Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Worship

  • 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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  • Best Pew Bible?

    Ken Schenck answers the question of what translation he’d endorse as a pew Bible. I must say that I give him the “Henry Neufeld award” for hedging his answer. For those of you who haven’t met me in real life, I’m known for giving long answers that provide plenty of verbal provisos or footnotes. At one church I attended, the education director called me aside one day to tell me that when church members asked me a question about the Bible they didn’t want a dissertation! My suggestion: Then don’t ask me!

    The best Bible version is one you readThis applies to any form of the “which Bible version is best” question. It’s nice when people specify “best for …” so at least you can limit it to some extent. Across the front of my little book What’s in a Version? I have the sentence: “The best Bible version is the one you read!”

    I’ve had any number of people tell me about the many cases in which that would be wrong. My point is that the Bible is not about possessing it, it’s about reading and absorbing it, and if you don’t read it, forget it. The most theoretically accurate translation is of no value if you can’t or don’t read it.

    Even with that on the front of the book, at practically every show where we’ve displayed it, someone asks, “But really, Henry, what is the best Bible version?” The answer:  It depends!

    So now that I’ve proven I can’t answer a question briefly, what about pew Bibles? I agree with a number of comments that Ken Schenck made in his post, though I would disagree mildly that for detailed study of a text in a class you want a heavily formal equivalence translation. There is a value in such a translation, but in my opinion, there is a great danger in the heavily literal style in that people read it under the impression they’re getting closer to the meaning of the Greek or Hebrew, but they really aren’t.

    I’m tempted to suggest that people go from a mildly dynamic translation straight to the original languages. With a dynamic version, you know that the translators are trying to interpret the text and express the thought. In literal translation, all too frequently people believe that interpretation is not taking place, and that if they just have an English word for every Greek and Hebrew word (or a short phrase), they’re getting close. They aren’t.

    While I have problems with certain renderings in every translation I own, I don’t find dynamic translations generally weaker in that area. I think those of us who read the original languages regularly tend to understand a literal translation according to what we know the original says, and thus miss the many ways in which someone who isn’t aware of the source text might misunderstand the literal rendering.

    My own recommendation regarding a pew Bible would be:

    • Give strong consideration to the way the text sounds when read.
    • Consider the congregation. An older congregation might be more comfortable with the RSV or even the KJV, though I think the latter can interfere with mission. A very young congregation which includes children in the main service might do well with the CEV. I agree with the NLT as a good pew Bible.
    • Consider cost. Some Bibles are printed in economical pew Bible editions.
    • Consider what your congregation uses mostly for study. I recall one congregation that ordered NRSV pew Bibles for a congregation that was used to the NIV. The pastor preached from the NIV. The pew Bibles gathered dust.
    • Consider not having pew Bibles. Projecting texts on screen is an option, but I would consider skipping that as well. (See below.)

    I must confess that I have a serious problem with the whole idea of pew Bibles. I grew up without them. I always had my own Bible. I honestly can’t remember I time when I didn’t. Now I enounter Sunday School classes that have a shelf of Bibles so class members can grab a Bible if they need one. Sunday School in which you might not need a Bible? The idea makes me sick.

    The whole notion strikes me as part of worship as a spectator sport. Convenience is OK, but not if it reduces involvement. What about marking one’s Bible? What about gathering questions and getting into discussion? What about looking at the text later when you get home?

    So if you want my bottom line recommendation, it would be not to have pew Bibles at all. If you project text on screen, do so only for the scripture reading and for responsive readings (one of the few good reasons for pew Bibles, in my opinion).

  • The Problem with 1 Corinthians 14 Worship

    In Sunday School this morning we touched on 1 Corinthians 14 and worship. I again brought up the issue I see with the way that 1 Corinthians 14 is applied to modern worship.

    On the one hand are those who use it to prevent innovation. To them the key verse is 1 Corinthians 14:40, “Let everything be done decently and in order” (KJV). And it’s generally the KJV that is quoted at this point. This means, according to many, that we don’t need deviations from the order of service. We don’t need words from people that aren’t on the plan for that morning. I’ve heard it used in complaints about excessive loud “amens” or about people raising their hands as they sing. What this has to do with the rest of the chapter, nobody is very inclined to explain. If it doesn’t look like order to you, it’s condemned by 1 Corinthians 14:40.

