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?

Worship Music Bingo

Have you ever been standing in church and thought I’ve heard this before? or this word gets repeated a lot? or every song sounds the same!

Well I have news for you: the answers are yes, yes and of course!

That’s why I created worship music bingo. Now you have the opportunity to actually track the repetition, cliche and myopic viewpoints reinforced by much of modern worship music in real time and with your friends! It’s like sabermetrics for church! And the best part is that some one wins!

Here are the rules for worship music bingo:

1. Print off worship music bingo cards for you and your friends
2. Use the bingo cards to keep track of when different words are used
3. The first one to get bingo wins!

Variations:

• See how many weeks it takes to fill up the whole card.
• Give cards out to your friends who attend different churches and compare your cards at a Sunday brunch.

You can download your own Everyday Liturgy Presents Worship Music Bingo™ card by clicking the download button.

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?

Is It Hymn or Him?

by Omar Niebles

I grew up in a Spanish speaking church.   We sang hymns, in Spanish of course, every single Sunday morning, but one day we were introduced to coritos.  These were songs, but it’s not like we were making a transition into contemporary music.  They were just choruses that you’d sing over and over again.  It was a Baptist church so by no means get the picture of an AG church singing out a chorus, guitars blazing, drums building and rockin, and people with hands up in the air.  No, we sang them pretty much the same way we’d sing a hymn.  A guy led the song from the front and someone accompanied him on the piano.  No arms rising.  No hands clapping.  No drums rockin.  That would have been a BIG no-no.

In my late teen years, I left the church I grew up in and checked out other churches.  These churches were different.  These churches had people clapping and guitars ringing and drums rockin.  Wow.   I experienced culture shock for sure.  I loved it.  I would see people raising their hands and they just seemed completely into the music and I thought to myself that I didn’t worship God in that way.  I was raised to think that it was wrong to worship in this way.  It was too much and over the top and God was not pleased.

A few years down the line, I found myself caught in the middle of a struggle.  People, who loved hymns, thought they were being cheated from worshiping God.  They did not feel that worship was about drums, fast music and hand clapping.  They refused to even be with the rest of the church community as the rest of the community was worshiping.  The people who were about being contemporary didn’t really care much about what the others thought.  This was the “new way forward.”  This way was what was going to grip the young people.  Contemporary worship was how “we” were going to worship God.

Something’s off here, isn’t it?  Was one group more right than the other?  When did worshiping God become a power struggle?  Should we scrap hymns because some of the language is no longer relevant?  Is contemporary music shallow?

Let’s ask this question…does God really care about the songs we sing on Sunday morning?  I mean I guess God would care if our songs talked about the awesomeness of Satan or our submission to evil.  Yeah, God would have beef with that.  But is God more pleased one way or the other on which genre of music we choose for our church communities?

God could care less about the songs you and I sing on a Sunday morning if our worship smells like you know what during the rest of the week.    Check out Colossians 3.  Notice the context of verse 16.  The verses circled around verse 15 deals with how we are to LIVE.  How we worship God with our lives, through our routines, through our children, through our spouses, through our authorities matters tremendously to God.  So much so that Paul decided it was good to have 24 verses on that and one verse to what we sing.

Check out Isaiah, Jeremiah, and what Jesus says about those who worship God.  The so-called religious come to God with His name on their lips, yet their hearts are far away.

Let’s be a people whose hearts are close to Him.  Let’s no longer make worship about hymn or no hymn, but about Him.  Let’s worship Him with our lives.  Let’s be people who put to death the junk of this world and clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.  Then, hymn or no hymn, corito or no corito, drums or no drums, let’s sing in complete gratitude of Him.

What Does Your Church Look Like?

This infographic from small ritual is stunning (click here to view, it’s long and it scrolls).

Steve Collins, the fine purveyor of small ritual breaks the local church down into two types:

#1: church as weekly service:

• focus on events
• seven-day cycle
• regular, predictable—suits business and industry
• emphasis on knowledge and self-improvement
• tries to fit irregular events and seasons into 7-day grid (nearest Sunday to…)
• historical seasons and festivals become sermon subjects

#2 church as rhythm of life:

• a focus on community
• annual cycle
• irregular, seasonal—reflecting history and nature
• emphasis on life as a journey through spiritual seasons
• special days and seasons overrule the 7-day grid
• seasons and festivals given different forms of expression (pilgrimages, parties, vigils, discussions, etc.)

As one of my friends said when I shared this with him: “#1 is boring.”

Was the Royal Wedding Evangelism?

Last Friday, early in the morning, we turned on our TV to watch Michael Scott’s last episode on The Office on our Roku box.  As our TV flashed on, the Royal Wedding was in full swing, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams presiding over the couple as he read from the Book of Common Prayer.

Beyond all the glitz, glamor and gossip that surrounded this monumental event watched by around two billion people is the this: two billion people were watching a service of worship from the Anglican liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer. Think about that, two billion people hearing the order of service for the wedding, about Christ at Cana, about the Christian understanding of marriage, about the joy of spiritual union.

If Billy Graham or Bill Hybels or Rick Warren preached a sermon in front of two billion people it would most certainly be called the greatest single evangelistic outreach ever recorded.

Why not the Royal Wedding? What is it about the non-sermon parts of a service that condemns it to be the non-evangelistic portion?

This question has always befuddled me, and I think it stems from a misunderstanding of what is evangelistic, i.e. presents the good news. Evangelism is often thought of as a passive action. Someone listens, then he or she responds. But really, the good news is presented in participation: in song, in silence, in communion, in funerals, in weddings, in prayer, in confession, in dance and in preaching.

The marriage service presented the good news in clarity, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see.