Worship and Liturgy

Liturgy and Culture

Aug 20, 2014 

Justin Taylor

Frank Senn:

The liturgy is transcultural in that it includes orders and symbols that witness to the church as a worldwide communio.
It is contextual in that it always admits the use of natural or cultural elements in worship in each locality.
It is countercultural in that the gospel it proclaims and celebrates always holds out the vision of an alternative worldview and lifestyle.
It is cross-cultural in that it uses expressions from different cultures.

—Frank C. Senn, Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997),  678.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow (About Breaking Their Teeth)

Like a Fist

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 11, 2014

 

As Iraq continues to spiral toward chaos, and is doing so in the Facebook era, the one thing we should want to avoid is directionless or aimless outrage. Anger under such circumstances is certainly appropriate and necessary, but like a fist, it needs somewhere to land. I am writing primarily about the treatment of Christians there by ISIS, but of course that cannot be at all separated from a host of other issues and circumstances. Let me start with the more important, and finish with a few related observations.

1. There truly are evil men in the world, and this is what imprecatory psalms were made for. This is why we have them. There are men who will grin for the camera over the prospect of beheading Christian children, and our response to them should be to pray the words of God back to Him.

“Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: Break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord” (Ps. 58:6).

“Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: Seek out his wickedness till thou find none” (Ps. 10:15).

Our psalter has this second example rendered as “O God, come down and break their evil arms.” In the face of the kind of evil that is abroad in the world, evangelical Christians need to stop filling up their worship services with sentimentalist treacle, and worship biblically in a very dark world. We are confronted with a great and growing evil, and we are discovering that we do not have the liturgical vocabulary to respond appropriately at all. When we sing or pray the psalms, all of them, there are two consequences that should be mentioned. One, we are praying in the will of God, and He hears such prayers. Second, we discover that praying and singing biblically transforms us. This really is the need of the hour.

We need to become the kind of people capable of standing against this kind of thing. Read Chesterton’s great poem about the battle of Lepanto, written one year shy of a century ago, and plead with God to raise up a fitting leader for our day. “But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.”

2. This is a grotesque evil, but it is not the only one. We are appalled at the open insolence of ISIS, and how they gloat over the killing of their enemy’s children. They are demented and cruel, but not as demented as we are. They at least do it to their enemy’s children. That’s not how we do it over here in our splendid democracy — here we chop our own children up into little pieces. But evil remains evil.

This particular form of evil is alien to us, and so we are shocked by it. We have gotten accustomed to our own forms of evil, even those who have stood faithfully against it — but at the end of the day, it always gets to the same place, which is the lap of Molech. The devil hates children, as do his servants everywhere. The only difference between the behavior of ISIS and the platform of the Democratic Party is the age of the victims and the presence of cameras. This means that the imprecatory psalms should be prayed with applications to more than one hellhole. Their black flag flies over black hearts, true enough. But our red, white, and blue flies over the black robes that consigned fifty million Americans to the gaping maw of the cruel cash registers of Planned Parenthood. This is why there will be no successful stand against the likes of ISIS without repentance and a broken appeal to Jesus. Until we turn back to His blood, we will continue to shed one another’s.

3. We see in all of this yet another instances of the impotence and ideological provincialism of secularism. The world is not what secularists say it is, the heart of man is not what secularists say it is, and the progressive march of time fixes nothing. The spectacle of our diplomats huffing and puffing over what certain people are willing to do “in the 21st century,” as though time had anything to do with it, is a gaudy display of impotent futility. Radical Muslims know what they want, and deracinated Whigs are trying to fix the world with the platitudes and bromides they learned years ago in some kindergarten in Massachusetts. It will not work, it cannot work. Blowing sunshine will not help in the Ukraine, or in Gaza, or in Syria, or in Iraq.

4. Bombing runs are not to be used as gestures. They are a tactic of war, and one of the principles of war is the objective. What is the objective? Can we tell if we have accomplished it? If Obama authorizes the dropping of bombs because this will be an instance of him “doing something,” and will be helpful in getting critics back here to lay off, that would be just one more instance of aimless killing. This is the difference between political bombing and military bombing. Political bombing just gives the natives more rubble to sort through after the geo-political stupidity has moved on. Military bombing would have an announced measurable objective, which would be something like “the establishment of a secure, independent Kurdistan.” That would make some kind of sense — but ad hoc bombing is the kind of thing that made this region of the world what it is today.

5. We mustn’t pretend, and shouldn’t kid ourselves. If you insist that the carnage there is none of our business, however tragic it might be, then you are a consistent non-interventionist, or isolationist. But if you want something effective done, then you are arguing for empire or resurgent colonialism, whatever you might want to call it. You can call it the “international community,” or the “coalition of the willing,” or a “humanitarian intervention,” but at the end of the day it is a rejection of self-determination. Self-determination is what we have there now.

To say that intervention is some form of “empire” does not mean that all imperial interventions are wise and judicious. Most of them are not. We are still paying for how imperialists drew up the borders in the Middle East after the First World War. If we blunder around enough this time, we might be able to wreck things for another century to two.

So while I believe a case for intervention could be made, I believe that the chances are better than two to one that with our current leaders, our current faithlessness, our current compromises, our current wooly-mindedness, and our current political correctness, we are not qualified and would only make things far worse. Making the rubble bounce is not nation-building. What good are smart bombs when our seers and prophets all have NPR book bags over their heads?

I know. The argument comes back — we have to do something. I know we do. So start with repentance. Start with Jesus. End the slaughter inside our own borders so that our horror at what they are doing is not the horror of high hypocrisy. Pray that American preachers would repent of their cowardice and start preaching the gospel high and inside, and pray that we would elect national leaders who actually could do some international good.