    On the other hand, there are those who see this chapter as a series of rules for managing certain types of activities. What do we do with people who have prophetic words? What do we do with speaking in tongues? If you don’t have these specific things in your worship service, of course, you don’t really need the guidelines. Who cares if there is an interpreter present if no tongues are spoken?

    I’m not interested right now in whether or not these activities belong in the modern church. Rather, I’m thinking about the background. In my opinion, the reason we don’t understand this chapter very well is that we really don’t have that many churches with the problems that the Corinthian church had.

    Consider:

    How then should it be, brothers and sisters? When you come together each one has a psalm, each one has something to teach, each one has a revelation, each one has a tongue [perhaps message in a tongue], each one has an interpretation. Let everything be done for building up the church (14:26).

    Now let’s be honest. When was the last time you went to a church service and found that everyone showed up with something constructive to provide to the worship service? If you go to such a church (and I’ve experienced this once or twice in half a century), then you are very blessed.

    We look to 1 Corinthians 14 to tell us how to control something that’s really pretty dead. Here are the Corinthians, with all their problems, showing up filled with excitement and ready to contribute. The problem there was to channel the enthusiasm so that everything can be done so as to build up instead of breaking up into confusion. Thus we have a call for two or three to speak, not everyone.

    Learning and Living Scripture

    I think we should be asking how we could experience the problem and then we might need to think about the remedy. The problem is a good thing. It’s like the enthusiasm and excitement of a child first experiencing an outdoor ball game. The child is enthusiastic, runs around, and does things with the ball.

    Now consider what would happen if we handled children at their first ball game the way we handle people in church. If we had on our church hats, we’d probably tell the kids to go sit on the sidelines until they had completed seminary or something of the sort. Only when they were fully responsible could a very small number of them get involved in actually playing ball.

    So how would we get this problem? I think we need to open up the service to more people. My wife Jody regularly tells whoever will listen that every church service should include testimonies. How would we get to the point where many people have something to say? Well, this goes back to making life into worship. If we’re spending our time with God during the week, we’ll want to talk about it when we gather together with other believers. It will happen naturally.

    Again, it seems to me that mission provides the driving force. If we’re involved in mission all week, we’ll be filled with the things of God, and sharing and mutual edification will come naturally.

    This is one of several points of the Sharing phase of the participatory Bible study method for which this blog is named.

    (See my other post on worship today, What is Cutting Edge? from my Threads blog.)

  • Leviticus 9:1-24: Eternity in Liturgy

    I have had very little time to post on Leviticus over the last few weeks because of my business, in which I’ve been working on three books simultaneously. But Leviticus has not been very far from my mind.

    The more I read Leviticus, the more I like it. I’ve read through it with a variety of commentaries, generally reading it in Hebrew along with whatever commentary I’m currently working through. Each time I get more. In the case of the commentary I’m using presently, the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the particular focus is on the connection to Christian themes.

    While one can argue that there isn’t any forward looking sense in Leviticus, I think it is close to impossible to argue that Christians did not look back to Leviticus and use its themes as the learned how to speak of the experience of Jesus and what his life, death, and resurrection meant to them. I’m going with that theme in looking at the book with specifically Christian eyes.

    I’m rambling a bit, but stay with me. One of the neglected aspects of Christianity today is, I believe, a neglect of liturgy. Now I don’t have some sort of detailed checklist as to how liturgy should be conducted. What I do believe is that liturgy should bring us into the presence of God, i.e. bring us into the presence of eternity in some way. Most of our worship services do not function in this way at all.

    At about the same time I read this chapter and this particular commentary on it I heard a sermon titled “The Eighth Day” in which the speaker suggested that we are to be living in the 8th day, somehow in the kingdom even though it’s not here yet. There’s a bit of a theme based on that in the appearances of Jesus in the book of Luke. I believe that we are to be living in eternity, and both our liturgy and our teaching needs to reflect that.

