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Tue, 03 Aug 2004
Aug 03, 2004, 14:38
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Together Forever
by John Fischer
A friend of mine has written a tongue-in-cheek song about a certain reluctance to go home for Christmas due to the strained relationships that always seem to characterize these once-a-year family get-togethers. I have witnessed his performance of this song numerous times, and every time it receives a boisterous response from the audience. If the perfect family exists somewhere, I haven’t found it yet, and I would venture to guess you haven’t either. It stands to reason, therefore, that our spiritual families will be plagued by the same limitations that characterize our physical families. There is no perfect small group, no perfect church, no perfect community.
The issue for our fellowship, therefore, is not to be free of problems, but to be free of pretense. Conflict, disagreements or differences of opinion are not the enemy of good relationships—dishonesty is. We can go through anything together if we are committed to two things—the truth about ourselves, and the permanency of our relationships in the Body of Christ.
These two things are absolutely necessary for a good relationship: telling the truth, and a tenacious refusal to walk away. My wife and I have a joke about this. We tell people that we have simply decided that divorce is out of the question as a solution to our problems: “Murder maybe, but not divorce!”
Imagine if we had the same tenacity towards each other in the Body of Christ What would happen if the ending or the avoidance of any relationship in Christ were simply not an option.
If you think about it, even if we make it an option, it has to be only temporary, because we are all headed to our eternal home in heaven where all differences, factions and grudges will be erased forever. Like we used to say in the Jesus movement: We’re going to be together forever, so we might as well start getting used to each other now. There are no exit doors in the family of God.
Contributed by Bill Tufts
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Tue, 18 May 2004
May 18, 2004, 14:38
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A Blank Canvas
By Matt Redman 2004-04-30
Contributed by John Harvey
A few months from now, a small of team of us will plant a church in Mid-Sussex, England. We’re excited to join together in worship, venture out in faith, and see where it goes. There’s a fresh challenge ahead of us to shine into our community something of the wonders and worth of God we’ve witnessed. We’re anticipating a challenge – but an exciting challenge. With every new church plant there’s a unique opportunity to strip everything back to basics, and ‘re-imagine’ what our gathered worship and reaching out should look like. We have a blank canvas before us - the space to explore together how to ‘do’ church.
I’m excited by this blank canvas. My experience in leading gathered worship week in and week out at a local church is that it becomes very easy to settle into certain ways of doing things, and never venture outside of those habits. A new impetus like a church plant gives a great reason to run every single thing we do, sing and say in our meetings through the filter of our values once again - and double check that we’re still on track. Sometimes in church life if we’re not careful we can find ourselves getting into certain worship habits which we can’t even remember the reason for!
I recently read a new book, ‘Exploring the Worship Spectrum’ in which six different writers, each from a different ‘tradition’ of the worshipping church, gives an account of how they express their congregational worship, and the reasons why. Then each of the other writers graciously and thoughtfully responds to this. It’s a great exercise – to have to describe the theology and values of what our worship looks like on the inside, then account for how it gets expressed outwardly. It’s essential that the style and form of our worship is moulded to fit our values, and not the other way around. Values are the foundation onto which we build the structure of our gathered worship. Our values will affect everything from the length of our sung worship times, to the volume and style of the worship. If reaching out to a certain people group is of high importance, for example, then the musical expression will reflect this, as well as any visual elements. If freedom and spontaneous flow are valued highly, then space will be given within the ‘liturgy’ to express that. The same is true of our theological values. We establish that which we value highly, and then implement a style and form to fit these things. Our theological values are, in a sense, the colours with which we paint onto our blank canvas. There are certain ‘colours’ we should seek to see use in every single meeting – certain biblical ingredients that every bible-believing church must paint. (For example, the centrality of the cross).