What we have now is a giant on the ground in the midst of an epileptic fit, doing a lot of damage by his thrashing around. It is not a serious proposal to suggest that he thrash “some more in Iraq for a bit.”

Daily Devotional

March 06

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Thoughts in God’s House (i)

What a wonderful place God’s house is. Often you will find deliverance by merely coming into it. Many a time have I thanked God for His house. I thank God that He has ordained that His people should meet together in companies and worship together. The house of God has delivered me from “the mumps and measles of the soul” a thousand times and more—merely to enter its doors.

How does it work? I think it works like this. The very fact that there is a house of God to come to at all tells us something. How has it come into being? It is God who has planned and arranged it. To realize that in itself puts us immediately into a more healthy condition. Then we begin to go back through history and remind ourselves of certain truths.

Here am I at this present time with this terrible problem, but the Christian Church has existed all these long years. (I am already beginning to think in an entirely different way.) The house of God goes back through the centuries to the time of our Lord Himself. What is it for? What is its significance? And the cure has begun.

Again, we go to the house of God, and to our amazement we find other people there before us. We are rather surprised at that because in our private misery and perplexity we had come to the conclusion that perhaps there was nothing in religion at all and that it was not worth continuing with it. But here are people who think it is worth continuing with; and we feel better. We begin to say: Perhaps I may be wrong; all these people think there is something in it; they may be right. The healing process is going on; the cure is being “con­tinued.”

Faith on Trial, p. 39

---

“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Doug Wilson’s Letter from Moscow

Hauling In a Ten-Pound Fish on a Five-Pound Line

Posted on Monday, February 10, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog 

I am currently working my way through a fascinating book about Reformation-era music called Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, written by Joseph Herl. It is a tightly-packed scholarly tome, but would be a great read for any pastor interested in musical reformation — as every pastor ought to be.

Church music can be divided into two broad categories. The first would be the music of trained musicians and choirs, at which the Lutherans excelled. They produced some of the greatest music that the human race has produced as of this point, and so we have to begin every discussion of this subject with that “where credit is due” acknowledgement.

But the other category is that of bringing congregations along. In this, the music of most churches in the Lutheran areas was atrocious. There were exceptions of grace — like Strassburg under Bucer, borderline not Lutheran, where the singing was good across the board. There were other exceptions in Lutheran areas, but in many places, the congregations sang very little, or anemically, or not at all. One of the reasons the Reformed areas did better in bringing congregations along is that their music was (deliberately) not as complicated.

Just a couple of examples should make the point. Services could be upwards of three hours long, with the middle hour occupied with the sermon.
There were times when parishioners would hang around outside the church during the preliminaries, and when the sermon was going to start, somebody would give a signal to go in. And when the choirs were doing their complicated figural singing, sometimes the people would be given devotional material to read, in order to keep their minds on something spiritual. Most of the singing in most of the services was not done by the congregations. It was pretty bad.

Part of the reason it was bad is that some of it was so good. Bringing the people of God along is like hauling a ten-pound fish in on a five-pound line. Whatever you do, don’t yank. Church music ought to be overwhelmingly congregational music, but this means that the musically gifted have to be expected to bear with the weak, and not run on ahead.

It is easy enough to put this down on paper, but it is a hard balance to maintain. It seems that God has fashioned the world of church music in such a way that it seems you are going to be exasperating somebody. Reading this book has made me enormously grateful for what God has given us in our community. We really have it good.

Christmas Carols

Drumming Glory

The Christmas season is approaching. We always need reminding that the core focus of Christmas for us, His people, is to be worship, with great joy. Here is a rendition of The Little Drummer Boy, using the greatest of musical instruments–the human voice. 

This particular piece is a reminder that worship of the God who is now amongst us clothed in human nature, who is bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh, warmly accepts the worship of children, and that it is the adoration of children which provides us jaded adults with a tutorial in worship. 

Be Thou My Vision . . .

Oaths We Have Taken

Sam Robson reminds us of oaths we have taken, and declarations of loyalty we have made, to our High King.

What the Hijabi Witnessed (and What She Didn’t)

Article by Carl Trueman  

August 2013

Reformation 21

 

 

I have had the pleasure on a couple of occasions of sitting next to a girl wearing a hijab.  Typically, this has occurred in departure lounges of airports or on the platforms of railway stations. Never has it happened in a place of worship at the time of a service. Never, that is, until recently.

On the last Friday in June, I happened to be in Cambridge with my youngest son and decided to expose him to one of my alma mater’s true delights: choral evensong at King’s Chapel. We dutifully queued in the pouring rain (for me, those blue remembered hills are definitely English and cloud covered), and, when the chapel finally opened, we took our places at the far end of the aisle. It was then that I realized that the young girl sitting to my left was wearing a hijab. 

 

It was an interesting, if unlikely, juxtaposition: the middle aged Orthodox Presbyterian and the twenty-something Moslem waiting for the Anglican liturgy to begin. I assume that – rather like me – she was probably in the chapel for aesthetic reasons rather than religious ones. King’s choir is famous; the preaching in the chapel was, at least in my student days, at best, infamous. Sermons then were the ultimate Schleiermacherian nightmare: rambling reflections on the religious self-consciousness by the irremediably irreverent. It may have improved in recent decades but, not being remotely postmillennial, I have no confidence that that is the case.

Once the choir had entered and taken its place, the service began. For the next hour, the sardonic Presbyterian and the attractive hijabi sat, stood and on occasion knelt together as the congregation worked its way through the Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy for evensong, modified to take into account the appropriate Feast Day (as a good Presbyterian, I have erased the detail of whose day from my memory). The singing, both corporate and choral, was beautiful; and the austere elegance of Cranmer’s liturgy seemed to find its perfect acoustic context in the perpendicular poise of the late Gothic Chapel. Then, at the end, we filed out in silence, having, at the level of mere aesthetics, heard one of the great male choirs singing words of deep and passionate piety. 

