The Art of Curating Worship

A book that has me absolutely brimming with ideas is Mark Pierson’s The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader. This book speaks directly to how worship can be a means of discipleship for a community and the needs of artists within their faith communities to grow and thrive.

It’s not often I feel like I read a book that confirms my dreams like this one does. When people have asked me how I envision a future role in full-time ministry I tell them I want to be a worship pastor. This is often met with puzzled looks.

I don’t play guitar.

I don’t sing melody.

How could I be a worship pastor?

To me, the point of being a worship pastor is to shepherd (pastor) people in worship, in a holistic sense. Just like preachers don’t accomplish their whole job in a half hour on a Sunday morning, why is it expected that a worship pastor’s sole focus is a four song music set on Sunday morning. Quite frankly, why do churches have full-time job roles for that? A worship pastor should lead and disciple people in worship.

To me, that means helping people in prayer, Scripture reading, music, serving others, discipling others, cooking, cleaning, painting, writing, etc. If we want to take seriously that all work should be worship, then the worship pastor should be uniting people’s vocation with their spiritual disciplines to bring glory to God in all we do.

This book speaks to that sentiment. Focused on doing stations based worship on Sunday mornings along with “guerilla worship” (doing worship events in the larger community, like art installations), this book shows that the role of the worship leader is to facilitate the  faith community’s participation in worship by utilizing individual talents to create art and bring glory to God. In its pages you will find dozens of examples, mostly in Australia and New Zealand, of how worship leaders are curating worship installations that allow God to speak to people through all of their senses. It is a view of worship as immersion—a setting aside of time to be immersed in the depth of the human condition and how God speaks to this depth.

I know I am not alone. I had a good friend lament to me a couple of months ago about how she set up an art event at her church and only one person showed up. This book is for people like us, who struggle with how to lead worship in a holistic way that connects with your diverse faith community and disciples people in their strengths and vocations.

The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader
Mark Pierson
Sparkhouse Press
$15.92  (Amazon)

Book Review: Light for the Journey

Christine Sine’s prayer book Light for the Journey: Morning and Evening Prayers for Living Into God’s World is a wonderfully comprehensive companion to prayer. More adaptable to group prayer than personal prayer, Sine’s book is full of rich litanies for mornings and evenings each day of the week. The litanies, readings and prayers are well developed and thematic, presenting a challenging focus as you go about your day.

The best feature of the book is Sine’s thought provoking “tasks” for the day that follow the morning and evening prayers. These questions and suggestions for further thought and action encourage an attitude of unceasing prayer, and they made me notice how even when developing a rule of prayer how fleeting our minds can be and how often we can forget the purpose of prayer to indwell our whole day. Sine has crafted a prayer book that pushes the reader into living out the prayers, and that is probably the best praise a prayer book can be given.

Light for the Journey
Christine Sine
Buy it from Mustard Seed Associates, $18.00 (includes S&H)
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Erasing Hell: A Rational Response to Rob Bell

There has recently been a flurry of publishing pushing back against Rob Bell’s Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Francis Chan’s book Erasing Hell: What God said about eternity, and what we made up, Mark Galli’s book God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins, the book of essays Is Hell Real or Does Everyone Go To Heaven?, Brian Jones’s Hell Is Real (But I Hate to Admit It), and Michael Wittmer’s Christ Alone: An Evangelical Response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins are all responses to Bell. Bell has created a cottage industry overnight.

So what should a proper response be to a book that has caused such fury, disdain, contemplation, confusing and rebuttal? Francis Chan delivers a healthy, rational response to Bell in his book. Chan’s book is a concise overlook of conservative evangelical theology on hell with a surprising openness to mystery concerning the afterlife. Chan takes a different route than typical response books, which is appropriate in responding to a book that is as contemplative as Bell’s. He keeps away from explicit dismissal for the most part, there are a few in there that would have become heady and might have bogged the conversation down. He also keeps away from gross over-generalizations of Bell, though he does sweep him up into an oversimplified discussion of universalism at the beginning of the book.

Chan’s response to characterizations of Bell is actually pretty weak. He tries not to be academic and ends up glossing over nuances of Bell’s conversation. A response to the aura of criticism around Bell should not be tucked into a few paragraphs and a bunch of footnotes.

On the other hand, Chan’s response to the questions and assumptions Bell makes is solid. The best chapter in the book is Chan’s outline of first-century Jewish thought on hell, something that is very valid to the conversation and completely absent from Bell’s work, which does not help Bell’s work stand up to any historical or critical scrutiny (the excuse that Bell’s work is pastoral and not academic may not be able to hold up to the weight of Chan’s use of Dunn and Wright’s methods of exploring first-century Judaism).

