ben's blog

Spiritual eroticism

Scot McKnight thinks that much of what we call "worship" is actually something called "spiritual eroticism."

Essentially it is being in love with the experience of loving God as opposed to being in love with God himself, preferring "the titillation of fantasy over the toughness of fidelity." Such people want to ache with longing, but once they are actually in the presence of the Beloved, they quickly lose interest. They try to re-capture the passionate emotions of longing for God, but really they do not desire or love God. They love loving God. They live for the experience of it. They love being in church and they love praising God and they love the sound of a worship band that can create sounds and textures that take them to the heights of passion.

But the problem is that none of those things have anything to do with worship.

Intrigued? Scot's article brilliantly and briefly exposes the problem and prescribes a solution.

(Part of) why I like the liturgical calendar

Michael Spencer has a post up that encapsulates most of why I like using the liturgical calendar as a basis for worship and Christian living.

I would argue (in addition to Michael's points) that how we celebrate time deeply shapes us as people, and increasingly, American holidays are shaping us as sentimental consumers, and the Christian year shapes us around the person and work of Jesus Christ. Case in point, Spencer points out that no church he was part of when he was younger ever chose Pentecost over Mother's Day. To put it baldly, we exalt the nuclear family over the Holy Spirit's work in the church, and part of the reason is that, for most evangelical Christians, Mother's Day is an obligatory holiday and Pentecost feels optional.

Here's a great quote that starts the post:

"Part of the problem is that evangelicals really don’t have traditions. Instead, we have these fads that are built on the strengths and talents of individual leaders. … But a real tradition can be handed on to anyone, from generation to generation. It’s hard to hand these evangelical fads down like that, so it seems like we’re always starting over. It’s hard to build something that really lasts." - Joe Carter

Read Michael's post for more good (and practical) thoughts on using the lectionary and Christian year as a basis for local church worship.

Presence Module 2, Day 2

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting in the Saturday afternoon session of the Presence module/worship retreat. My friend Andy is interviewing Geraldine, doing some Q&A about issues that come up in worship teams.

Presence Module 2

I am sitting in Module 2 of the Presence School of Worship, listening to Geraldine Latty teach on John 2 - the wedding at Cana. It's some great stuff. Here are some shots from my perspective in the second row (from my computer's webcam).

She's continuing to teach tomorrow from 9am-4pm.

Bright spots in worship songwriting

Those of you who pop onto my blog now and then know that my last post was a brief, strongly-worded rant on what is wrong with Christian radio. And while I still maintain that Jesus is not a hamburger, and I still won't listen to Christian radio, I don't want to give anyone the impression that I don't think there is good music out there being made by Christians. Thus I want to highlight a couple people I think are doing a great job at the specific job of writing songs for congregational worship. (See? I can be positive!!)

In the realm of songwriting for worship, there are a few bright spots amidst a sea of blah. This paragraph from a recent novel is painfully accurate regarding modern worship songs. The protagonist is a semi-atheist who has planted a church to make him rich and famous (funny plotline already). Up until now they've been just taking normal pop songs and changing a few words. But then they discover that there are people who write music for specifically for worship. Katherine, the "pastor's" wife, has looked into this and is reporting to the worship band (also not Christians) about this newfound piece of information:

"... almost all of the songs were essentially about three things. The first: how great-awesome-incredible-powerful-majestic Jesus/God is/was/and forever will be. The second: how much we love-thank-adore-worship-bow down to Jesus/God. The third: how happy-touched-amazed and pumped up we were that Jesus/God saved us. That was pretty much it. There were thousands of these types of songs, yet so many of the lyrics were nearly identical. It was almost as if a songwriter could take one song, change five or six words, and then have an all-new song." (ht: marko)

Admit it! Sometimes you've thought that when singing a new worship song, haven't you?

Anyway, the point is that there is a lot of mediocre stuff out there, but there are people writing great music for worship out there. Music that forms us as disciples instead of consumers, music that inspires instead of sugar-coats. Music that has us singing faithful words of worship, that doesn't resort to sentimentality or pendantry.

Two people who come to mind immediately are Matt Redman and Stuart Townend. Most of you know about Matt Redman, but perhaps fewer know about Stuart. Mr. Townend wrote the incredibly faithful (and popular) hymn "In Christ Alone", as well as "Beautiful Savior." And tomorrow morning I plan to lead the Heartland congregation in one of his newer songs (cowritten with Aaron Keyes) called Psalm 62 (based on Psalm 62, strangely).