 

Outside, the rain continued and my son and I left the young hijabi chatting on her phone as we headed off to Don Pasquale’s, a favourite haunt of my student days. Indeed, it was the place where one took a girl on a date if one wished to appear sophisticated while still operating on a budget. (For any would-be sophisticated but impoverished Cambridge bachelors out there, I can confirm that it is still there, and still a prudent balance of atmosphere and good value for money).

Sitting in Don Pasquale’s, my son and I indulged in a little thought experiment. What, we wondered, had the girl in the hijab made of it all? Culturally, it may not have been a completely alien environment. She was a Spanish Moslem, and, with the exception of the hijab, dressed in the casual attire of any fashion conscious Western girl. So the look and sounds of a Christian church were possibly not as alien to her as, for example, I had found the Blue Mosque in Istanbul while touring Turkey in the 80s. Yet she was still a Moslem. The service itself would have been foreign territory.

So what exactly had she witnessed, I asked myself? Well, at a general level she had heard the English language at its most beautiful and set to an exalted purpose: the praise of Almighty God. She would also have seen a service with a clear biblical logic to it, moving from confession of sin to forgiveness to praise to prayer. She would also have heard this logic explained to her by the minister presiding, as he read the prescribed explanations that are built in to the very liturgy itself. The human tragedy and the way of salvation were both clearly explained and dramatized by the dynamic movement of the liturgy. And she would have witnessed all of this in an atmosphere of hushed and reverent quiet.

In terms of specific detail, she would also have heard two whole chapters of the Bible read out loud: one from the Old Testament and one from the New. Not exactly the whole counsel of God but a pretty fair snapshot. She would have been led in a corporate confession of sin. She would have heard the minister pronounce forgiveness in words shaped by scripture. She would have been led in corporate prayer in accordance with the Lord’s own prayer. She would have heard two whole psalms sung by the choir. She would have had the opportunity to sing a couple of hymns drawn from the rich vein of traditional hymnody and shot through with scripture. She would have been invited to recite the Apostles’ Creed (and thus come pretty close to being exposed to the whole counsel of God). She would have heard collects rooted in the intercessory concerns of scripture brought to bear on the real world. And, as I noted earlier, all of this in the exalted, beautiful English prose of Thomas Cranmer.

Now, I confess to being something of an old Puritan when it comes to liturgy. Does it not lead to formalism and stifle the religion of the heart? Certainly I would have thought so fifteen or twenty years ago. Yet as I reflected on the service and what the girl in the hijab had witnessed, I could not help but ask myself if she could have experienced anything better had she walked into a church in the Protestant evangelical tradition. Two whole chapters of the Bible being read? To have one whole chapter from one Testament seems to test the patience of many today. Two whole psalms sung (and that as part of a calendar which proceeds through the whole Psalter)?  That is surely a tad too old fashioned, irrelevant, and often depressing for those who want to go to church for a bit of an emotional boost. A structure for worship which is determined by the interface between theological truth and biblically-defined existential need? That sounds as if it might be vulnerable to becoming dangerously formulaic formalism. A language used to praise God which is emphatically not that employed of myself or of anybody else in their daily lives when addressing the children, the mailman, or the dog? I think the trendy adjective would be something like ‘inauthentic.’

Yet here is the irony: in this liberal Anglican chapel, the hijabi experienced an hour long service in which most of the time was spent occupied with words drawn directly from scripture. She heard more of the Bible read, said, sung and prayed than in any Protestant evangelical church of which I am aware – than any church, in other words, which actually claims to take the word of God seriously and place it at the centre of its life. Yes, it was probably a good thing that there was no sermon that day: I am confident that, as Carlyle once commented, what we might have witnessed then would have been a priest boring holes in the bottom of the Church of England.  But that aside, Cranmer’s liturgy meant that this girl was exposed to biblical Christianity in a remarkably beautiful, scriptural and reverent fashion. I was utterly convicted as a Protestant minister that evangelical Protestantism must do better on this score: for all of my instinctive sneering at Anglicanism and formalism, I had just been shown in a powerful way how far short of taking God’s word seriously in worship I fall. 

Of course, there were things other than a sermon which the hijabi did not witness: she did not witness any adults behaving childishly; she did not witness anybody saying anything stupid; she did not witness any stand-up comedy routine or any casual cocksureness in the presence of God; she did not see any forty-something pretending to be cool; in short, she did not witness anything that made me, as a Christian, cringe with embarrassment for my faith, or for what my faith has too often become at the hands of the modern evangelical gospellers.

Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary. His latest book is The Creedal Imperative (Crossway, 2012).

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow Idaho

Becoming More Like the Squirmers

Posted on Saturday, August 10, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

From Blog and Magblog

Whenever God’s people take up the adventure that He sends them, there are always troubles that arise in the midst of the adventure that make you want to second guess your initial decision. In the midst of the turmoil that you have gotten yourself into, it is easy to wonder if you read the fine print carefully enough.

One example would be the path that many of you have chosen to follow—bringing many children into the world, caring for them, providing them with a Christian education, bringing them to worship every week, and doing so in a church where all the littles spend the entire worship service with us, worshipping together with us.

This is no fad—fads are not this much work. But it might be easy to think “this must have been a fad when we chose to do it.” I want to speak a particular word of exhortation and encouragement to you moms who are doing this.
It would be easy for you to focus on all “management troubles in your row.” You know, the little ones are squirming, or making faces at the visitors sitting behind you, or spilling communion wine into the psalter, or having to be taken out three times in the service and brought back in again . . . you don’t need to be reminded of the drill. It might be happening right now. You might be wishing you could listen to this word of encouragement to moms, but you are distracted.

