Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Worship

  • How Charismatic Am I?

    Adrian Warnock is working on a spectrum for determining just how charismatic one is in belief and practice. His initial test seemed to make people more charismatic than they actually are, or perhaps than they consider themselves to be.

    I took the test, and came out strongly charismatic in belief and mildly charismatic in practice. Some of my negatives include “I have prophesied” and “I have asked God to give me the gift of prophecy.” These two questions are legitimate measures of charismatic belief, but while I believe that the gift of prophecy continues in theory, I am very hesitant to point to any particular person I would regard as a prophet. In other words, God could call someone to be a prophet, but I have not identified one.

    Another interesting one was regarding speaking in tongues. Under beliefs I indicated I believed this gift was available in modern times, and under practice that I have spoken in tongues, by which I refer to what is commonly called “praying in the Spirit,” though I don’t prefer that title. As closely I can describe the experience, it’s a bit like meditating. But that is for another article. But under practice, I had to note that I had never prayed to receive the gift of tongues, and in fact never desired it. It just happened. That is a valid distinction. If I believed that receiving the gift of tongues, or more specifically a prayer language, was a required, singular evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that the baptism is an event always or most commonly separate from conversion, then I’d presumably be answering ‘yes’ to all of these.

    On the positive side I checked off praying for or receiving healing, raising and clapping my hands during worship, and getting emotional during worship, amongst others.

    After presenting some results, he followed up with some questions that needed to be reworded. Amongst these he changed the question on healing to include the word “supernaturally.” On dancing, raising, and clapping hands, the questions indicated a biblical requirement rather than simply whether it is acceptable.

    I really have little problem with the spectrum in general, but I would note the difficulty I have in answering these questions. In fact, I thought of some of these issues when responding to the questionnaire the first time. How closely do my definitions of these terms match the ones Adrian is using in asking the questions. When he added the word “supernaturally” to the healing question, the definition question came back to me.

    I’m willing to answer supernatural healing positively, if that means that through prayer healing occurs that would not have occurred in the natural order of things. But there are two issues. First is the definition of “supernatural.” I don’t make as clear a distinction between supernatural and natural as some do. Yes, there are natural laws, but I see God in everything, so I consider all healing (and all truth) to come from God. I think also that most of what God does in the world is subtle and generally mediated through His people. This isn’t because God cannot act. I do not deny miracles. It is because God likes the way he designed the universe, and for the most part it works by natural law.

    Then there’s the issue of a biblical mandate for particular acts of worship, whether singing, clapping hands, raising hands, or dancing. There would be two levels of distinction here. The first is whether such things are permitted. Many churches would reject the idea that people should dance in the church service, or even raise their hands or clap. Then there are those that consider this a valid part of worship, but wouldn’t require everything to do it. Then there are

    others who think that if you don’t dance, you aren’t truly worshiping.

    Neither set of questions truly distinguish all this, so I’m not sure how well the spectrum works. It’s especially difficult for someone who is a moderate or liberal charismatic. In that case, one would probably be open to many different approaches to worship, and might define various gifts (prophecy and healing, for example), in different ways, and still believe that the same gifts are available to the church today as ever were.

    Finally, while I consider this spectrum interesting, since I hold only a very small set of beliefs as essential (saying the Apostles’ Creed without crossing one’s fingers!), I see such a spectrum as more for interest and entertainment than to be taken seriously. Any spectrum examining just one belief set is likely to obscure some differences and overemphasize others.

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  • The Only Worshiper Who Got It

    At today’s church service there was something I wish I had caught on camera. I’m not really quick, even though I have a reasonably good camera in my cell phone.

    Our pastor, Geoffrey Lentz, was preaching the final sermon of his Summer in the Psalms series, this time from Psalm 150. He talked about exuberant praise, and suggested that if we could really get a vision of God’s grace we would doubtless be ready to sing and dance ourselves. He’s been using musical styles with his sermon, and today’s style was jazz.

    As is our custom, the offering comes immediately after the sermon. The offertory was jazz, with quite a catching rhythm. I was sitting near the back and looking across a congregation sitting quietly in their seats while the band rocked the house; well, would have rocked it had it been movable. And no, this is not about me. I was sitting in my seat like the rest.

    But a few rows ahead of me, close to the center of the sanctuary, there was a little girl, perhaps two years old. She was quite noticeable in a bright red dress. She was standing on her chair, dancing, waving her hands above her head, and clapping (mostly) to the music.