The lyrics are below, but when you hear the melody, this thing really takes off. And it's not just that it's a good song, but it's a faithful song, a song that calls us into its description of God, that pulls us further into the life of God, that forms us as the people of God. It's a song you can sing loudly, confidently, because it faithfully reflects the character and ways of the Living God.

PSALM 62
Stuart Townend and Aaron Keyes

VERSE 1:
My soul finds rest in God alone, My Rock and my salvation,
A fortress strong against my foes, And I will not be shaken.
Though lips may bless and hearts may curse, And lies like arrows pierce me,
I’ll fix my heart on righteousness, I’ll look to Him who hears me.

CHORUS:
O praise Him, hallelujah, My Delight and my Reward;
Everlasting, never failing, My Redeemer, my God.

VERSE 2:
Find rest, my soul, in God alone amid the world’s temptations;
When evil seeks to take a hold I’ll cling to my salvation.
Though riches come and riches go, Don’t set your heart upon them;
The fields of hope in which I sow are harvested in heaven.

VERSE 3:
I’ll set my gaze on God alone, and trust in Him completely;
With every day pour out my soul, and He will prove His mercy.
Though life is but a fleeting breath, a sigh too brief to measure,
My King has crushed the curse of death and I am His forever.

Chorus-singing as meditation

Charismatic choruses are often criticized for various reasons. Sometimes they are criticized for being "boringly repetitive," just singing the same words over and over. But really isn't that what Christians throughout the centuries have called meditation? We take a brief thought or portion from Scripture and we mull it over in our minds, contemplating, turning it over, repeating truth to ourselves until it becomes part of our being.

In this way charismatic choruses can function as meditative exercises, provided the content of the chorus is worth meditating on! This is where charismatic choruses are often legitimately criticized: the theology contained therein is often questionable and the content is often shallow. Simon Chan suggests that for choruses to effectively encourage devotional meditation they should concentrate on three areas:

1. Key portions of Scripture, so that they can be meditated on and memorized
2. The great mysteries of the faith--God the Trinity, creation and redemption--for they constitute the basic facts of the Christian story
3. Key expressions of the faith--the creed, the commandments and the Lord's Prayer--which make up the main content of ancient and modern catechisms.

"These key concepts and expressions must be skillfully distilled into 'ready-to-eat mouthfuls of different sizes, never too large and suited to any taste.' If the church as a colony of bees is to gather quality honey, it has to feed on the right flowers."*

I won't mention any choruses I find weak and/or dubious, but I will mention one songwriter whose choruses I find consistently reflect deep content, solid theology, and a rich faith: Matt Redman. Incidentally this is why we have tended to do so many of his songs at Heartland. They are simple, relatively easy to sing, and worth repeating and meditating on.

So let that be a call to all the songwriters and poets out there! We need choruses from which we can drink deeply and be refreshed and encouraged. We need the "right kind of flowers" to be able to make the quality honey the world needs.

* Simon Chan, Spiritual Theology, p. 166.

What is "contemporary" worship?

This is hilarious:

Contemporary Service blased for being too "traditional"

It is a work of satire, bringing up interesting and humorous issues. One of those issues is: what in the world does "contemporary worship" mean? Is music written in the past 100 years contemporary? It is if you compare it to Gregorian chant. Is music from the 80s contemporary? It is if you compare it to music written at the turn of the 20th century. When is it "contemporary" enough to satisfy our neophilia?

I want to cast my vote for defining contemporary worship as "worship that is happening right now". Thus every church service, every Sunday, every week, is "contemporary". Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Methodist, charismatic, Vineyard, Taize... it's all contemporary because it's all happening right now. Period.

Christ Community on Sunday | Lent readings

This Sunday is the first Sunday of Lent, and also happens to be the first public Sunday of Christ Community, which is what we decided to name the community we've been cultivating. You can check out some basic info here, but we're still working on the "real" website behind the scenes. Somehow this icon of Jesus has ended up all over our literature (mostly because we don't have an "official" logo yet):

But now some of us have grown kind of attached to it - it's an icon from St. Joseph's Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts. Anyway, we're meet Sunday nights at 6pm at the second floor chapel at Indiana Tech's Andorfer Commons (map). Here's how we're describing ourselves:

Christ Community is gathered around liturgical rhythms; worshiping in ancient and home-grown ways to see Christ formed in us, to be a living witness of the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I hope you can come join us for worship (Sundays at 6pm, remember). We joked as a team that Lent was a really cheery season to start a church service... so it goes! We've all immensely enjoyed worshiping together, and we're looking forward to making things a bit more public and seeing what comes of it.