Be encouraged in this one thing. All these things are happening in the presence of the Lord. He delights in them. He wants you here, and He wants you here in this kind of shape. Bringing children to Jesus is something that He welcomes, and He welcomes all that is entailed in it. We sometimes think that He wants us to be more like the officious disciples, frowning at the squirmers, when He actually wants us to be more like the squirmers. Unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Letter From America (About Uncool Churches)

How to keep Millennials in the church? Let’s keep church un-cool.

By Brett McCracken, Updated: July 31, 2013

The Washington Post
 
 Last week a column on CNN’s Belief Blog titled “Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church” went viral, partially because any time the words “Millennials,” “leaving,” and “church” are combined in a headline, people pay attention.

But why? Why do we care so much about the reasons Millennials are reportedly leaving churches?

I’m a Millennial, but I am weary of everyone caring so much about why Millennials do this or don’t do that. I’m sorry Millennials, but I’m going to have to throw us under the bus here: we do not have everything figured out. And if we expect older generations and well-established institutions to morph to fit our every fickle desire, we do so at our peril.

The CNN piece, written by Rachel Held Evans, makes some good points, to be sure. The line that I saw shared on Facebook more than any other is this:

“We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.”

I wholeheartedly agree. I made the same point three years ago with my book Hipster Christianity, and in a Wall Street Journal column called “The Perils of Wannabe Cool Christianity,” where I wrote:

“If the evangelical Christian leadership thinks that ‘cool Christianity’ is a sustainable path forward, they are severely mistaken. As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don’t want cool as much as we want real.”

It’s certainly important to remind the church that efforts to be cool will do little if anything to keep young people engaged. It often has the opposite effect.

But I also think that the answer is decidedly not to sit the Millennial down and have him or her dictate exactly what they think the church should be. But this is what Evans suggests. Her article ends with this proposed action step:

“I would encourage church leaders eager to win Millennials back to sit down and really talk with them about what they’re looking for and what they would like to contribute to a faith community.”

How about the opposite? Millennials: why don’t we take our pastors, parents, and older Christian brothers and sisters out to coffee and listen to them? Perhaps instead of perpetuating our sense of entitlement and Twitter/blog/Instagram-fueled obsession with hearing ourselves speak, we could just shut up for a minute and listen to the wisdom of those who have gone before?

And for pastors, church leaders, and others so concerned with the survival of the church amidst the glut of “adapt or die!” hype, is asking Millennials what they want church to be and adjusting accordingly really your best bet? Are we really to believe that today’s #hashtagging, YOLO-oriented, selfie-obsessed generation of Millennials has more wisdom to offer about the church than those who have thought about and faithfully served the church decade after decade, amidst all its warts, challenges and ups and down?

Part of the problem is the hubris of every generation, which thinks it has discovered, once and for all, the right way of doing things. C.S. Lewis called it “chronological snobbery,” defining it as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”

But a deeper problem is that Christianity has become too obsessed with how it is perceived. Just like the Photoshop-savvy Millennials she is so desperate to retain, the church is ever more meticulously concerned with her image, monitoring what people are saying about her and taking cues from that.

Erik Thoennes, professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Biola University, is troubled by the church’s obsession with perception.

“We’ve got experts who tell us ‘this is how pagans think about us, Oh no!’ and we wring our hands and say ‘we’re so lame!’” said Thoennes. “This perception-driven way of doing things will make you go crazy. We’re junior highers. Junior highers live in this world of ‘how am I being perceived’ all the time. Oh to be free from that!”

Much of this is an outgrowth of the audience-is-sovereign mentality of the seeker-sensitive movement, which has loomed large in evangelicalism’s recent history. Another part of it is Christianity’s capitulation to a consumerist culture where the primary goal is to scratch where the market itches.

But at the end of the day, the Christian gospel is defined outside of and with little regard to whatever itch people think Christianity should scratch. Consumerism asserts that people want what they want and get what they want, for a price. It’s all about me. But to position the gospel within this consumerist, give-them-what-they-want framework is to open the door to all sorts of distortions, mutations, and “to each his own” cockamamy variations. If Christianity aims to sell a message that scratches a pluralism of itches, how in the world will a cohesive, orthodox, unified gospel survive?

I’m not saying that the church should never listen to the audience or pay attention to data and trends. It’s just that more often than not, the “just tell us what you want us to be!” approach does more harm than good, turning the church into a shape-shifting chameleon with ever-diminishing ecclesiological confidence and cultural legitimacy. It smacks of desperation and weakness.

As a Millennial, if I’m truly honest with myself, what I really need from the church is not another yes-man entity enabling my hubris and giving me what I want. Rather, what I need is something bigger than me, older than me, bound by a truth that transcends me and a story that will outlast me; basically, something that doesn’t change to fit me and my whims, but changes me to be the Christ-like person I was created to be.

Brett McCracken is the author of Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism & Liberty (2013) and Hipster Christianity (2010).

A Letter From Calvin College Professor (About Praise Bands)

An Open Letter to Praise Bands 

Monday, February 20, 2012

James K. A. Smith

 

Dear Praise Band,

I so appreciate your willingness and desire to offer up your gifts to God in worship. I appreciate your devotion and celebrate your faithfulness–schlepping to church early, Sunday after Sunday, making time for practice mid-week, learning and writing new songs, and so much more. Like those skilled artists and artisans that God used to create the tabernacle (Exodus 36), you are willing to put your artistic gifts in service to the Triune God.

