Reading Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity piqued my interest in how to refrain from making worship “cool.” It’s a temptation that we all fall into, as worship has suddenly become something that is commodified and has a market value. The fact that people may pay $30-40 to go worship with a cool worship band as opposed [...]
Whenever I read the Psalms I’m impressed by the rich imagery, metaphors, and narratives that the poets use for their worship. The poets who wrote the Psalms wrote about enemy attacks, trees rooted along streams, and rocks holding firm amidst floods. These images communicated truths about God’s character and his dealings with his people. In [...]
During these days after Easter I have been thinking about Pentecost. I’ve been wondering what a creative liturgy would look like for a Pentecost service. Liturgical churches read the Pentecost passages but don’t often practice much in the way of spiritual gifts. Some churches mention Pentecost and the power of the Spirit and stop there. [...]
After being inspired by Imonk’s recent foray into evangelical liturgy, I have been thinking about the role of confession in non-denominational churches without a tradition to follow.
During communion at my church, I have been reading selections from Joel and a confessional prayer I wrote. For me, it it is both a product of our community (my writing) and attached to God’s Story of confession and deliverance (in Joel and in the sacrament).
I think there are many opportunities for powerful confessional moments in our churches that we are simply missing out on. So I ask of you, how does your church confess?
I play drums at church, where we play a lot of Hillsong material. I needed to look up what the drummer for Hillsong was doing on a song so I went into Youtube and thought I had stumbled into a Keith Urban concert, with an Australian heart throb crooning away under a spotlight (I got made fun of yesterday for thinking that Hillsong was from England and not Australia—shows how often I follow the Christian Contemporary scene: absolutely never). The drummer was in the shadows playing away and I could kind of get the gist of the rhythm. But I do have to say I was shocked by the rock n’ roll marketing and set design for a worship concert, that most paradoxical of paradoxes. Worship is life performed before the Other, which is God. A concert is a performance before people, a display like an art gallery or a novel. In worship an audience gives something. In a concert the audience receives something. The only thing that an audience gives over during a concert is cash for tickets and beer.
Alright, I’m done knocking on Hillsong and all the other spotlight enshrouded pervayours of worship entertainment. I want to start moving beyond Hillsong. I am tired of dwelling in critique of CCM and instead want to forge the path ahead into the great unknown, which for most local churches, is an unruly thicket.
I am not going to boycott Hillsong. The music is good. The lyrics are the best and most un-"Jesus is my Boyfriend" you can get in the "worship music" genre these days. The lyrics are often quotes from Scripture and are not "I" and "me" focused. Hillsong’s music does not encourage passivity and idleness in worship (their concerts are another story). Yet, the problem still exists, and it is our responsibility to fix it.
"I wish we could just get rid of the sermon."
That’s what one friend said to me at Starbucks recently. For us that view worship as holistic and not as song and sermon, both music and preaching seem to take precedence over other forms of worship: prayer, silence, meditation, Scripture reading. In lieu of these things we instead sing and preach about them. How many sermons have you heard mention silence as important to worship? How many times has your own church been silent? How many times have pastors preached the necessity of Scripture reading? How many times has your own church read Scripture at any great length (more than a whole chapter)? Preaching far outweighs doing in most Protestant churches.
Using the motto lex orandi, lex credendi (what one prays is what one believes) as our measuring stick, we should look at the worship service as a microcosm of how we want the local church to worship. The goal of every church is to have a congregation that reads Scripture, prays, meditates, spends time in fasting, in silence, in wonder, sings, preaches, teaches, and fellowships with one another. Yet we don’t model the right way of worship in our own worship services. We are not modeling what you pray is what you believe. We are really showing our congregations that true worship is active only in song and passive in everything else. We have taught our congregations that beyond singing and talking around a cup of coffee we are to let others do all the heavy lifting of Scripture reading, preaching, prayer, and silence.
The sermon is the linchpin to a successful return to a balance in worship because it is the facet of worship that has ballooned to swallow up the other facets in terms of time and importance.
I have been to an Ash Wednesday service at a Presbyterian Church before, but never to a regular morning service until this past Sunday. Experiencing their liturgy was a mix between the familiar (prayers that echo the Book of Common Prayer and hold much in common with most mainline liturgies) to different prayers and litany I had never heard before.