Speaking of Lent, we are trying to find something to do as a community together (yes, a tad late). In the process of looking for some things I came across something I am planning to do myself: read through the early church fathers during Lent. The church fathers (or apostolic fathers) is the term used to designate the collection of earliest extant Christian writings outside the New Testament. They provide a fascinating glimpse into the life of Christians in the postapostolic period (A.D. 70-135), a time when the church was struggling with the transition from having capital-A Apostles around (the ones who were with Jesus) to the time after their deaths. There were questions of authority and governance, new challenges and pressures (both internal and external).

Anyway, I'm reading them as a devotional exercise, not just a historical one, which means I am wondering what the church fathers' response to the challenges of the 1st century might have to teach us about the challenges we face as the church of Jesus Christ in the 21st century. Happy lenting!

Elements of worship: the sermon

The elements of worship series is a few comments on the elements of the traditional four-fold structure of worship: GATHERING, WORD, SACRAMENT, SENDING. GATHERING included preparation for worship, the call to worship, adoration, and confession and absolution of sin, and the PROCLAMATION started last Monday with the reading of Scripture. We now turn our attention to that most misunderstood and maligned part of worship: the lowly (or, as the case may be, too-exalted) sermon.

The sermon should follow from and be consonant with the Scripture reading, and not take on a life of its own. It should, in short, do whatever is necessary to make the reading clear to the hearers. But the sermon is more than just exposition. It is a performative act: words that do something. We don't gather to hear the gospel because we forgot it, but because we need to again be braced by God's voice speaking to us in the gospel. Jean Lebon says it about as well as anyone:

To hear the Christian story retold is not to gather new ideas about the gospel; it is to hear God's speaking afresh to us, reassuring us of his covenantal faithfulness. It is like a lover proclaiming to the beloved: "I love you!" When lovers proclaim these words they are not simply supplying information; the words perform a certain function: they seal a relationship; they reveal the speakers' intention; they have transforming power.

"Preaching is Spirit-inspired speech... it is a word reborn by the Holy Spirit in the preacher. A greater existential involvement is required by preaching than by reading. In preaching the preacher is bearing witness to the truth he or she is proclaiming and staking his or her life on it" (Simon Chan).

So while preaching will necessarily have some expositional elements to it, explanation should not dominate the sermon. David Fitch is helpful here:

The primary move of preaching will not be sentence-by-sentence exposition & explaining, then an application. Instead the primary move of the preacher will be to describe the world as it is via the person and work of Jesus Christ, then invite the hearers into this reality by calling for submission, confession, obedience, or the affirmation of a truth.

Not take-home application points, but active liturgical response. Sermons ought to be works of poetry, world-making words that proclaim the drama of God's redemptive work in Christ over against the stories that vie for the attention of the church day after day: nationalism (Go America!), consumerism (You'll Feel Better After You Buy Those Pants!), materialism (You Need A Bigger House!), activism (You'll Feel A Lot Less Guilty After You've Saved the World!).

In the sermon, the gospel is again proclaimed: Jesus is Lord, not Caesar, not America, not a President or Prime Minister, not politics or the economy, not mortgage rates or foreign policy. Jesus Christ has the last word, the crucified Jewish Messiah is the Lord of the world. The sermon's job is to announce the reality of the gospel and call people to respond to it.

Of wine and wineskins | thoughts about tradition on All Saints' Day

Thomas Merton writes,

The perfection of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture is not to be explained by saying the Cistercians were looking for a new technique. I am not sure that they were looking for a new technique at all. They built good churches because they were looking for God. And they were looking for God in a way that was pure and integral enough to make everything they did and everything they touched give glory to God.

We cannot reproduce what they did because we approach the problem in a way that makes it impossible for us to find a solution. We ask ourselves a question they never considered. How shall we build a beautiful monastery according to the style of some past age and according to the rules of a dead tradition? Thus we make the problem not only infinitely complicated but we make it, in fact, unsolvable. Because a dead style is a dead style. And the reason why it is dead is that the motives that once gave it life have ceased to exist. They have given place to a situation that demands another style. If we were intent on loving God rather than upon getting a Gothic church out of a small budget we would soon put up something that would give glory to God and would be very simple and would also be in the tradition of our fathers.

(from The Sign of Jonas)

Merton talks about the application to architecture, but I think the same applies to our approach to worship liturgy - if we simply seek to love God in our contexts, we will soon create something that gives glory to God, is simple and beautiful, makes sense to our local context, and stands in the tradition of our ancestors in the faith.

And for those with a Protestant tradition, it seems to me that continuing to reform the church is more in standing with the tradition of the Reformation than simply recycling the words of the Reformers themselves. Semper reformanda, right? That is the way we continue in the traditions of our fathers.