Perhaps the passing years make one cynical, or perhaps it is realism – sometimes the only difference between the two is experience – but there are sometimes there are songs on the radio that perfectly express thoughts. The American band Dr Hook and the Medicine Show recorded “Cover of the Rolling Stone” in 1972, a satirical look at the rock music scene where the culmination of success was an appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. The lyrics of the song are a tongue-in-cheek list of things that seemed to be perceived as marks of success:

Oh, we’re big rock singers.
We got golden fingers.
And we’re loved everywhere we go.
We sing about beauty,
And we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show.
We take all kinds of pills
To give us all kind of thrills,
But the thrill we’ve never known
Is the thrill that’ll getcha
When you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.

I got a freaky old lady
Named Cocaine Katy
Who embroiders all my jeans.
Got my poor old grey-haired daddy
Drivin’ my limousine.
It’s all designed to blow our minds,
But our minds won’t really get blown
Like the blow that’ll getcha
When you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.

We gotta lotta little teenage blue-eyed groupies
Who do anything we say.
We got a genuine Indian guru
Who’s teaching us a better way.
We got all the friends that money can buy,
So we never have to be alone.
And we keep getting richer,
But we can’t get our picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Pills, a freaky partner, a limousine, groupies, a guru – all the friends money can buy – were those things really what it was all about? Like all good satire, the song found an audience because within it there was a core of truth.

Listening to the song on one of the online radio stations, the thought occurred as to what one might include if writing such a song about success in the church. It wouldn’t seem so hard to make a list to include in a satire. There would be bishops in funny hats and camp silk outfits, and check-shirted worship leaders who are in their forties and balding and still pretend to understand “yoof” culture, and sharp-suited pastors with perfect hair and perfect teeth, and stern ministers with leather-bound books. The people on the front of the ecclesiastical press maybe seem as exotic and odd to most ordinary people as did the colourful characters who appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Success is an odd thing.