Other ‘colours’ we have at our disposal when painting onto our canvas, are the many and varied ways in which the saints have worshipped throughout the ages. Forms and expressions of biblical of worship which we’d be foolish to ignore. There is nothing new under the sun, and we have at our disposal a rich heritage which has been and honed throughout the centuries. From a single hymn to centuries old liturgical pattern, all of these things are essential to explore if we’re to paint as full and as rich a picture as possible in our worship together.
So, visually, musically, lyrically and with our whole approach to gathered worship, we start with a blank canvas – and purposefully begin to re-imagine what our worship together should look like. ‘Purposefully’ is ultimately the key word. We should re-visit congregational expressions and verify that there is more of a reason to do it that way than ‘that’s just the way we do it around here’! It’s so important to ask questions about the patterns of the meeting. Just one example:
Do we always have a 40 minute talk after the sung worship time? Why is it that length? Would it ever be appropriate to split it up into two or three shorter pieces? (which might be more digestible and therefore even more effective perhaps for a younger age group or anyone brought up in a TV culture where to listen to one person speak for so long might be en extremely unhelpful way of presenting God’s word?)
These are not in any way ‘loaded’ questions - but they are an important exercise to carry out occasionally to review our approach. One thing I have noticed is that so many of our meetings are heavily front-loaded with ‘response’ elements such as extended sing, and most of the aspects we associate more with ‘revelation’ (such as the talk and celebrating communion) tend to occur towards the end of the meeting. In some instances this might be a strange thing to do – we may be awoken by the revelation of the Word or sacraments as a congregation – yet by that point in the service be all out of time to respond to them together. We should look through our meeting structure therefore and evaluate whether is a helpful flow of revelation and response. I personally love the idea of at times placing the communion time right near the front of the meeting – which serves a few purposes. It would draw us together and remind us that we are one body, one people. It also reminds us of the wonder of the cross and awakens us to the Saviour’s worth early on in our gathering together. It also helps us to get right with God and reminds us of the need to seek cleansing and forgiveness before we can boldly approach Him and draw near with confidence.
With our church plant in England we have a great reason to come before a blank canvas and carefully and prayerfully re-imagine what our gathered worship look like. But whether we’re starting a new venture or not, it’s important for all lead worshippers and church leaders to now and again re-visit the way we do things, and make sure they fit our values tightly, and convey all we wish to theologically. Every song, liturgy, and approach submitted to the foundations on which our church body is built.
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Wed, 12 May 2004
May 12, 2004, 14:38
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Music Wars
Singing the Lord’s Song
Travels in sacred music, from Eureka Springs to Salt Lake City.
by Mark Noll
Sacred Song
in America:
Religion, Music,
and Public Culture
by Stephen A. Marini
Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003
395 pp. $34.95
One of the most notable, but least studied, aspects of the 18th-century revivals that led to the rise of modern evangelicalism was the disputed place of hymn-singing. In his very first report on the unusual religious stirrings in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1736, Jonathan Edwards noted that although his congregation had already learned the era’s new style of singing‹”three parts of music, and the women a part by themselves”‹the revival had worked an extraordinary musical effect: “Our public praises were greatly enlivened, and God was served in our psalmody as in the beauties of holiness. There was scarce any part of divine worship wherein God’s saints among us had grace so drawn forth and their hearts lifted up, as in singing the praises of God.”
Yet soon the fervor of hymn-singing, as well as what the newly revived were singing, came under fire. Not only were critics upset with what Edwards (in a later work defending the revivals) described as “abounding in much singing in religious meetings.” Critics were also complaining that the revived congregations were singing “hymns of human composure,” that is, hymns newly written by contemporaries rather than hymns paraphrased directly from the Psalms, which was then the only kind of hymnody widely accepted in most English-speaking Protestant churches. Edwards, with many of the early leaders of the evangelical awakenings, had in fact begun to sing the hymns of his older contemporary Isaac Watts (“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “Join All the Glorious Names of Wisdom, Love, and Power” . And not only Watts, for from the earliest days of the evangelical revival, leaders and participants were writing and singing their own hymns in both Britain, as from Charles Wesley (“Where shall my wond’ring Soul begin? Š How shall I equal triumphs raise, / or sing my great Deliverer’s Praise!”, and America, as from Samuel Davies (“Who is a pardoning God like Thee? / Or who has grace so rich and free?”. The result from the new intensity of hymn-singing, appearing as it did along with newly written hymns that were as evocative to some as they were offensive to others, was an early version of today’s worship wars.