    The liturgy in this passage reflects that full sense of history as we go from inauguration to glory and then to celebration of the glory in one pass.

    The worship here involves everyone. It is emotional. It is educational. It is enthusiastic. It is also rewarded.

    David W. Baker, author of this section of the commentary notes (p. 66):

    … the people could not keep silent before a God who responded to their worship, so they joined their voices to those of the priests (9:24). God can and should be approached at times in stillness (Ps 46:10), but exuberance can also be appropriate. Everyone, young and old, male and female, was represented by the priests and leaders in the rituals; they each witnessed God’s response, and each responded appropriately in worship.

    Just so!

  • Worship: Few Words, Boy Friends, and Girl Friends

    David Ker is complaining about modern worship songs (since the 90s), and Peter Kirk has partially taken him to task about it, wondering about the air down in Mozambique and whether it causes David to rant. (Personally I suspect it’s looking at too many hippos, but in non-essentials charity, I say!) David continues with a more in-depth piece, Droning, desymbolization and Christian mantra. I think the latter is especially well worth reading, though all three will help set the stage.

    Now I’m going to try to “let my words be few,” but I’ve already written quite a number of words, so that may not be easy. [Note after completing this–I failed.] Since I have an eclectic readership, let me note here that this is written to Christians. It’s internal shop talk and will probably be simply boring or weird to others.

    I’m personally in sympathy with David on this from the point of view of music quality and what makes me worship. Over the years, however, I’ve tried to learn to be less critical. If I find it difficult to handle a song, I look around the congregation and inevitably I see plenty of other people who are quite deeply drawn into the crowd. If I focus on that community, I often find myself drawn in as well–to the worship, not really the music.

    After hearing from friends overseas who must drive a couple of hours to fellowship, and have no options, I have felt very convicted about my complaints regarding local worship services. If I don’t like the worship one place, I can easily move to another. Many Christians can’t. Thus read the following advice with reference to American Christians, and to others only where truly applicable.

    To worshipers, if you can’t stand the worship music, get over it. Worship is a communal activity, and it’s likely that if a particular style of music is repeatedly presented at your church, somebody is being attracted to it.

    I recall one church where my wife and I could barely stand some of the music. It always seemed out of harmony with the worship service itself. But then we noticed that there was almost half of a section of the sanctuary filled with kids, many of whom attended that church without their parents, and those kids were completely involved in the very music that was driving us nuts. We chose to get over it.

    If you can’t get over it, and I admit that this is quite possible, find another congregation. I can think of a few churches I’ve visited where I believe my best efforts to follow my own advice would fail. In that case, you need to find a place where you can become a part of the community.

    There is a third option I hesitate to mention, and that is to try to improve the worship experience of your own church. The problem with this approach is that, barring debates over the color of the carpet, debates over styles of worship can be the most divisive, and frequently lose the goal of the best worship for the community in efforts by individuals to have everything done in their personally favorite style. So if you try this option, do it prayerfully and make sure that you’re trying for the best for everybody and not just for yourself.

    Having said this to members of the congregation, I would like to emphasize a paragraph from David’s second post:

    But, worship leaders also have a key role in this. On the stage, it’s easy to get swept away in the beauty of the music and the enjoyment of the moment and not realize that a hundred people in the congregation have their hands in their pockets and are bored out of their minds. Open your eyes, worship leaders! Be aware of the temperature of the congregation. You are supposed to be leading others in worship not zoning out in the front.

    I send a separate message to leaders and congregants. Leaders, if you see your congregation bored, uninvolved, uninterested, or simply not worshiping, then you have some work to do. It’s fine for someone like me to tell people (especially myself!) to get over themselves and worship. But that’s not an excuse for some of the careless crap that goes on in worship.

    People treat a stumbling presentation of the liturgy as a joke, something nice and folksy about the church. Communion is done so frequently that many pastors don’t take time to connect it to the message and the rest of the liturgy. One gets the feeling of “oh yes, we’ve gotta hand out some bread and wine” from such presentations. Worship leaders don’t pay attention to scripture or theme.

