The Altar We Bought Tickets To
Noah Kahan has spent the last three years telling us he’s just a guy from Vermont. On Monday night, 40,000 people sang those words back to him, and it felt like a hymn.
Last weekend, we went to Atlanta for vacation and saw Noah Kahan play at Truist Park.
Going from Montana to Georgia for a concert might sound like a lot, especially since the tour also stops in Denver and Salt Lake. But we wanted to skip the Ticketmaster headaches, and Atlanta is special to both of us. We each lived there years ago, before we met. I also grew up as a Braves fan, watching games for 30 years and sticking with them through everything. I’d been to Turner Field, but never to Truist Park.
We also got lucky because a Braves staff member we know gave us floor wristbands.
When Noah started the first song, we stood in right field, on the same grass where Acuña plays. You could feel the excitement in the air. I’ll admit, I sang along to almost every word.
Then he played “The View Between Villages.”
That song meant something new to me on my birthday in 2025. I was back in Virginia, the town I left what feels like ages ago. I had just lost my father-in-law, and my in-laws’ house was about 45 minutes from my mom’s, where I spent 20 years growing up. Driving back from lunch on the interstate, the lyrics hit me:
“A minute from home, but I’m so far from it.”
And
“The things that I lost here, the people I knew
They got me surrounded for a mile or two”
Nothing in Hampton Roads would ever be the same again. Not the roads, not those two houses.
During “All My Love,” I noticed something.
This was a worship service. I was part of it, singing the chorus back to the man on stage in a sold-out stadium.
When I stopped singing for a moment and listened to the crowd, I felt grieved that I was complicit, knowing I was part of it. Still, I kept singing, and I loved every second.
The Man Who Keeps Telling Us He’s Ordinary
You’ve probably been somewhere like that, even if you’ve never been to a stadium show. Maybe it was in a gym at a youth conference, a bar at last call when the right song played, or a funeral where the singing took over. There’s a moment when a crowd stops consuming something and starts submitting to it, and you can feel the change before you can explain it.
What makes last week’s concert hard to describe is that the man on stage has spent three years trying to avoid this exact thing.
Kahan started The Busyhead Project in 2023, named after his first album, and it has raised more than $6.6 million for roughly 170 community mental health organizations. In April, he released a documentary on Netflix called Out of Body, and it is not a victory lap — Brian Tallerico’s review at RogerEbert.com called it “not a typical hagiographic music doc.”1 He talks about depression, body dysmorphia, and about a mirror that reports back a man nobody else can see. You can see the guilt as he talks about mining his own family’s worst years for material.
He isn’t trying to make himself a hero. Instead, he’s been honest about how hard it is to be put on a pedestal.
So I can’t write the easy version of this essay. I can’t claim a famous person was exposed as a false prophet, because for three years he’s told us he’s just a guy from Strafford, Vermont, with his own struggles and a good band. He’s said it in interviews, liner notes, and a 95-minute film. He’s been as clear as anyone could be.
We just kept singing.
What stood out even more was that Gigi Perez opened for him that night. Before her set ended, she talked about how Noah’s music helped her through a tough time when she needed something to hold onto. She said his songs got her through dark days and helped her keep going. Now, opening for him felt surreal, and her words touched the audience.
I learned something later that I’m not sure the rest of the crowd knew. Perez grew up in church. Her older sister Celene died in 2020 at age twenty-two, and Perez has said her grief, her faith, and her religion are all mixed together in a way she can’t separate. Her breakout song is about that struggle. It includes a line that made some conservative Christians online ask her to change it, but she refused, saying songwriting isn’t a democracy.
I don’t believe in God, but I believe that you’re my savior
Read it again and notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t get rid of the position of a savior. It fills it.
That’s the part I keep thinking about. Everyone at Truist Park would have said they came for a concert. But forty thousand of us stood in the humid air for two hours, arms raised, singing about being unwell to a man who wrote those words because he was unwell. It felt like all that energy was going somewhere.
There’s a scene in Acts where this exact thing happens, and the two men at the center of it tear their clothes trying to stop it.
Two Men Who Tore Their Clothes
Sometime in the late 40s A.D., in a hill town in what’s now south-central Turkey, Paul healed a man who had never walked. The crowd erupted. And because they erupted in Lycaonian, Paul and Barnabas had no idea what was happening.
Luke mentions the language for a reason; if a group was freaking out on you in a foreign language, it’d be a pretty important detail to you. The two men at the center of this religious event couldn’t understand what was happening around them. Because of the local language, plans to honor them as gods went much further before either apostle realized it.2 By the time they figured out what was going on, the priest of Zeus was already at the gates with oxen and garlands.
