Four Questions: Scot McKnight

Engaging with different voices is always important. In blogging it is so easy to concentrate on your own view, and let other views orbit around it. “Four Questions” is a series on Everyday Liturgy which looks to authors & artists to ask them four questions about their craft.

Today’s guest is the prolific Scot McKnight. Similar to N.T. Wright, Scot has the wonderful ability to take complex academic discussions and present them in concise, accessible prose. His writings on fasting, Mary, hermeneutics and the atonement have all been formative in my own thought and practice. I wanted to ask him some questions about his new book, The King Jesus Gospel.

Everyday Liturgy: In your new book The King Jesus Gospel you talk about how contemporary evangelicalism is a “salvation culture” instead of a “gospel culture.” What are some examples of contemporary evangelical worship that are rooted in “salvation culture”?

Scot McKnight: First, think of many of our songs, which are rooted in our personal experience of salvation instead of in the glory of God, the centrality of Jesus Christ, and our empowerment by the Spirit. Many think Philippians 2:5-11 and Colossians 1:15-20 are early Christian hymns, not to mention the rich hymns of Revelation, and you will see a remarkable difference between our experience-based music and their Christ-focused lines.

Second, how much of our worship is focused on Christ? Notice again the art of ancient churches: they all had wonderful art that found its focus in Christ. I’m thinking of Hagia Sophia’s famous depiction of Christ, or even the cross-shaped York Minster. What is the “shape” of our churches?

Third, think of how the ancient liturgy led us to the Table. That was the focus and the climax of the “service” while ours is focused either on a sermon or on an invitation. There are huge theological factors at work here, and we are losing theology and not gaining it.

EL: What are some of the changes churches can make to their worship that would make their worship services a cultural expression of the gospel?

Scot: The major shift is simple and yet will prove itself difficult because we unfamiliar with it: we need to readjust everything so that our entrance, our music, our readings, our sermons and our sacrament all lead us to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, all known most clearly in Jesus Christ.
We could go through our hymnals and cut out all songs that aren’t focused on God.

EL: What are some spiritual disciplines that people can begin to practice that will help them live out the gospel of Jesus?

Scot: Bible reading. We need to become mastered by the Bible’s Story and to let that whole Story—Genesis to Revelation—guide us to Jesus Christ.

Spiritual disciplines make me nervous at times, mostly because they are often too focused on “my own” spirituality. They tend to draw attention to how we are growing, our own condition before God, etc. Genuine spiritual disciplines will draw us into God and then into the world where God is accomplishing his mission. So I would urge us to reconsider some of our disciplines, and begin to see other-directed praxis as discipline: evangelism, service, compassion, visiting the marginalized and unempowered…

EL: In your book you discuss how the sermons in Acts are the best example of the gospel of Jesus. These sermons are pretty different than the sermons heard from many pulpits today. How should pastors look to preach a two thousand year old message to our contemporary culture?

Scot: Evangelism needs to be reshaped from a persuasive rhetoric designed to precipitate decisions toward a declarative rhetoric designed to exalt Jesus Christ. The essence of the sermons in Acts was to tell us stuff about Jesus and not to persuade sinners to accept Christ.

Good evangelism takes us from creation to Christ and to the consummation, but one doesn’t need to do the whole each time, esp if a congregation or a person has no clue. The center of evangelism, and all good preaching, is Christ — we tell people about Jesus. That Story of Jesus has the power to awaken faith in sinners and the saints. So, we need to become people who are most concerned with presenting Jesus.

If you want to know more about Scot McKnight you can read his blog, Jesus Creed.

Take A Bag!

Recently I was talking to one of my good friends and catching up about life when he shared with me a very interesting thought. He was describing those bags you usually get from a school, a hospital or another institution when a big life event is about to happen.

Here’s a bag that explains everything you need to know about going to college.

Here’s a bag with all of the policies and manuals for your new job.

Here’s a bag that gives you information on childbirth.

Here’s a bag full of information about the area and things to see and do.

It dawned on him as he was sitting in a doctor’s office and had just been handed a packet about what to expect when you’re expecting that the church should really do this. He shared a bit with me about how this idea came about and how it’s grown.