    Rather than being folksy and fun, such things make the congregation treat worship as something unimportant and casual. If the minister can’t even find one sentence to insert in the communion liturgy at the appropriate points (marked conveniently with asterisks in the United Methodist hymnal), or the worship leader can’t be bothered to communicate with the minister and provide musical settings with a sense of connection, then the worshipers are justified in concluding that somebody doesn’t really care.

    But finally, what is this business about boy friends and girl friends? Yes, I finally got to that point. It has to do with “I am so in love with you.” (No, not YOU, someone else!) I believe that in scripture one of the strongest metaphors for the way in which God seeks people and for the bond between myself and God is sexual passion. I don’t mean sanitized, hand-holding, going on a date level passion. I mean the kind of passion that makes one unable to wait to get to the bedroom before the clothes are coming off. I imagine that image offends some. Enjoy being offended.

    Then read Ezekiel 16, for example, and see God’s passion for us represented as the passionate desire of a lover, while unfaithfulness is represented as the passion for someone other than our true spouse. There are many other texts. The problem with “lover” music, in my view, is not so much that we trivialize our love for God by expressing it in the form of cheap love lyrics; rather, it’s that our love for God is often so much more shallow than those cheap lyrics.

    Hmmm. I intend none of this as judgmental about any particular person. There are many of you, such as both David and Peter, whose service for God indicates that they speak from a depth of passion that most stay-at-home American Christians cannot hope to match. If you’re in that situation, please don’t be offended at my suggestions here.

    But if you’re just checking off the boxes of your supposed weekly activities, then give it some consideration. Is your relationship with God a casual date or a life-long covenant?

  • If You Are Having Trouble Accessing God, Read This

    When I’m teaching church members, I like to emphasize service in one’s choice of a church congregation.  The best congregation for you is the one where you can best fulfill your call to minister to others.  I believe everyone has such a call.  That’s a generalization that often doesn’t answer that many questions, but it often does help.

    Thus I don’t like to talk much in terms of whether a church “fulfills my needs” or “feeds me” or whether I enjoy the worship services, and whether the services are up to standards.  That seems like selling church as a commodity, and whether you’re looking for child care or entertainment, it’s likely that your church isn’t going to compete well according to secular standards in any case.

    That’s not to say that all these things are not important.  The servant who is not fed, clothed, and housed is unlikely to be able to serve well.  That principle applies spiritually as well as physically.  So the search for a church in which I can best carry out my call to ministry may well come back to the question of where I will be fed, all other things being generally equal.

    I must confess that I’ve been having trouble with “church” for some time.  I’ve struggled with everything from attendance to writing the tithe check.  It’s not because I don’t like to get up that early in the morning.  I have normally had hours with the books before I ever get to church.  It’s not the financial scare of writing the tithe check either.  I’ve been in much more difficult financial circumstances.  The temptation is to right the tithe check to some other organization to accomplish some task that I choose, rather than to my local church, which is where I’m convicted it should go.

    It’s that conviction that keeps me going and keeps me doing these things.  But what if one is a church leader who needs to work with the folks who are a bit less convicted?  I belong to a United Methodist congregation, and 50% attendance on a given Sunday is considered very good.  Some churches run more like 30%.  Part of that is a paperwork problem, in that it is very difficult to remove members from the church rolls when they disappear, and people are not that keen on membership paperwork these days.  It’s one way in which the United Methodist Church is perhaps a bit out of touch–a bureaucratic church in an age when people want to escape that style, at least on Sunday morning.

    But that’s not the whole story.  Somewhere in that 50-70% who are missing on Sunday morning there are a lot of people who simply aren’t convicted enough or motivated enough to show up at church.  So my message to church leaders (including myself), is that we do have to be concerned with feeding the people and motivating them.  It’s all well and good to say they ought to attend church services, and they ought to be looking for a place to serve.  When I’m teaching them, I’ll tell them that.  But we as leaders need to help make them welcome.