The Lystrans weren’t being stupid, which is an easy conclusion to reach. Their region carried a story: Zeus and Hermes had passed through once before, disguised, looking for a bed, and the one couple who took them in got a temple out of it while the neighbors who turned them away got a flood.3 Lystra had a cultural memory of a divine visitation that almost everybody missed, and of what happened to the ones who missed it. When archaeologists dug near Lystra in 1926, they found a stone altar dedicated jointly to Zeus and to Hermes.4 The infrastructure was already poured. The crowd wasn’t inventing a category that day, but instead living in one they had already that hadn’t been filled with anything in a long time.
I keep coming back to one way of reading this scene. The Lystrans didn’t lack information. God was revealing himself right in front of them. But they filtered that experience through a way of thinking that couldn’t accept it. Johnson calls this a functional theology.5 Theirs worked perfectly, but it just wasn’t based on anything true.
Paul and Barnabas tear their clothes. In Scripture, that gesture either signals grief, or it signals that you’ve just heard blasphemy. Here, it does both at once. Then they do something stranger than protesting. They run into the crowd, toward the people trying to worship them. “We are people also, just like you,” Paul says (Acts 14:15, CSB).
What Paul and Barnabas say next changes how we see the whole scene. They don’t just refuse the worship; they redirect it. They point to rain from heaven, fruitful seasons, food, and joyful hearts (14:17). God had been showing himself in their weather and meals all along. Paul never says their longing was false. He says it was aimed at the wrong place.
Then, a handful of verses later, the same crowd stones him. Huh?
Luke says outsiders, men from Antioch and Iconium, came and turned the crowd against Paul (14:19). That’s part of the story. But some believe there’s more to it. The Lystrans felt embarrassed, and people who feel foolish often turn angry.6 That’s just a guess, but I think it fits.
Either way, the sequence stands as written. The men who refused to be gods were dragged out of town and left for dead by the same people who had wanted to sacrifice to them, and Paul carried the scars for the rest of his life (2 Cor 11:25; Gal 6:17). Garlands, then stones.
The Other Man
Two chapters earlier, Luke shows us the alternative.
Herod Agrippa puts on his robes, takes his seat, and gives a speech. The crowd shouts that this is the voice of a god and not of a man (Acts 12:22). The historian Josephus supplies the detail that the robes were silver and caught the morning sun.7 Herod says nothing. And then he is struck down, because, Luke tells us, he did not give the glory to God (12:23).
The worms have turned this into a Sunday school horror story, which is a shame, because the Greek may be saying something quieter and even more unsettling. In commenting on this passage, Jame Hamilton notes the phrase can be read as saying Herod died and became food for worms, just like every mortal does, and that the ESV’s connective is a defensible interpretive addition rather than a certainty.8 Either reading works for us. The man a crowd called a god turned out to be just as mortal as everyone else.
Hamilton also flags that the contrast with Lystra is impossible to miss, and he’s right.9 Two men handed divinity, and two answers. Herod accepted it, and it killed him. Paul and Barnabas refused it, and the crowd tried to kill them. Nobody in this story survives being worshipped.
Reading Truist Park Through Lystra
This is where Redemptive Correlation comes in, and the direction matters more than anything else in this essay. I’m not asking what a sold-out stadium can teach us about worship. I’m asking what Scripture says a sold-out stadium is. Bonhoeffer put it in one sentence: theological thought moves from God to reality, not from reality to God.10 Lystra isn’t just an example I used to explain Monday night. Lystra is the diagnosis. Monday night is the case.
Creation. The capacity that filled Truist Park isn’t a mistake. Humans are made to aim at something. The Lystran instinct to fall down in front of something that healed a man was the right instinct, just running on the wrong information. Worship is built into every person and culture. It’s standard equipment, and it doesn’t turn off when belief does.
Fall. Paul says we traded the truth of God for a lie and worshipped what was made instead of the one who made it (Rom 1:25). The action never changes, but the object does. Last week I wrote about a nation making that swap with a flag. On Monday I did it with a setlist. The Fall gave us a world where people worship each other, which is how a guy from Strafford, Vermont, who made a documentary about his own body dysmorphia, ends up carrying 40,000 people’s need to be saved without ever asking for it.
Redemption. Every rumor in Lystra was really about one thing: gods coming down looking like people. They had the shape and hints of the gospel, but none of its content. Then someone actually came down, and the details matter. Jesus accepts worship because he is God, and he never tore his clothes when someone fell at his feet. What he refused was the crowd’s version of the crown. When they tried to make him king by force, he left (John 6:15). When they finally crowned him, they used thorns. He is the only one who can take in what that stadium was doing and not be crushed by it.
Restoration. At the very end of the Bible, John falls down at an angel’s feet and is told to get up and worship God instead (Rev 22:8–9). John. In the last chapter. Still getting it wrong. Still being corrected. The sorting isn’t finished, and it was never ours to finish. The end of the story is a room louder than any stadium, focused on the one voice that can hold it, and not one person in that room is being overwhelmed by the singing.
Name Your Room
You weren’t in right field on Monday. But you can name your room.