One of the few historians who has attended to the power of singing in the rise of 18th-century evangelical movements, and then to the central place of hymns in all subsequent American church life, is Stephen A. Marini, Elisabeth Luce Moore Professor of Christian Studies at Wellesley College and also the director of a musical group that often performs the shape-note hymns of the Sacred Harp tradition. Over the last two decades, Marini has published a number of path-breaking articles on the place of hymns in American Protestant history. Now he has broadened considerably the scope of his concerns by publishing Sacred Song in America . It is a book that could not have arrived at a more opportune time.
The clash of musical styles, tastes, and practices, which becomes every year more dramatic in America’s churches, is one of the most prominent features of contemporary religious life. Never has it been more obvious that the right kind of music draws people in and the wrong kind of music drives them out. Rarely has the emotional power of music been so fully on display. Contemporary experience on every side validates viscerally what Marini, quoting the documents of the Second Vatican Council, recognizes as the capacity of music to “unveil a dimension of meaning and feeling, a communication of ideas and intuitions that words alone cannot yield.”
Marini’s book does not provide prescriptive answers to the many questions‹practical, artistic, theological, scriptural, architectural, economic, ethical, and ethnic‹that swirl around the religious use of music today. What it does supply, however, may be even more basic, for the book documents the central role of sacred song in a tremendous variety of religious traditions; it explains with special sensitivity the breakthroughs (and problems) for music in the liturgical, charismatic, and seeker-sensitive revivals of recent years; it treats sympathetically the tangled web of economic-religious considerations that now beset sacred music of almost every sort; and it begins to explain why music is and has been so foundationally important for religious believers.
Marini’s strategy was to hit the road in order to visit places where sacred song could be observed in practice. The book describes with as much sympathy as possible what he heard and saw, to which are added historical accounts for the groups under consideration. Marini also includes analysis of two recent hymnals (the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Hymnal of 1991, which reflected the rising conservative tide in that denomination, and the United Church of Christ’s New Century Hymnal of 1995, which did more to incorporate inclusive language and inclusive ideology than any other major American hymnal). And he presents transcripts of interviews with two composers whose works are used widely in church settings‹Daniel Pinkham, whom Marini calls “a nonbeliever of Episcopal background,” long associated with the Unitarian King’s Chapel of Boston, and Neely Bruce, a passionate Roman Catholic believer who from his post at Wesleyan University in Connecticut has long campaigned for the spiritual and artistic renewal of church music.
The great success of the book is Marini’s ability to make every one of his on-site visits come alive. The great complexity that the book reveals comes from the striking variety of what he found during those visits: to the Denver March Powwow featuring Native American song and dance; a Chicano Holy Week pilgrimage in Chimayó, New Mexico; a Sunday of Sacred Harp shape-note singing at the Little Vine Primitive Baptist Church in Blount County, Alabama; a morning worship with the thousands packed into the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago’s south side; a concert of klezmer music and Sephardic song in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an evening of New Age music in Ellsworth, Maine, featuring wiccan Kay Gardner; a rehearsal with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Temple Square in Salt Lake City; a visit to John Michael Talbot at the site of his community of the Brothers and Sisters of Charity near Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and personal interviews with members of the Lewis and Isaac families at the Peaceful Valley Blue Grass Festival in Shinhopple, New York. In order to make sure that music remains central in a book about music, Marini also adds a 45-page appendix of musical examples keyed to the various chapters in the book.