The book does start out a bit fluffy, but the more Chan gets away from the aura surrounding Bell and how one should respond the stronger the book becomes. Additionally, Chan sets a great tone in the last chapters by trying to set down an apologetic for a conservative evangelical theology of hell while appreciating and realizing the severe limitations anyone has when discussing the afterlife. Chan tries to work with the Scriptures as best he can without reading Protestant theology into the text, though in places Chan does make some connections between judgment and hell that are not anywhere in the context of the gospels, epistles and Revelation. He should be commended for the effort.

In short, Chan’s book is a rational response to Bell because he keeps the dismissals and generalizations to a minimum and presents a solid argument while allowing for God to be judge and not humankind.

Erasing Hell
Francis Chan & Preston Sprinkle
David C. Cook
$8.99 (Amazon)

That Book Rob Bell Wrote

It took going to hell and back to get him into the evangelical time out corner, but Rob Bell has finally unseated Brian McLaren  for the coveted position of “liberal wolf in evangelical sheep’s clothing.” From flippant dismissals from fellow Midwestern pastors to bewilderment to calls of heresy, Bell has found a sweet spot for dissension and anger.

I tried to stay out of this conversation altogether, writing a while ago that worship is our vocation, not deciding who goes to hell and who does not (“Who’s the Judge?“). Maybe providentially, I was offered a pre-publication copy of Francis Chan’s Erasing Hell: What God said about eternity, and the things we made up, which is a response to Bell’s Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. So, not wanting to put the cart before the horse, I read both books over the past two weeks.

First off, Rob Bell believes in hell. He really does. If you don’t think he does then you haven’t read the book. In fact, I think Bell’s book injects one of the single most vital theological arguments on hell to the evangelical conversation to come around in a long time. The main thesis of Bell’s book is not universalism lite, as most critics have argued (more on that later), but that hell does exist. Right here, right now, in our midst.

While Bell does not couch it this way (it would be too point blank for his style), what he sets up in the majority of the book is a counter-part to an already/not-yet view of the kingdom: an already/not-yet view of hell. In arguing that hell exists right here, right now, in the gross injustice, sickness, hopelessness, rage, war, rape, disease, poverty, pillaging, natural disasters, etc., Bell makes a strong case for taking hell very seriously. Love Wins makes a very strong case for a literal interpretation of the role of the kingdom in fighting against the gates of hell and taking death, destruction and darkness head on, like Christ did.

But then there is that pesky chapter 7. Here Bell makes a case for a quasi-universalism. Possibly. I don’t really know. Chapter 7 was really hard to follow and understand. The parable of the prodigal son seemed to be taken a bit out of context, and I couldn’t really follow the logic. I think Love Wins would have been a very different book if this chapter had been more focused, or maybe left out altogether.

For those of you who have heard the warning about Love Wins, that it will lead you down the path of heresy, I don’t buy it, and neither should you. Read it for yourself. Maybe you can figure out Chapter 7!

Love Wins
Rob Bell
HarperOne
$13.79 (Amazon)

The Accidental Anglican

I have written now and again about how in my own life I have experienced a spiritual renewal in recovering the liturgical practices that I forsook while in evangelical and Baptist contexts. So, a book with the title The Accidental Anglican certainly caught my eye, especially the promising sub-title “The Surprising Appeal of the Liturgical Church.” Unfortunately, the title is a bit misleading. There is not as much a discussion of why liturgy should be so appealing it is taken for granted that the appeal of liturgy is self-evident to the reader.

That being said, this is a great book. It is part memoir, part apologia for conservative Anglicanism. Hunter’s journey from the Vineyard movement into an Anglican context is fascinating, and one that is affirming to those who are journeying back to more liturgical contexts.

The apologia Hunter presents in this book is the foundational beliefs for why he is now a missionary bishop within the Anglican church and how this role is an extension of his calling to plant churches. The churches Hunter is planting are inspiring. They are a microcosm of their bishop: charismatic, missional and deeply liturgical. In essence, they are a product of the ancient-future movement and the evangelistic and charismatic zeal of the Vineyard movement (see my review of John Wimber’s Power Healing). Having worked with Wimber for so many years, Hunter has the pedigree to lead such a movement, and the later portion of the book is basically a defense of his model of church planting, which I find convincing.

This book is a delightful memoir and welcome addition to any conversation about how Protestant churches can return to our liturgical roots.

The Accidental Anglican: The Surprising Appeal of the Liturgical Church
Todd D. Hunter
InterVarsity Press
$10.28 (Amazon)

Review: The Book of Men

My review of The Book of Men, Dorianne Laux’s newest book of poetry, is now up on The Englewood Review of Books. An excerpt:

The Book of Men, Dorianne Laux’s latest offering of poetry, is a tableau of the male archetype. The poems, far from presenting the stereotypical nature of man or the masculine, are linked together by the diversity and plainness of different men. Men are captured here in their habitat, specks operating in a humungous and incomprehensible world. No matter how small or great, whether trailer trash or Superman, the men in the poem are set adrift and forlorn but for the simple satisfaction they find in life, women and the world.

To read the rest of the review click here.