So please receive this little missive in the spirit it is meant: as an encouragement to reflect on the practice of “leading worship.” It seems to me that you are often simply co-opted into a practice without being encouraged to reflect on its rationale, its “reason why.” In other words, it seems to me that you are often recruited to “lead worship” without much opportunity to pause and reflect on the nature of “worship” and what it would mean to “lead.”

In particular, my concern is that we, the church, have unwittingly encouraged you to simply import musical practices into Christian worship that–while they might be appropriate elsewhere–are detrimental to congregational worship. More pointedly, using language I first employed in Desiring the Kingdom, I sometimes worry that we’ve unwittingly encouraged you to import certain forms of performance that are, in effect, “secular liturgies” and not just neutral “methods.” Without us realizing it, the dominant practices of performance train us to relate to music (and musicians) in a certain way: as something for our pleasure, as entertainment, as a largely passive experience. The function and goal of music in these “secular liturgies” is quite different from the function and goal of music in Christian worship.

So let me offer just a few brief axioms with the hope of encouraging new reflection on the practice of “leading worship”:

1. If we, the congregation, can’t hear ourselves, it’s not worship. Christian worship is not a concert. In a concert (a particular “form of performance”), we often expect to be overwhelmed by sound, particularly in certain styles of music. In a concert, we come to expect that weird sort of sensory deprivation that happens from sensory overload, when the pounding of the bass on our chest and the wash of music over the crowd leaves us with the rush of a certain aural vertigo. And there’s nothing wrong with concerts! It’s just that Christian worship is not a concert. Christian worship is a collective, communal, congregational practice–and the gathered sound and harmony of a congregation singing as one is integral to the practice of worship. It is a way of “performing” the reality that, in Christ, we are one body. But that requires that we actually be able to hear ourselves, and hear our sisters and brothers singing alongside us. When the amped sound of the praise band overwhelms congregational voices, we can’t hear ourselves sing–so we lose that communal aspect of the congregation and are encouraged to effectively become “private,” passive worshipers.

2. If we, the congregation, can’t sing along, it’s not worship. In other forms of musical performance, musicians and bands will want to improvise and “be creative,” offering new renditions and exhibiting their virtuosity with all sorts of different trills and pauses and improvisations on the received tune. Again, that can be a delightful aspect of a concert, but in Christian worship it just means that we, the congregation, can’t sing along. And so your virtuosity gives rise to our passivity; your creativity simply encourages our silence. And while you may be worshiping with your creativity, the same creativity actually shuts down congregational song.

3. If you, the praise band, are the center of attention, it’s not worship. I know it’s generally not your fault that we’ve put you at the front of the church. And I know you want to model worship for us to imitate. But because we’ve encouraged you to basically import forms of performance from the concert venue into the sanctuary, we might not realize that we’ve also unwittingly encouraged a sense that you are the center of attention. And when your performance becomes a display of your virtuosity–even with the best of intentions–it’s difficult to counter the temptation to make the praise band the focus of our attention. When the praise band goes into long riffs that you might intend as “offerings to God,” we the congregation become utterly passive, and because we’ve adopted habits of relating to music from the Grammys and the concert venue, we unwittingly make you the center of attention. I wonder if there might be some intentional reflection on placement (to the side? leading from behind?) and performance that might help us counter these habits we bring with us to worship.

Please consider these points carefully and recognize what I am not saying. This isn’t just some plea for “traditional” worship and a critique of “contemporary” worship. Don’t mistake this as a defense of pipe organs and a critique of guitars and drums (or banjos and mandolins). My concern isn’t with style, but with form: What are we trying to do when we “lead worship?” If we are intentional about worship as a communal, congregational practice that brings us into a dialogical encounter with the living God–that worship is not merely expressive but also formative–then we can do that with cellos or steel guitars, pipe organs or African drums.

Much, much more could be said. But let me stop here, and please receive this as the encouragement it’s meant to be. I would love to see you continue to offer your artistic gifts in worship to the Triune God who is teaching us a new song.

Most sincerely,

Jamie

 

Postscript from John Piper

 

John Piper, writing in 2008:

Thirteen years ago we asked: What should be the defining sound of corporate worship at Bethlehem (Baptist Church), besides the voice of biblical preaching?  We meant: Should it be pipe organ, piano, guitar, drums, choir, worship team, orchestra, etc. The answer we gave was “The people of Bethlehem singing.” Some thought: That’s not much help in deciding which instruments should be used. Perhaps not. But it is massively helpful in clarifying the meaning of those moments.  If Bethlehem is not “singing and making melody to the Lord with [our] heart,” (Ephesians 5:19), it’s all over. We close up shop. This is no small commitment.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

The Legs of Unbelief 

Liturgy and Worship – Exhortation
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 20 October 2012

We cannot be reminded too often of the goodness and grace of God. Unbelief is the perennial temptation, and part of that unbelief is the idea that our unbelief is greater than the purposes of God. No—the legs of unbelief are too short to outrun the goodness and grace of God.

We like to put on airs; we like to believe that we are more important than we actually are. God’s purposes will be done regardless.
If I believe or if I don’t believe, God is not deterred. If I don’t believe Him, then His purposes will redound for His glory (which they were going to do anyway), but if I believe, then His glory will also be for my good, and for my blessing.

For the utter unbeliever, this does not matter at all. But for the believer who worries that his belief is not what it should be, he begins to panic. He knows he believes, but like the man with the demoniac son, he cries out, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” This is where we may take comfort. The legs of your unbelief are too short to outrun the goodness and greatness of God.

We love because He first loved. We believe because He gave us the gift of faith. We rejoice because He filled our hearts with joy. And what God has begun, God will complete.