    Making people welcome, involving phrases like “seeker sensitive” and even “user friendly” have gotten a bad reputation in some circles, and I think that in many ways they should have.  They can easily lend themselves to marketing a service or advertising entertainment, which is always going to be a losing proposition, unless our churches also fulfill spiritual needs, and fulfilling spiritual needs always leads to both the motivation for, and practice of, action and service.

    I discovered a blog through the Christian Carnival this week, Boston Bible Geeks.  They have a post titled The Necessity of the Church for a Persevering Faith, in which they say:

    But God has not left us alone to fight against sin and temptation.  He has given us each other.  He tells us to assemble together, not to meet a requirement or get a star on our Sunday School attendance chart.  He tells us to meet together so we can build each other up and keep each other from sinning.  We are given the responsibility to restore each other when we do sin (Gal 6:1, I deal with that verse here).

    Now you need to go read the entire post to get the context of that, but the point here is that the congregation–not just the pastor or the Sunday School teacher–is charged to encourage one another in their Christian walk, and the major purpose, according to Hebrews, is to keep us from falling into sin, and to help restore us if we do.

    That reminded me of something that has happened each time I signed onto my web hosting account this week.  There’s a message that appears right after I sign on that says, “If you are having trouble accessing your account, read this.”  It has made me laugh each time.  I even went to check whether it can be accessed without logging in.  It can, but it doesn’t appear conveniently on the login page.  The encouragement, you see, comes only after you’re “in.”

    That’s the problem with church, and even with small groups.  What reaches out and encourages our Bible study each week?  I’ve been disturbed by the number of times I’ve taught a series of Sunday School lessons, and entire Sunday School classes will confess that they didn’t read or study anything that I provided on a topic during the week.  That means that they absorb (too often) or even reject what I say without giving it more thought than occurs in a Sunday School hour.

    It’s as though we have a sign on the inside of our church sanctuary and on the inside of our Sunday School classrooms that says, “If you are having trouble accessing God, read this.”  The church needs to create connections that go beyond the church setting, beyond the Sunday morning hour, and provide a “spurring to good works” (Hebrews 10:24) that lasts through the week.

    There are many means of doing this.  My home church’s new ICON service even has a Facebook page and Twitter account, so that they can send out messages.  But these are only part of the means, not the content.  I’m not a good person to go into all the means of reaching people socially.  I do know it needs to be done in order to build a complete Christian life.  Whether the means are high tech or low tech the question is whether the Christian activity of “spurring” continues all week.

    It’s that spurring, that building of a complete Christian life that will make church worthwhile, and if it’s really worth it, people will be there.

  • Fulfilling Needs or Catering to Wants

    The Internet Monk recommends a couple of books in a post titled Recommended: Wicker and Duin on The End of Evangelicalism, and I’m not going to gainsay his recommendation, considering I have read neither. But one comment he made caught my attention:

    Despite being an interesting read and passing along many good pieces of information and research, Duin’s own point of view is jumbled. One moment she longs for communal simplicity, another for the seminary atmosphere of intense theology and the next for the erudition and authenticity of L’Abri. . . .

    Duin in this quote is Julie Duin, author of Quitting Church. Now please understand that I’m not responding to her viewpoint, which I know only from a very brief second-hand reference. It’s the attitude that the Internet Monk seems to have found in the book, and which I have heard time and time again. Many people seem to be on a wandering quest, looking for whatever is not there in a particular church.

    Further, please don’t read anything I’m writing here as a suggestion that church leaders should be sloppy, or should not care about fulfilling the needs of their congregation. Too often when church leaders tell people to suck it in and live with the church, they are really simply not that interested in reaching those particular people. On the other hand, there are large numbers of pastors and other church leaders who are working themselves to death trying to reach people who may be searching for something that does not, and will not, exist.

    I recall preaching on a Sunday night once, in a church in which that service was attended by the most dedicated folks. I commented that I believed one should join a church not because of the needs it fulfilled, but rather because of how one could serve in and through that church congregation. A gentleman in the congregation objected strenuously. He thought the church needed to do a better job of serving him and of providing the kind of worship service he needed.