When we went to the ObGyn for the first time after we found out K— was pregnant they gave us this canvas bag with books, info sheets, prenatal samples, etc

I said, “We should be doing this.” Someone gets engaged, Fr Paul has a bag ready. Someone is interested in becoming a catechumen, Fr Paul has a bag ready. Someone dies, Fr Paul has a bag ready, etc. We decided it was silly for [the church] to be out done by the medical practitioners.

We are working with our priest on making up little information packets/bags for different stages of life that explains the services connected with them and how th elaity can prepare for them, etc and including patristic works related to them

K— and I are currently working on one for expecting parents. It will include a description of the different prayers the priest says after the baby is born and leading up to the baptism and hopefully include some patristic advise/books about raising children.

I will work next on a marriage bag and hope to put John Chrysostom’s homilies in there.

What a great idea! We are admonished in Scriptures to be ready to give an answer, and this is a great way to do it.

How do you think your local church could use information bags?

We decided it was silly for us to be out done by the medical practitioners

Guest Post: Prayers from the Scene of a Wound

This is a guest post by Tim Snyder. To download these prayers click here: Prayers From the Scene of a Wound.

Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to be a part of an ordination of a close friend, Nate Preisinger. Nate and I have been friends for the better part of the last eight years. Our friendship and conversations have shaped each other’s vocations and lives in strange and profound ways. What was even more is that Nate was being ordained through an alternative route to ordination. So, when Nate asked me to be a part of the ordination I was honored to do it.

But, as I sat down to write the prayers I discovered the task to be harder than I had imagined it would be. You see, I am wildly ambivalent about our church’s current practice of ordination. There’s many sociological and theological reasons why we ought resist the existence of a professionalized clergy. Still, other parts of it—like education, for example—are highly valuable. I’m doubtful the way forward in the future will be less educated leaders for Christian communities.

And while all that above rationalizing is true, there’s more. The truth is my own ordination process was a disaster. It failed. I had to withdraw from my own path to ordination because a denominational leader decided the community in which I first heard my call was not “sustainable.” What happened next involved deceit, denial and disjunction. For years Nate and I had been running parallel paths. But now my path would diverge from his and I would leave ordination behind to seek healing.

In her most important theological work, Places of Redemption: Theology for a World Church, Mary McClintock Fulkerson writes:

Theologies that matter arise out of dilemmas—out of situations that matter. The generative process of theological understanding is a process provoked, not confined to preconceived, fixed categories. Rather, as Charles Winquist is reported to have said, creative thinking originates at the scene of a wound. Wounds generate new thinking. Disjunctions birth invention—from a disjuncture in logic, where reasoning is compelled to find new connections in thought, to brokenness in existence, where creativity is compelled to search for possibilities of reconciliation.^[1]

I had been wounded, yes, but it was a wounding that had its roots in a larger wounding: our church’s inability to acknowledge the days of settled life are over. But I believe that Nate’s ordination was just the kind of creative thinking that arises from the scene of a wound. As a church, ordaining Nate was certainly about affirming him as a future leader, but it was more than that. It was about us, as a church, being honest about our wound, confronting our disjunction and fumbling our way towards new possibilities.

So, when I prayed for Nate at his ordination, I imagined returning to the scene of my own wound and I imagined what it would be like to let that scene speak not only for me, but for the community, for the church. This is what I prayed:

+   Prayers of the People +

I. “For Nate”

God of Mercy,
We break in to worship
On this day
That you have called Nate
To the ministry of Word, Sacrament (and Community).

Nate —
In the out-of-the-way places of your heart
This beginning has been quietly forming

May you trust the promise of this opening
May you unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
May your spirit of adventure awaken & may you find ease in risk
And a home in the rhythms of this new call

LORD in your mercy,
All: Hear our prayers.

II. “For All of Us”

God of Mercy,
Break our hearts open
And teach us to love.
Deeply and thoroughly
And not just those who are easy to love…

But help us somehow love like you do.
Help us
If it’s even possible
Make visible the life of Jesus
In our bodies
With justice for the oppressed
Food for the hungry
Freedom for the captives
Care for the poor, strangers and widows.

And if it is possible, tangible
We thank you for that.