    I think she was the only one who got it!

     

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  • Worship and a Broadcast Sermon

    John Meunier asks if he can be replaced by a video screen. It’s a good question, considering the number of megachurches that are broadcasting a sermon to multiple locations.

    I have several objections to the idea of a broadcast sermon:

    1. I think our worship services are already too far from the idea of active participation. I’d like us to move toward 1 Corinthians 14 worship. (See my post The Problem with 1 Corinthians 14 Worship.
    2. Broadcasting one man’s (or one woman’s) message to multiple locations tends to build the false notion that only the professionals are qualified to share the Word. What an opportunity having multiple campuses would provide to train up more Christians to share?
    3. Using the one sermon in multiple locations elevates the authority of one person over the body.
    4. The very idea of one church with multiple campuses takes us away from a style of authority that treats the body of Christ as a single body, not as a large passive audience to be entertained or informed.

    I think every worship service should involve active participation and personal contact. I can watch or hear great sermons from great preachers on my television if I want.

    And while we’re at it, we need a service long enough to cover the ground, which includes hearing the scripture itself (not just someone’s discussion of it), prayer, interaction, discussion, learning discipleship, and preparing to take the message outside during the week.

     

     

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  • Worship Worthy of Your Understanding of God

    I started teaching a new Sunday School class today, or I should say it’s new to me. In our discussion one of the class members discussed who he understood God to be, and then commented that he couldn’t understand such a God requiring worship. His concept of God was rich and deep, so by this time I was wondering. Then he mentioned what he meant by “worship,” and what he was talking about was the very common things we do at our worship services.

    I think his question was very appropriate, even though the answer–as he acknowledged–was kind of built into the question. But it raises another question: Are our worship services worthy of God? Or perhaps I can make it a little easier: Are our worship services worthy of our best understanding of God?

    I spent some time writing about worship, and one of my key points was that worship should happen all week long. Worship is not something that just happens during a time of “worship” should help us to worship all week, and what we do all week should help us worship when we get together.

    So I ask: Is what we do on Sunday morning worthy of our God? Does it send people forth recharged to meet the world? If not, what can we do?

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  • What is Cutting Edge?

    From Pensapedia.com / Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License v. 2.5

    The description of the ICON service at my home church, First United Methodist Church in Pensacola, FL, states that the service is:

    • Cutting Edge
    • Tradition Rich
    • Art Embracing
    • Christ Centered

    This worship service just celebrated its second anniversary, and I was happy today to see that the sanctuary was largely filled. It has been both amazing and gratifying to me to watch the success of this particular worship service as it has been the entry point to church fellowship for a large number of people, especially young couples. I must confess that I often feel a bit old attending.

    Today associate minister at First UMC, Geoffrey Lentz, preached on cutting edge. He noted the things that make people think the service is cutting edge–large, high-definition screens, state of the art sound, and the embrace of social media. But he said that wasn’t what makes it really cutting edge. The one genuinely new thing under the sun, with due apologies to Qoheleth, is Jesus Christ. He told us that the most cutting edge thing we could possibly do is to follow Jesus Christ.

    Now I like many of the elements of worship in ICON. I think many of those elements, and the way they are blended, has helped make the service successful. But if you had asked me before this service why I think First UMC is growing, I would tell you it is because the pastors are preaching the gospel and making every effort to put it in practice. If you attend First UMC, you’re going to hear a gospel message.

    I don’t say this to belittle any other accomplishments. I just don’t think those are the key things. Large, high-definition screens showing well-produced videos can help bring people into the room. Well-done contemporary music can catch their attention. But if the message behind those things is not Jesus Christ and him crucified, there will be nothing to keep people in church. And if you don’t get there, you also don’t get them into ministry, and I would say that if one doesn’t get into ministry (or more directly stated mission), then one hasn’t really brought that person to Christ.

    I was glad to hear Geoffrey make that point. While I have just argued that the worship service is worship, even though everything we do is to be worship, I also believe that a major test of the success of a worship service is whether or not it gets us engaged in those acts of service–and worship–that are to go on all week.

     

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  • The Worship Service is Worship Too

    Some time ago I read a post by Arthur Sido on The Voice of One Crying Out in Suburbia titled What is Worship? and I’ve been intending to respond ever since. The problem is that the topic brings up so many different issues that it threatens to become an incredibly long blog post. Those of you who have read this blog before know that wordiness is my besetting sin!