    He was not entirely wrong. We do have spiritual needs that must be fulfilled through worship, but ironically, I think, those real needs will never be served while our wants are being catered to.

    Hold that thought for a moment. While I was thinking about some of this, I read 8 in 10 Don’t Want Sunday School on John Meunier’s blog. The study from which he cited these numbers goes on to show that very few people are interested in spiritual formation beyond the occasional church service, and few want a small group experience.

    As a teacher and small group leader, this bothers me quite a bit. But I’m not sure that we’re generally going the right way in response in many churches. You see, we try to find out what people want to have happen on Sunday morning, and then we try to do that. But I believe that when Jesus gets hold of you, you’re going to go places and do things that you might not want to do.

    Worship is about God. Now I’ve argued before that leaders still have to pay attention to the people worshiping. You can’t just do anything you want and expect your congregation to encounter God in worship. But ultimately worship is going to involve loving God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, and that can get uncomfortable.

    Our neighbors? How about the neighbors down the pew? You see, worship is a giving exercise, and it might mean that I need to go and be part of Christ’s body when something is happening that I really don’t care for. If I’m the Bach lover, perhaps I need to be there for the teenagers with their praise band. If I want drums, perhaps I need to be there when the choir is singing an anthem.

    Or the problem might be in sermons. I might be longing for a message filled with intellectual stimulation, but the body, the whole congregation, needs to hear a message of conviction, or one of encouragement. Going to worship together will involve commitment, and horror of horrors, giving up some of what I want in order to be with that body. I want to be made happy. I need to serve and to surrender to God.

    The idea of being spiritual without a social aspect bothers me. The more I study, the more I see the command to love God and to love one’s neighbor as almost identical. This week’s lectionary text, Matthew 25:31-46 (The Sheep and the Goats), brings that more to the fore. Jesus is appearing in the form of people who need my help, and my love for Him is manifested in what I do for them.

    I think quite often when we drop out of church, what we are saying is that we can’t be bothered to spend an hour or two a week doing things that have to do with other people. It all has to be the way I want it to be or I’m not going to go.

    Now we can try to cater to that kind of folks if we want to, but I don’t think they will ever make a congregation. Our problem may not be so much that we lack enough entertaining music, adequate or excellent audio-visual material, or an engaging enough pastor. Our problem may be that we–myself included–lack enough commitment. If such folks are to become truly part of the body of Christ, they’re going to need to be converted, not catered to.

    It may be that rather than a change of church programs we need a change of heart.

  • 2 Corinthians 3:17-18: Freedom to do What?

    2 Corinthians 3:12-18 (CEV) (from BibleGateway.com).

    This post is less about the exegesis, which I’m only covering briefly, and more about application. I have frequently heard this passage (verses 17 and 18) cited in support of a free and unscripted style of worship. In particular, the phrase “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (NRSV) is often repeated on its own in response to any complaints about order in worship. The intended meaning is that if the Holy Spirit is present in a worship service, then restrictions on how people act in worship and what they do for worship will be removed.

    Now I suspect nobody intends it to mean anything quite so radical, but since it is used in response to questions about order, it is hard to tell where people draw the line. I want to make clear that I consider unscripted worship to be valuable as one approach to worship. My point here is not to challenge the idea of unscripted worship and call for a more liturgical style, but rather to put this text in context. Unscripted worship should be supported in a different way.

    Note also that the terms “charismatic,” “contemporary,” and “free or unscripted” are often used with reference to worship nearly synonymously, but that usage produces a dangerous confusion. A charismatic worship service is most frequently one in which you can expect a manifestation of the gifts of the Spirit (at least as understood by that congregation), such as prophecy or words of knowledge, and sometimes tongues. A contemporary worship service is usually less structured and involves contemporary music, but the structure may simply be different. In one local church, a worship service is planned that uses contemporary praise and worship music, but does so in the context of a very liturgical service that might even be called high church. It will be interesting to see how that develops.