Marini’s reports illuminate musical traditions that are often little understood, or even known, by those outside the specific groups involved. As an example, his clear explanation of how West African ritual practices, the evangelically sponsored hymns of Isaac Watts, and the performance practicesof early jazz and the blues flow together into the controlled improvisation of urban African American worship makes sense out of what to first-time Caucasian visitors can sound wildly incongruous, or simply wild. Likewise illuminating is his account of how the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has exploited classical Christian repertory and good-feeling American patriotism as a powerful advertisement for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints .But as with so many of the groups Marini visited, Mormon musical practice contains substantial ambiguities‹in this case, some Mormons who worry that their choir is not aggressive enough in propagating their faith, and other Mormons who feel that the spectacular attention lavished on this one choir takes the steam out of musical efforts at the ordinary services of local Mormon worship.
Marini also subjects the growing commercial entanglements of sacred music to fair, but searching analysis. He quotes sympathetically John Michael Talbot as saying, “I believe that American Christianity is a heresy and I believe that the industry of the Christian Broadcasters Association has become a Whore of Babylon.” But he also notes the dependence of Talbot’s Brothers and Sisters of Charity on the success of Talbot’s albums (and now also videos) and the anomaly that Talbot practices his simple lifestyle and promotes his intentionally simple music from a corner of Arkansas overrun with outlandish Christian kitsch. In addition, Marini’s attention to successes and problems in the world of Christian Contemporary Music structures his discussions with the Lewis family, which features what Marini calls “Christian entertainment,” and the Isaacs, whom he describes as practicing “music evangelism.”
The payoff from Marini’s careful work is not going to resolve the musical conundrums that now bear down with such intensity on congregational councils, pastors, worship leaders, and church musicians. Yet by showing so clearly how forcefully music acts to establish community and communicate deep conviction, how it both reflects a church’s values and actively shapes those values, and how‹above all‹music acts as a “dynamic whole” reflecting the deepest levels of “human religiousness,” this book explains why those conundrums are so important. It is now one of the best resources available to show why, for better and for worse, we have arrived at the state of religion in contemporary America where, as Marini quotes one Mormon leader, “we need better music and more of it, and better preaching and less of it.”
Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford Univ. Press). Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today International/ Books & Culture magazine.
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Tue, 20 Apr 2004
Apr 20, 2004, 14:38
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When Worshipping God Becomes Idolatry
I found a very good article on the web a couple of days ago. We are moving as a church from being traditionalists, or high-taste spectators to being seeker sensitive, focused on church-growth. Here’s an important warning:
All the above can be boiled down into a three-part artistic dilemma that has faced the church for centuries. First, if art is beautiful, it has to be used whether it is effective or not. This is the idol of quality. Second, if art is effective, it must be used, irrespective of quality. This is the idol of effectiveness. Third, if art has worked well, don’t change it. This is the idol of stasis. There is no church, large or small, rich or poor, ethnically diverse or homogeneous, that will not face one, two or all three of these dilemmas. But it usually works out that the high-culture/high-taste artists face the first idol; the church-growth/seeker-sensitivity leadership, the second; and the traditionalists, the third.
This is an important wake-up call for all of us as we pursue growing and being effective as a church. If we’re not careful, the whole endeavour can be an exercise in envy:
When something works well and is frozen into its own continuity, we have entered idol territory through an ecclesiastically acceptable door, because we can point to this or that church and say, “Look how God is blessing. Let’s change our ways to match theirs so we can expect the same.” Here the idol can be described in Pauline terms as the gospel being preached in envy (Phil 1:15). Church growth by envy is only a little better than church growth by compromise, which is only a little better than church shrinkage through snobbery or stasis, because all are idols going by different names.
You’ll want to read the whole article.
~Jason
“This article first appeared in the 04/06/2004 issue of Christianity Today. Used by permission of Christianity Today International, Carol Stream, IL 60188.”
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Mon, 05 Apr 2004
Apr 05, 2004, 14:38
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Passion Initiative Update
Dear Friends,
It has been a great privilege to coordinate The Passion Initiative here in Canada. Amid a barrage of publicity and controversy in the media, a great number of positive stories are emerging.
