Over Easter weekend, a viral Rorschach test split online Christians over exactly what to make of what they were seeing: a man walking up and down the aisle of an airplane with his guitar, singing “How Great Is Our God.”
Is it a divine moment at 30,000 feet or noise pollution on an otherwise peaceful flight? Social media was a bit divided. And some of the passengers looked a little divided as well. But all might not be quite what it seemed.
The video was originally posted by Jack Jensz Jr., the founder of a group called Kingdom Realm Ministries. He captioned it “#Jesus is taking over this flight!” The exact details of the flight were unclear, but another recent video posted by Jensz stated that they were witnessing to train passengers in Poland and Ukraine. “The harvest is plentiful!” Jensz wrote.
It stirred an awful lot of debate, with some Christians praising the airborne performance and others arguing that it was intrusive. “This is wonderful,” wrote one supportive user.
“As a person of faith, I implore you: don’t do this,” wrote one Twitter user pushed back. “St. Francis of Assisi said it best: preach the gospel every day, and only if you have to, use words. This kind of thing just turns people off, and rightly so.”
There are a lot of questions here. It’s unclear why more passengers aren’t wearing face masks, as flights in and out of the U.S. and most other countries were still requiring them when the video was posted. It’s also unclear exactly what the rules are about staging a concert on a plane, but it seems like flight attendants would generally have a few things to say about them. They would almost certainly have something to say about the people not wearing a seatbelt, which is against guidelines on a commercial flight.
It seems possible that this was a charter flight, which would give passengers greater freedom around the rules and also likely mean that no non-Christians were being “forced” to listen to the music, however uncomfortable some of them might appear to be. If that’s the case, it would mean that this impromptu worship set may not have been impromptu or particularly disruptive.
So, there you have it. It’s sort of a brown and blue/white and gold dress for our generation, in which what you see in the video largely reflects what you’re bringing to it.