The Lord is easily pleased, but hard to satisfy. He chides the disciples frequently for being little-faiths. That is not a good thing. And yet, at the same time, He teaches them that mustard seed faith can accomplish great things. One of the things that little faith can accomplish is that it can grow into greater and greater faith.

So do not hesitate to come before the Lord in worship. You have things to be fixed, right? What else is new? You have issues? Then we have no time to lose. Come, let us worship the Lord now.

Neglecting Duties

Subtle Disobedience

An abiding temptation to Christians and the Church is to distort the truth by emphasis.  It is a subtle form of disobedience.  If the landowner gave his stewards a list of ten responsibilities and they focused on one only, neglecting the other nine. the unfaithfulness and disobedience of the stewards would be apparent to all. But not to the stewards, we suspect.  Their uber-faithfulness to one duty would be used to justify the neglect of their other duties. 

When Christians overemphasise a responsibility clearly taught in Scripture to the neglect of other commandments their defalcation is usually not immediately apparent to them.
  Their zeal for the one commandments often justifies their neglect of the others.  At least we are getting the “main things” right, they tell themselves.  Our Lord knew all about this deceit of heart.  At one point He condemned the Pharisees who focused on less important duties (tithing the produce of the herb garden) whilst they neglected the more weighty matters of the law (justice and mercy and faithfulness,  Matthew 23:23).  Our Lord said they should have done both: faithfully tithed their herb gardens and faithfully practised justice, mercy, and faithfulness. 

In some Christian circles evangelism has become the Most Important Duty–to the eclipsing and neglect of other commandments.  One place this shows up is in our worship services.  The worship of God has now morphed into an activity with the prime focus being to reach the Unbeliever with the Gospel.  Worship has become a means to a “higher” end: gaining converts.  Disobedience is the inevitable outcome of such a distortion. 

T. David Gordon deliberately understates the outcome to drive the point home:

. . . we can probably agree that a meeting between God and his people becomes very different when those who are self-consciously not his people are invited not only to observe, but to participate and feel comfortable.  As a meeting between God and his people, the meeting is compromised.  [Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns (Phillipsburg: P & R Publishing, 2010), p. 152f.]

 Arguably, worship–public worship–must be considered one of the weighty matters of the law.   The first four commandments all address different aspects of worship.  How should the Unbeliever “feel” when attending a Christian worship service?  Should he or she be invited to observe or participate?  The Gentiles during the Jewish disapora in the inter-testamental period attended synagogues as observers; the court of the Gentiles in the temple was likewise to encourage Gentiles to attend and observe, not participate.  This is where the God-fearers mentioned in the book of Acts came from: attending, watching, observing and respecting the synagogue services. They were welcomed as observers, not participants.

When the duty to evangelise becomes elevated into the status of an uber-responsibility, worship morphs into an activity centred upon non-Christians, rather than on God meeting with His people.  The service of worship must be “seeker friendly” whatever that may mean.  Usually it means conducting the service so that non-Christians can participate in the activities of worship.  The prayers, songs, music, preaching are all made relevant to non-Christians so they can take part.  This is a grave mistake. 

Inevitably it means that worship becomes a meeting between God and those not His people, which means in turn that the actual duties and obligations of worship by God’s people are neglected. 

This always happens when one duty is elevated into an uber-duty–a duty above all duties.   

It’s A Small Matter–Or So We Are Told

Music And Worship

Music is a contentious issue in the Church.  This is not surprising.  It has been contentious for a long, long time.  One of the issues abroad today is whether church music and song should reflect the currently prevailing musical idioms of our culture. 

On any given Sunday, up and down the country churches listen to (and sing) songs which imitate trite “love songs” playing on just about every radio station, 24/7.  With one difference: the love songs are sung about Jesus.  It is banal and disrespectful.  It breaches the third commandment–being nothing more than the using of God’s holy Name in a vain and empty manner.

T. David Gordon, in his Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns puts the matter in a wider perspective. 

Biblically, then, neither music nor song is merely a matter of entertainment or amusement.  Both are very serious business, both culturally and religiously.  Song is the divinely instituted, divinely commanded, and divinely regulated means of responding to God’s great works of creation, preservation, and deliverance. 

Worship song is both the remarkable privilege and the solemn duty of the redeemed.  Therefore, to suggest that worship song is “merely” or “just” anything, whatever that “anything” is, is to deny the very teaching of Scripture about the importance of worship song in God’s economy–an importance so great that it characterizes the life of the redeemed in the world to come.  Thus, the unfortunately common statements, by both proponents and opponents of contemporary worship music, that this is “merely” a matter of taste or preference are erroneous and must be regarded as unbiblical. 

This . . . posture that worship song is merely a matter of amusement or entertainment . . . . arises from a culture that has come to be characterized, as Neil Postman argued, by amusement.  In such a culture . . . it is not surprising that even Bible-believing people have unwittingly adopted such an anti-biblical stance.  They simply aren’t aware of the conflict between the teaching of the Bible and the values of our culture on this point.  [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns (Phillipsburg: P& R Publishing, 2010), p.31f.]

Christian Public Worship and Popular Culture

Worship is Neither Relaxing Nor Soporific

Music use in churches has increasingly become a descent to the lowest common denominator.  The intentions may be good: the overriding goal is to make public worship accessible to “outsiders” or non-Christian visitors.  The consequence has been a turning to “pop music” as the appropriate musical idiom for the public worship of the Living God.  This is a short-sighted mistake.   

Pop music is like pop psychology–superficial, bland, inconsequential.  Music which is popular is that which can be played as background music in shopping malls.  It is soporific, calming, pleasing, entertaining–without demanding concentration, work, or undivided attention.  As T. David Gordon puts it:

For commercial reasons . . . pop culture and pop music cannot be either beautiful or ugly; pop music must be easy and therefore it must be fairly inconsequential.  [Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010), p. 67.] 