    But 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 has only a very tangential relationship to all of this. If we look for the context, in broad terms Paul is defending his ministry. In this case he has come to a more specific point about the glory of the new covenant ministry. He compares this to his own description of Moses and the way in which the glory of the Lord shone from his face after he had been in God’s presence on the mountain. This is loosely based on Exodus 34, but Paul’s focus is different. First, he describes the purpose of the veil as being to cover not the glory itself, but its fading. Second, Paul switches the location of the veil and its function. It is now placed over the heart of contemporary readers. Paul is alluding to Exodus 34, but not interpreting that story.

    This veil on the heart prevents readers from understanding when they read the law. You could connect this to the way in which it concealed the fading of the glory according to Paul, and understand the readers to still see the old covenant as carrying the glory, while Paul wishes to attribute that glory to the new covenant. In any case, it is necessary for the reader to have that veil removed, otherwise they will not see or understand the new covenant and its glory when they read.

    When someone turns to the Lord, that veil is removed, and they can see that true glory. It is debated whether this is Christ or God the Father, but I tend to prefer Christ. This is not my primary subject. Furnish, whose commentary I am currently working through, maintains that this is God the Father. I think there is a substantial theme in the New Testament that suggests that seeing the scriptures through Christ is the key to new understanding. This is reflected in the Emmaus experience (Luke 24:13-35) and also in the book of Hebrews. Perhaps I’ll expand on this in a later post. (Then again, I’ll probably forget!)

    In any case, when the reader turns to the Lord, the veil is removed (16). Then we are reminded that the Lord is Spirit (skipping a bit of linguistic argument on that phrase), and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. I like the CEV’s rephrasing, “17The Lord and the Spirit are one and the same, and the Lord’s Spirit sets us free. 18So our faces are not covered. They show the bright glory of the Lord, as the Lord’s Spirit makes us more and more like our glorious Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:17-18).

    There is a specific type of freedom here, the freedom to see God’s glory as displayed in the new covenant. When we can do that, then we are able to look there, and this results in our transformation. There is nothing here said about styles of worship directly.

    I do, however, think there is a slight implication about worship. There is a point here to experiencing the presence of God, and in worship, we can hope this happens. But it happens in different ways for different people. I am led into God’s presence through Bach, Handel, and sometimes Haydn, for example. My wife truly enters worship through contemporary music. I like a good order of worship; she prefers freedom and flexibility. This passage provides us a direction to look as a result of our time of worship, whether of hearing the word of the Lord spoken, reading it, or anything else. We long to look upon God’s glory, to the extent that we can, and allow him to transform us. That is not Paul’s point, however.

    It is important to see commonly used passages such as this in context, because they often get a quite heavy weight of baggage all their own in the context of the church community, sometimes ending up used for something that would be quite foreign to the one who originally wrote them. New ideas may be valid, but they need to be supported in other ways.

  • A Desire to Please and a Fear to Offend – Psalm 95

    Matthew Henry, in commenting on Psalm 95 says that “[t]his psalm must be sung with a holy reverence of God’s majesty and a dread of his justice, with a desire to please him and a fear to offend him.” I’m wondering just how that was derived from this Psalm.

    I don’t doubt that there we should desire to please and fear to offend God, if for no other reason than that I believe God commands us to do merely what is best for us in any case. But in this Psalm we have a description of approaching God, and it doesn’t seem to match this solemnity. Working from God’s Word (GW), the first couple of verses refer to shouting, using adverbs like “joyfully” and “happily.”

    Now I don’t think reverence and happiness are incompatible. I don’t think shouting and reverence are incompatible. But I know plenty of congregations where they would be seen as such. A person who approached the song service by shouting joyfully would be very unwelcome. I won’t accuse Matthew Henry of making such a mistake. I don’t know precisely what his approach to worship would be.

    At the same time we turn to fearing to offend. Again, a joyous response doesn’t seem to involve a fear to offend, but rather points to a situation in which perfect love has cast fear out (1 John 4:18). And no, I don’t think I’m confusing the awe/fear of reverence with fear as in terror. The one fear the Psalm calls for is a fear of being stubborn and closed off to God’s direction, a fear of testing God.

    I may have been unfair to Matthew Henry here, but his entry on this Psalm doesn’t seem to match the spirit of the work.