Not the obvious one. You already know to be wary of stadiums. I’m asking about the voice you’ve quietly given the final word: the podcast that got you through your hardest year, the author whose books you’d defend faster than your own pastor, the counselor who said the one thing that changed you, the man on the platform in your own church on Sunday morning.
The test isn’t whether you worship them, because nobody would say yes to that. The real test is what you feel when someone criticizes them. If the critique hits you before you even think about what you believe, you’ve found the altar. You built it. You know exactly where it is.
And you’re on the receiving end of this too. Someone has quietly put more on you than you can handle: a kid, a younger believer, someone in your small group who thinks you have it all figured out. You know they’ve done it, but you’ve never corrected them. Herod didn’t correct anyone either.
Read the charge against him again. He didn’t claim to be divine. He just accepted it in silence, and Luke says he didn’t give God the glory. His sin wasn’t what he said. It was the silence where he should have spoken up.
The correction, when it comes, isn’t about looking down on the venue. Paul never told the Lystrans their hunger was embarrassing. Instead, he told them it was aimed in the wrong direction, and then he pointed to rain, harvests, and full stomachs—the evidence that had been in front of them all along. You can do that. It’s slower than just giving an opinion, and it costs a lot more.
And it will make you look like Paul did: a grown man tearing his own clothes in public while everyone else is just having a good time.
That’s what made me pause in right field. I didn’t want to ruin the night. I’d waited months for that show, and I wasn’t going to be the guy who turned to his wife in the middle of “All My Love” and said, do you hear what this is.
So I sang. I loved it. And I didn’t say a word.
You’ll find yourself in a moment like that before the month is over. You’ll feel it. The only question is whether you’ll say something out loud, or do what I did.
What We’re Practicing On
Nothing was wrong with Truist Park.
Forty thousand people stood in the heat on a Monday night and gave something their full attention. They sang about depression, divorce, and small towns without hesitation, and they did it next to strangers. They knew every word. They wept in front of people they’d never met. That’s not a culture that forgot how to worship, but one that never stopped, doing it beautifully, for a man who has been saying for three years that he can’t carry it.
The Lystrans were half right. Something worth falling down for really had shown up. They just couldn’t tell the messenger from the message, and Paul cared enough to tear his clothes over it.
So the church’s job in a moment like this isn’t to look down on stadiums. We’d only be looking down on ourselves; I have the ticket stub. Our job is to be the room where all of that energy is aimed in the right direction, and where the aiming doesn’t harm anyone in it.
That’s what the singing was for. Not performance, not preference, not the thing we argue about at members’ meetings. A congregation with its whole self lifted up, focused on the only one who can take it all in and not be crushed. We have what every stadium is reaching for. We’re often bored by it.
John got it wrong in the last chapter of the Bible, and he’d seen everything. He fell at the angel’s feet and was told to get up. Even at the end, the aim needs correcting. It always will, until it finally doesn’t.
There’s a room coming that will be louder than Truist Park. Nobody in it will be sold anything. Nobody on the receiving end will buckle.11 And everyone there will have spent a lifetime practicing on smaller stages—some not so well, some in right field with their arms up and their aim off by just the width of a man.
What are you practicing on?
This is the fifth entry in Functional Gospels, a series on the salvation stories our culture actually runs on—the ones people live by, whether or not they’d ever call them that. Previous entries: The Da Vinci Code, Brené Brown, Matthew McConaughey, A God Who Asks Nothing.
This piece was written using Redemptive Correlation, the method behind most of what’s here. It works in four steps: listen to the cultural question on its own terms, find the longing underneath it, reframe it under Scripture’s story from creation to restoration, and respond with something you can actually live. The order matters. Culture asks; Scripture answers. If you reverse that, you get a stadium.
If this one connected with you, the most helpful thing you can do is send it to one person. Not share it widely. Send it to the specific person you thought of while reading.
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Brian Tallerico, review of Noah Kahan: Out of Body, dir. Nick Sweeney, RogerEbert.com, April 13, 2026, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/noah-kahan-out-of-body-netflix-documentary-film-review-2026.
F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, rev. ed., The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 274.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.620–724; John B. Polhill, Acts, NAC 26 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), 314n65.
Bruce, Book of the Acts, 275.
Keith L. Johnson, Theology as Discipleship (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 39-40.
Bruce, Book of the Acts, 279; Polhill, Acts, 317.
Josephus, Antiquities 19.343–350; Bruce, Book of the Acts, 241.
James M. Hamilton Jr. and Brian J. Vickers, John–Acts, ESVEC 9 (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), 451.
Hamilton and Vickers, John–Acts, 470.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, DBW 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 89, quoted in Johnson, Theology as Discipleship, 43.
The imagery here draws on Rev 19:6, where the sound of the multitude is compared to rushing waters and thunder. In both scenes, the worship is directed to the one on the throne and to the Lamb, never to the creatures gathered around them; cf. Rev 5:11–14.