But–and here is the problem–how does such music (which has its own place and utility) fit appropriately into public worship of the Almighty God?   The music and lyrics employed in worship must be fit for purpose.  They ought to reflect what worship is.  If worship were fairly inconsequential, pop music idioms would be entirely appropriate.  But it is not; and pop idioms are not. 

But now, is worship inconsequential, trivial, or insignificant?  Is meeting with God a casual, inconsequential activity, or a significant one?  Is religious faith itself insignificant?  If the music or lyrics of our hymns are insignificant or inconsequential, do they not send the wrong meta-message? . . . The lyrics of a hymn might say, “Holy, holy, holy,” but the music might say, “Ho-hum, ho-hum, ho-hum.”  In such a case, the meta-message competes with and contradicts the message. 

Neil Postman rightly said: “I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion.  When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”  So what is at stake is the kind of religion presented in music that is easy, trivial, light, inconsequential, mundane, or everyday. 

The very existence of the expression sacred music once conveyed the notion that some music was different from other music, intentionally different, different precisely because it was devoted to a sacred (not common) cause.  (Gordon, ibid., p. 68)

To be sure, pop music can be thoroughly enjoyable, as can a racy detective novel.  Both have the quality of escapist relaxation–entirely appropriate at the right time and place.  Public worship is not one of those times or places.  

Seeker Sensible Worship

Intelligibility is Not Cozy 

Liturgy and Worship – Liturgical Notes
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 23 August 2012

Yesterday at Knox Presbytery (CREC), we had a good discussion surrounding the issues of “seeker sensitive” worship and “seeker sensible” worship, a discussion that flowed into the evening.

Here are just a couple of quick comments about it. First, my operating assumption is that the worship service on Sunday morning should be structured for believers, and not for unbelievers. The impact of such a service can certainly be evangelistic, but not because that is its primary purpose. There can be evangelistic effects, but this does not shift the purpose of the worship service. But what about . . .?

“But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all,  the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you” (1 Cor. 14:24-25, ESV).

This is a standard text that is appealed to in these discussions

Centrality of Worship In the Kingdom

No Retreat, No Compromise

Chrestomathy
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 22 March 2012 08:01

“Christian worship is the declaration that God is creating a new humanity in Christ, and wherever that new humanity gathers, a new center is constituted, a new public square is established. We reject the ghetto-izing of the faith, which wants to worship God without actually creating a city . . . we also reject the idea that Christ can be considered ‘a player.’ He is no player; He is the Lord of heaven and earth” (Heaven Misplaced, p. 118).

Powerful Ancient Traditions

Gaining Traction in a Post-Modern World

In a world falling apart, universal, timeless tradition has traction.  In the 1960’s the opposite applied.  Western culture was basking in the victory over Germany and the Axis powers; there was a distinct sense that the “good” had triumphed over the “bad” in World War II.  History was on a right course.  The fifties were a decade of the universal and conventional.

Beneath popular culture, however, scepticism was bubbling away, about to burst forth into the public square.  Post-modernism had taken deep root in the intellectual institutions.  Along came the Beatles with distinctly unconventional haircuts and strange musical idioms.  Almost overnight being “square” did not cut it; change, change, change was the new normal.

Fifty years later the Western world has been “narrativised” and “perspectivised” to cynical boredom and jaded detachment.  The only “ism” that has traction is the view that nothing has traction.

Singing a New Song

King of All Kings 

It’s great to see modern hymn-writers celebrating the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.  This from Sovereign Grace Music:

Condescending and Disrespectful

“Seeker Friendly” Churches

Many Christians take very seriously our Lord’s command to preach the Gospel to all the nations.  So seriously they risk making an idol of the responsibility, elevating it above all other duties and responsibilities equally given us by our God.

Reaching people for Christ can become more important than faithfulness to Him in all things.  One manifestation is the attempt to engineer public worship into being “seeker friendly”.  The idea is that worship must be so organised and conducted that when a non-Christian enters, he or she immediately feels at home.  As much as possible, everything must be made to be familiar, ordinary, and usual.  The inevitable result is that the Word of God and the Gospel is dumbed down, and worship itself becomes profane–that is, simply a replication of life “outside the temple”.

Marilynne Robinson reflects upon this shortsighted foolishness, arguing that it is found not just within the Church, but within modern culture and academia:

At a certain point I decided that everything I took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural history, and so on did not square at all with my sense of things, and that the tendency of much of it was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.

I do not meant to suggest, and I underline this, that there was any sort of plot against religion, since religion in many instances abetted these tendencies and does still, not least by retreating from the cultivation and celebration of learning and of beauty, by dumbing down, as if people were less than God made them and in need of nothing so much as condescension.  Who among us wishes that songs we sing, the sermons we hear, were just a little dumber?  People today–television–video games–diminished things.  This is always the pretext. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was A Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 2012), p.5.]

Often the rationale for dumbing things down in the Church is precisely that pretext: we are reaching a generation raised on a steady diet of TV and video games and the internet.  People today have a lust for instant gratification: entertaining, high powered, intense, blood-racing excitement is the order of the day.  Therefore, let’s keep Christian worship and activity short, sharp, racy, engaging, and exciting.  Only then will we have any hope of attracting Unbelievers into our circles.  How foolish–and condescendingly arrogant.

If we think we have done this voiding of content for the sake of other people, those whom we suspect God may have given a somewhat lesser brilliance than our won, we are presumptuous and also irreverent.  William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for his translation of the Bible, who provided much of the most beautiful language in what is called by us the King James Bible, wrote, he said, in the language a plow-boy could understand. He wrote to the comprehension of the profoundly poor, those who would be, and would have lived among, the utterly unlettered.  And he created one of the undoubted masterpieces of the English language.