In early January, prior to our advance screenings of the film, I wrote about the importance of encouraging people to see the film so God could touch their hearts, and of connecting them to the gospel so Christ can change their lives.
From the beginning I was careful not to promise fruit from these efforts, only opportunity. And opportunities abound for talking to people about our wonderful Lord Jesus as a result of the release of The Passion of the Christ.
By God’s grace there has also been fruit. In the first week the film was released 76 people either received Christ or rededicated their lives to Him on our web site http://www.TheLife.com. Several visitors to our chat room told of their friends and acquaintances that came to faith during discussions after the film.
Just today one of our staff told me of a woman, a Christian of 30 years, who led her unbelieving husband to the Lord after he saw the film. In her words, “the film broke him.” I am sure you probably have heard similar stories.
This email is sent to encourage you with what God is doing and to say thank you to those who have participated in the project and have used our materials. I hope you found them helpful.
If you did not get our materials, or need more, there is one last chance to order now. You may find them appropriate for your Easter services or outreaches. Anything not sold by the end of Easter will be sent to the Philippines for use in their campaign and we do not have the ability to reprint.
To order materials you can go to http://www.sharethelife.com or call New Life Resources [604.514.2016 or 800.667.0558]. More information is enclosed below. To read the entire content of the booklets visit http://www.TheLife.com.
Finally, if you have stories of how God used the opportunity surrounding The Passion Initiative in your church and community, I would love to hear from you. With your permission, I may publish your story in our newsletter to encourage others in their efforts.
May God’s blessing rest on you, your church and your work for the Kingdom.
Together in ministry,
Bob Kraemer
National Coordinator
Passion Initiative
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Thu, 01 Apr 2004
Apr 01, 2004, 14:38
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The Wallenda Factor
George Bullard is a innovative church-health leader, and this was taken from his blog site:
Monday, March 22, 2004 was the 26th anniversary of the day Karl Wallenda, patriarch of The Flying Wallendas, fell 75 feet to his death while walking a cable strung between two hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
In reflecting on the time around his death, his widow explained that during the months preceding his death Karl transitioned from a life style and attitude of confidence and courage, to one of fear and precaution. He morphed from being an aerialist who lived to fly across the wire, to a hesitant high wire actor who was concerned about the fear of falling.
This fear of falling or failing is today known as The Wallenda Factor. It refers to people and situations where the fear of failure smothers the joy of soaring. It refers to people and situations where problem-solving erases an affirm and build process, where counting the “no” votes is more important than counting the “yes” votes, and negatives are more important than positives.
Congregations who take on challenging spiritual strategic journeys are often subject to The Wallenda Factor. They fear the possibility of failure as they travel along their journey. They focus on fixes rather than solutions. They seek to bring everyone along with them on the journey, and would rather halt the journey than leave anyone behind.
The Wallenda Factor is particularly expressed in congregations when a threat of some type is present. People often are afraid the threat will become a full reality, and that the congregation will be harmed. Much of their dialogue is around the possibility of something negative happening to the congregation, rather than the opportunity to soar that is often also present during a time of threat or challenge.
Does your congregation soar with the collective spiritual gifts, life skills, and personality preferences of the people connected with it? Or, does it focus on not failing, and thus takes few, if any, risks to minister to the people God has placed along the path of their journey; much less to engage in cutting edge discipleship development for people connected with the congregation?
Is it concerned that if it fails that it will possibly lose some of it strengths, capacities, and even members who are necessary to continue the quality and quantity of ministry to which it has become accustomed? Or, is it open to the new thing that God is doing in it, and gladly risks comfort to pioneer new areas of ministry into which God is leading it?
Are the leadership gatherings of your congregation filled with challenging dialogue about the emerging ministry trends of the congregation, and the possibilities for unconditionally sharing the love of God? Or, are their filled with cautious dialogue about the scarcity of finances, the lack of available leaders, and the necessity to not move forward if there is one person not in favor?
~Lane Fusilier
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