    So I’m going to try to give a few thoughts and I’ll write about details later if it seems the thing to do. I will obviously fail to cover all my ground. I’d suggest you read Arthur Sido’s post first. I’m not going to respond point by point. In fact, I consider most of his suggestions excellent, even though I take a different approach to the texts. Instead I’m going to just put forward a few ideas about worship, and particularly about the relationship of the Old Testament to the New on this topic.

    Before I get to the question of how much of what the Old Testament says about worship applies to the church let me comment on the definition of the word “worship.” One problem is that worship can mean different things in different places. I first encountered this problem talking to people who thought only part of the church service was worship. They would refer to the musical portion as “worship” and would complain that they had not been allowed enough time to worship at a particular service because too many other things took place. Worship would generally be defined in those conversations as the portions of the service that particularly engaged the emotions.

    We might see this as something similar to the biblical phrase “bow down and worship.” It’s a particular act of worship. I don’t have a problem with this special definition, so long as we realize what’s happening. You can define one piece of the worship service as “worship” and the rest as, well, something else, and lose the the broader meaning of worship. I recall some people who started to make a large distinction between “praise music” and “worship music” and had particular times for these things. Again, one can appropriately make a distinction between the word “praise” and the word “worship” in particular contexts, but that doesn’t mean that’s all of worship.

    On the other side, we have those who see the worship service strictly in terms of conveying certain facts. There is no expectation of poetry and emotional engagement in the service. The preference is for a few songs to kind of set off the time of preaching, the proclamation of the word. For these people the point of a church gathering is to get educated.

    Most people, of course, fall somewhere between these points. I think all fall short of the best concept of a service of worship. And no, I don’t have a problem using a term that is not explicitly used in the New Testament. In fact, I find the argument that something was not mentioned in the New Testament and thus must not be something we should do or believe to be one of the worst arguments. But that is another subject.

    Yet it is important to understand that worship can be broadened to cover everything that we do in life. I have learned a great deal of this while studying the book of Leviticus (read some of my notes on Leviticus), and also the rest of the Pentateuch. The overarching theme, I would suggest, is that God wants to bring everything into the realm of the sacred. We make some things sacred; God wants to sanctify everything. We make some places holy; God wants a holy world. We set aside sacred time; God claims rule of all time.

    The scriptural bookends for this view are found in Exodus 19:6 “You will be a kingdom of priests to me, a holy nation …” and then in 1 Peter 2:9, which alludes back to Exodus. What happened in between? Well, things didn’t happen that well at Sinai. God couldn’t make Israel a nation of priests and chose instead a priestly family, and the tribe of Levi to serve the temple. Instead of a holy nation we had a holy shrine.

    But the rituals of Leviticus see God moving into our profane spaces and trying to make them holy. The direction in which God is leading people is away from the scattered bits and pieces of “holy” and to a holy, consecrated life. I call this one of the trajectories of scripture that helps us understand how various texts apply, in this case texts related to worship.

    There are two commonly accepted ideas about how we apply Old Testament texts to the church. On the one hand there are those who think that if it isn’t restated in the New Testament, it doesn’t apply. There are others who believe it applies unless it was explicitly changed in the New Testament. As usual, these extremes don’t happen that often in practice, and there are certainly other views, but those provide the general outline.

    I would suggest instead that the Old Testament applies to the church wherever it does so based on the principles espoused in the text. We do not offer animal sacrifices in the church, but it is not simply because the New Testament says that was to end. Rather, the New Testament says that was to end because it’s function was completed. We can discover whether the function was completed by asking whether the situation that called for a particular activity, ritual, or law still applies in the time of the church. I would suggest that this question often needs to be answered differently for different people or groups.

    What does this mean for worship? I think it will suggest that it means that worship services are worship too. Those who think we worship only in the worship service should come to realize that obeying is better than sacrifice (1 Sam. 15:22), while those who think the worship service is unimportant should spend some time with those Old Testament passages that speak to the importance of ritual in engaging us with God.

    I think there is a great difference between individual needs. While worship is about God, it is about people worshiping God, and that worship experience means different things to different people. But there is that corporate need to worship together. Leave off either the acts specifically directed to God, or acts of service to others (which should be directed to God as well),  and one’s spiritual life will be unbalanced. (One can learn a great deal about worship from 1 Corinthians 12-14, especially 14.)