Now we seem to feel beauty is an affectation of some sort.  And this notion is as influential in the churches as it is anywhere.  The Bible, Christianity, should have inoculated us against this kind of disrespect for ourselves and one another.  Clearly it has not. 

Equally clear–from the example of Tyndale–is that there is a way to communicate the truth to others that is powerful, and beautiful, and sound.  Dumbing down God and His Word is not being “seeker friendly”–it is the exact opposite.  

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Five More Volleys on Effeminate Worship 

 Liturgy and Worship – Liturgical Notes
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 24 April 2012

A short while ago I posted something about effeminate worship that has since that time excited some comment. The original piece was here, and you can see a couple of responses here and here.

This is not so much a point-by-point refutation as it is getting out a wetvac to clear up some misunderstandings. Once we understand each other, it is unlikely that this will bring about sweet concord on the subject, but at least we should be closer to the heart of the actual disagreement.

First, effeminacy and femininity are not synonyms.
When I say that worship services have become effeminate, I am not saying that that they have become feminine. They have actually ceased being feminine (but more on this later). Feminine characteristics are God-given, and in their assigned place, they are a great glory, as terrible as an army with banners. But when feminine characteristics are falsely adopted by someone who has no claim or title to them, then that is effeminate.

The same principle runs the other way. When a woman adopts certain masculine prerogatives, putting on the gear of a warrior, let us say (Dt. 22:5), then this is grotesque. But to say it is grotesque is not to say that the same thing applies when a man who puts on the gear of a warrior. It would be grotesque for him not to.

Second, there is a difference between corporate piety and individual piety. In the first paragraph of my original post, I recommended the book The Church Impotent by Leon Podles. This particular point is a central theme of his book. The Church is the bride of Christ (Eph. 5:23), and is in the process of adorning herself, as a bride does for her husband (Rev. 21:2). Podles points out that a fatal step was taken (by Bernard of Clairvaux) when expressions of corporate piety became normative for expressions of individual piety.

The Church can and must adorn herself as a bride. Our corporate identity is feminine. But if an individual man attempts to replicate that identity in his personal devotions, two bad things can happen. The first is that he finds he can step right into such role, no prob, and presto, we have ourselves a new worship leader. The second problem is that the cultivation of this demeanor is so alien to how God made him that he concludes that the Christian faith must not be for him. This is all the result of a fundamental confusion about the relationship of corporate identity to individual identity.

Third, misogyny should never be defined as saying something negative about particular sins that women may be prone to. That way lies madness. The apostle Paul takes a shot against old wives’ tales (1 Tim. 4:7), without having any animus whatever toward old wives generally. But it should be noted that in this, our effeminate age, our contempo-translators protect Paul from himself (and his inexcusable gaffe) by rendering it as “silly myths” (ESV), “silly tales” (NIrV), or “silly stories” (Message).

If men are prone to particular sins (and they are), it is not an attack on all men as men to identify that particular temptation. And men do struggle with particular male-oriented sins — anger, brittle pride, lust. But one thing they don’t tend to do is think that when a preacher attacks angry men he must be attacking all men. That is, however, a temptation that women do have, and effeminate men often copy them in this. A particular sin is singled out that some women fall prey to, and it is assumed that anyone who points it out is at war with all women. One of my critics said this: “What is clear is that Wilson exudes a deep distrust and contempt for women in this post.” Heh. Because he critiques women who do X, he must have it in for women who wouldn’t ever do X.

Fourth, returning to the truths established in the first two points, it should be pointed out that there is, in the modern worship wars, a real attack on the true corporate femininity of the Church. When women teach or exercise authority over men in the Church (1 Tim. 2:12), or when women refuse to remain silent in the way the apostle requires (1 Cor. 14:34), this means that the congregation involved is refusing to do what her husband has required of her (Eph. 5:24). That congregation is being unfeminine, unsubmissive.

This means that when you attend a worship service led throughout by men, that worship service is appropriately feminine. You don’t make a service feminine by putting women up front, you make a service feminine and submissive by doing what our husband has required of us. When the wishes of our husband and federal head are blithely ignored, the assembly of the saints has become a continuous dripping on a rainy day (Prov. 27:15), and it would be better to go out and live in a desolate wilderness than to worship there (Prov. 21:19). That is what a contentious woman is like, and if somebody wants to be contentious about it (1 Cor. 11:16), he should remember that we actually do have apostolic guidance for how we should think about the relationship of the sexes.

Fifth, when it is simply assumed that masculine leadership in true (feminine) worship must mean some sort of machismo, or swagger, or talking out of the side of your mouth, this is an assumption that runs clean contrary to what we have taught on this subject for many years.

For example, in Future Men, in a section entitled Counterfeit Masculinity, I say this:

“This can all be done in a loud voice, and with hairy chest, but it is still shirking a duty assigned by God” (p. 23).

“This false masculinity — excuse-making, bluster, braggadocio — is in part the result of resisting and opposing true masculinity” (p. 24).

There is plenty more of this kind of thing throughout my writing on this whole subject, down to and including a rejection of “Esau Christianity.” I make the point that while Esau was off four-wheeling in the woods, fulfilling stereotypes, Jacob was faithfully tending to the family business.

So, is our rejection of effeminate worship “mean-spirited” toward women? Not a bit of it. Does it show contempt for the abilities of women who have accepted the role God has assigned to them? Again, no. I write as a man in a family crammed full of high-performance women, and would mildly suggest that if anybody really wants to attack me on this front, a little background research might be helpful to them.