominations began to fade, but that was OK because we were growing. Distinctive theologies like Wesleyan-Holiness were swallowed up in the generic evangelical culture. But we were the greatest show on earth. The only church currently growing the in United States is the Assemblies of God and that appears to be Christian migration. The Global Methodist Church is claiming tremendous growth, but their growth is mostly them eating the United Methodist Church, not new Christians.
Is that a smile or a tear? Is it all show business here? The cinema that is stained glass You’re at the altar at our wedding mass Is this a church of love or fear? Have we made God feel like a stranger here?
This verse is what hit. The remembrance of being the greatest show on earth is one of show business. Spectacle and entertainment became a hallmark of church growth. Many still speak in those terms thinking that was a good thing. But we outsmarted and out-programmed ourselves. We cannot complete with the world in entertainment, spectacle, or franchising. But more than all of that, we have too often used the language of fear rather than the language of love. Have we made God feel like a stranger in our churches?
Beyond our language is the seduction of political power in which evangelicals in America have equated assimilation with salvation. We quote a lot of Jeremiah, but we’ve forgotten Jeremiah’s greatest fear for Judah - that when Babylon conquered Judah that the Hebrews would become good Babylonians. I heard a sermon recently in which Rev. Dr. Scott Daniels preached about this. The Judeans heard Jeremiah and what we can see historically is that their sojourn in Babylon was not one of assimilation, but of coalescing their understanding of who God is. This is the period when what Christians call the Old Testament came into focus and was assembled. They did not become good Babylonians who happened to observe Passover. Instead they leaned into being Israel and their writing about creation and God were direct counterpoints to the pagan gods they were exposed to in Babylon.
What if our desire for a past that never was has pushed us to assimilate. Have we become good Americans who attend church rather than Christ followers who happen to live within America? I think the question should make us uncomfortable enough to wonder. Have we assimilated so deeply that we are unable to disconnect our faith from partisanship? Have we made God feel like a stranger in our midst? How do we remember who we are rather than who we think we were?
These are questions I ask myself because I don’t have the answers. All I know is that I see us grasping to become the greatest show on Earth rather than being a people bringing about Heaven on Earth.
Oord, Thomas Jay. Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being. SacraSage Press, 2022.