    Thus my title: It’s not “The Worship Service is Worship,” but “The Worship Service is Worship Too.”

    I can certainly see a number of lines of discussion I haven’t followed and perhaps should have, but I think I’ll wait to respond to comments–or until I again feel it’s a good idea to follow up.

     

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  • Hallelujah Chorus – Quinhagak, Alaska

    Some friends of ours sent a link to this video. They have worked in the area and know many of the places.

    Hallelujah Chorus -Quinhagak, Alaska

  • I got goosebumps

    … during the closing song at church today, Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.  Perhaps this explains it!  Or perhaps not.

  • Quote on Worship

    From C. Michael Patton:

    What I have been coming to realize over the years is that there is simply no one way to do church. …

    You need to read the whole post at Parchment and Pen to get the real drift of what he’s saying, complete with evangelical discomfort with a seeker sensitive service, a discomfort I share to some extent. I do think he makes some excellent points for people on both sides to consider.

    On the one hand, advocates of seeker sensitive worship should take to heart the points about discipleship. Christian discipleship is not really all that seeker sensitive!

    On the other, many do well to consider why people come to hear the gospel under some circumstances, but not others.

  • Scot McKnight: Is Low Church Evangelicalism Protestant?

    I find this an interesting question. But before I comment, let me summarize and quote Scot McKnight’s article.

    He first notes that from the early liturgies to the Westminster Confession there is a certain common pattern in worship, one which is dropped by what he calls “low church evangelicalism.” Amongst the elements he includes the multiple scripture readings (Psalm, OT, Epistle, Gospel) that would be familiar to those who follow the lectionary, sharing of the word, and some sort of conclusion, such as the creed.

    He concludes:

    … Low church evangelicalism is too often theologically shallow, frequently chaotic in its order of worship, nearly always lopsided in which parts of the Bible it preaches and teaches and knows, and inexcusably ignorant when it comes to the history of God’s people called the Church. These are marks that it has wandered from the gift of the Reformation. These are marks of groups that are not Protestant.

    Having come from a rather low church background, and then having experience even lower liturgy in charismatic circles, I come at this from the opposite end. My wife was raised Catholic, and I as a Seventh-day Adventist. We came together in a United Methodist congregation with a distinctly charismatic tilt. I tend to find much more value in the form of the liturgy, and particularly in the scripture readings. I’m disappointed that we do not read four full scriptures.

    The general complaint I hear in charismatic and other low church circles is that high church worship is just dead ritual. From my high church friends I hear that low church worship is shallow, and so are very many of the worshipers.

    There is some truth in both accusations. In many cases I have found that charismatic believers will not meet without the expectation of some manifestation of the presence of the Spirit, i.e. without an emotion-engaging spiritual experience. They will forgo any other element of worship in order to get there. So often a worship service can consist entirely of singing, with the expectation that there will be people around the altar or whatever one calls the area at the front of the church weeping, on the floor, or in some other way making it known that the Spirit is there.

    High church folks quite often don’t want to be interrupted in their liturgy by anything, and often I think this includes being interrupted by the Spirit. While they are likely to refer to the emotional manifestations as the kind of thing they wish to avoid, they may also wish to avoid discussion or testimony, or just about anything that makes the message current.

    Now both of my last two paragraphs paint an extreme, and I can point to any number of exceptions. For example, the ICON worship service at First United Methodist Church which I attend has the historical order of worship, but is quite lively. I feel the presence of God there each and every week. I would be delighted to hear more scripture read, but we do get three of the four scriptures worked into the service. I also know any number of free-wheeling charismatics who are quite serious about studying their Bibles.

    My hope would be to find a balance that connects us to history, roots us in scripture, and challenges us to Christian living all in one.

    Having said all of that, I really don’t know the answer to Dr. McKnight’s question. First, I have always used the term “protestant” for any movement that grew out of the protestant reformation, even though I’m aware that some groups and streams are very different. Second, I’m not sure what specifically the title “protestant” should prove. I have avoided calling myself “evangelical” because I’m not all that sure what it means and how precisely it differs from simply being “Christian.”

    One note I would add is this: Was liturgy a defining element of the protestant reformation? Is it not possible that the reformers stuck with the basic liturgy not because it was defining, but because it was not–it was simply an element of their tradition that they didn’t see any immediate need to reform. If that is the case, I would have a hard time seeing how the word “protestant” should be defined in part by liturgy.