LORD, in your mercy.
All: Hear our prayers.

III. “For Those in Need”

God of mercy,
Help us not to be content with false cheerfulness
And vacant optimism.
This thing is broken.

Trouble won’t go and peace won’t stay.
Cycles of the earth still devastate
Violence lingers
Conflicts deepen
Despair is still crippling
And many who are sick will not get better.

Help us to see all this
Help us to not shelter ourselves from it
But rather find our way to faith
Through our broken hallelujahs.

LORD, in your mercy.
All: Hear our prayers.

IV. “For the Church”

God of mercy,
Help the church
To proclaim Christ crucified
Not to be concerned too much for itself
Its particular longevity
Its numbers, or influence…or even relevance
Its growth or failure.

Help us resist the seduction of safety and certainty
The gray promise of sameness
Rather, may our elders see visions
And our young dream dreams
Dreams that call us outside ourselves
To something more beautiful, mysterious
And true.

LORD, in your mercy
All: Hear our prayers.

V. “For the World”

God of mercy,
Help the world.
Where it is too settled, unsettle it.
Where it is too unsettled, settle it.

Help us not to draw false distinctions:
us/them
sacred/secular
church/world
But rather help us lose ourselves
So that we may find ourselves
Renewed, redeemed and reconciled.

Into one creation,
A community of faith, hope and love.

LORD, in your mercy.
All: Hear our prayers.

Finally, God, because our words fail us…
Meet us now in this extended silence.

(silence)

Amen.

 

Note: When I write prayers (esp. those “of the people”) I borrow heavily from prose, song lyrics, other prayers, scriptures, etc. I do not bother to cite any of this formally because that seems awkward. So just know that these prayers are something like the “sampling” that happens in hip hop, rap and spoken word. And in that sense they are original compositions, improvised for a particular time and place.

Are We A Lamenting Church?

Two events in our area are kind of coming together into a season of lament for the communities in the New York City metro area. Thankfully we were spared damage in the hurricane, but many of my friends and people at church suffered damage. As I drove to a friend’s house on Tuesday to help with flooding, I went through detour after detour. Frustrated by how long it took me to travel what is normally such an easy trip, it was haunting to witness destruction from my car in stop-and-go traffic. Rivers undercutting interstate highways. Submerged houses. Block upon block of damaged property stacked high and wide for trash pickup that will take weeks. The police called in for looters and garbage thieves. It was enough to make one numb.

And in just a week will be the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attack. As someone who moved to this area a few years after the attacks, its been a bit bewildering to be placed into an area where so much suffering has been pushed aside for necessity as life goes on. But the hurt is still there, and this anniversary many are finally preparing to deal with some of the emotions they have held in check for so many years.

Our church is basically entering into two straight weeks of lament. This Sunday will be the hurricane. Next week will be September 11th.

The question is: do we know how to lament?

In our contemporary American Christianity when every church advertisement and production is all smiling families and up beat well groomed pastors, do we know how to properly lament before God?

I think we know how to respond to tragedy as best as we can. But in the Scriptures we witness so many of the prophets and stories of God’s people not only respond to tragedy but actually become tragedy. To dress in sackcloth and ashes. To indwell destruction and horror in order to overcome it.

We respond so that we can cope. What we need to do is participate in the grief so that we can do more than cope, we can become despair.

How can we through Christ actually become grief, so that those around us may grieve? In other words, how do we not only voice our despair and lament, but become despair and lament, that others may see through us to Christ, who dispels the darkness?

A Question of Aesthetics

One of my recent obsessions has been the design blog Design*Sponge. I love design, and I love to think about ways to re-decorate around our place.

The world of Christian design is wide open, from iconoclastic white washed Baptist churches to flying-buttressed cathedrals, Thomas Kinkade kitsch and Makoto Fujimura abstraction, and simple lecterns to rock and roll stages. Design in Christianity is deeply tied to function: the need to communicate spirituality and to actually perform spiritual actions and works: preach, baptize, serve communion, read, play music, etc.

This begs the question: Do you think that the design of the church—colors, architecture, ambiance—should be a central focus of church?

And more: How do you think they influence worship? Do you think they should influence worship?

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)