Denominations and their local churches are cultures unto themselves, probably for the better. Familiarity is a good thing. A common language is a good thing. Dialects are revered for their abnoxiousness or beauty depending on which side of the line you stand and speak from, but all dialects are part of a common language.
As Christians we are given a common language, the Word and the Sacraments, but we express these in dialects that we are sometimes unfamiliar with. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or false, because the common language is there. The Word and Sacraments are still true even though we talk past each other.
I have been watching seasons 1 and 2 of The I.T. Crowd lately, and though I laugh at 90% of the jokes it is still a British comedy and I don’t always get everything. My wife would sometimes look up from her Twilight books and ask, "what does that mean?" and I’d have to confess, "I have no idea." They speak the English tongue but I have no idea what they mean.
Last night I watched Up in 3-D on the big screen. It was a technological and artistic masterpiece, providing both stunning graphics and a stunning story (rarely do the two mesh).
Always the critic, I was thinking in the movie about the perspective three dimensions gives us of two dimensions: pictures, movies, words on paper, etc. Viewing a regular movie is completely two dimensional: both actors and text, pictures,captions, etc. In a 3-D movie the 2-D objects stand out by subtraction: in the opening shot of Up as the sepia newsreel played to introduce two important characters the screen is two-dimensional, and as the movie pans out the people in front of the protagonist become 3-D with the glasses on, and you see the crowd in three dimensions but the newsreel in two dimensions. We are seeing a crowd.
We are seeing ourselves.
Earlier this week Ed Cyzewski wrote about the question: Why Would God "Command" Us to Love? The Greatest Commandment is to "love God and love others," so why this command? Ed "read God’s command to love as counteracting these influences. The
most important part about worshiping God is learning to love God, not
what we bring to the table."
Even in Christianity we bring things to the table. Instead of worshiping God on his terms we often decide to worship God on the world’s terms, and form a syncretism instead of worship after God’s own heart.
Earlier this week as I was reading the lectionary this passage from Deuteronomy 12 jumpted out at me:
You must demolish completely all the places where the nations whom
you are about to dispossess served their gods, on the mountain heights,
on the hills, and under every leafy tree. Break down their altars,
smash their pillars, burn their sacred poles with fire, and hew down
the idols of their gods, and thus blot out their name from their
places. You shall not worship the LORD your God in such ways.
We are commanded to love God and love others because not only do we slip into idolatry and
chasing after false gods, but we also can stumble into worshiping God
“in such ways” as our culture, creating a syncretism of our worship
with how the world worships.
In today’s evangelical landscape there are
so many instances of this in the way we worship and celebrate God:
through rock concerts, conferences, building gigantic sanctuaries,
erecting church campuses, huge church staffs, etc.
Most egregiously, we have concocted the shrewd and calculated idea to
hire huge church staffs so that they can be our “love liaisons” for us,
getting the congregation off the hook from worshiping God the way he
wants to be worshiped so that we can worship him on our own terms.
God commands us to love him and love others because that is not how the world works. It is certainly not how our culture of consumerism, expoloitation, and greed works. Love is only the way God works.
Yesterday as I was driving home from work out of the speakers rang the words in a strong radio voice: "Whan that Aprill with his its shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote."
It probably sounded like a foreign language or bizarre accent to most listeners, but for me, I knew it right a way, and continued the reading of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales from memory: "And bathed every veyne in swich licour of which vertu engendred is the flour, whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth inspired into hath in every holt and heeth…" in the weird Anglo-German accent that characterizes Middle English.
When I was a junior in high school I had to memorize the first 20 or so lines of the General Prologue, and it has stuck with me ever sense. It inspired me to spend some Saturday nights, before heading out with friends, to sit with a cup of tea and read from the Middle English. That may make me a certified English major, but the broader idea it points to is how memorization generates spiritual transformation.
Songs sung in church for the first time are not as moving as the 43rd time. The reading of Scripture only gains more meaning as it continues to wash over us as life progresses. The words of our faith dig deep within us, and out of these depths comes joy.
Memorization and meditation are the winemaking of our spiritual lives. As time progresses and the words of Scripture, the church, and our communities of faith wash over us and ruminate within us, the fruit of these words turns into a fine wine. The word of God only gets better as it ages.
