New Every Morning

"What happened?" Faith seeking understanding as Worship

2011-06-05T22:37:00.001-07:00

One year ago, a team of us landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. You can read about the trip here. I remember being so full of confidence that this was exactly what I was supposed to be doing, ready to take on whatever challenges would come. They came, to be sure.

Indeed, we would play a lot of things by ear on that trip, trying to do our best to help those who came in our path without creating or reinforcing a dependency on western aid. The question, "what exactly are we doing here?" seemed, if not spoken, on the tip of everyone's tongue, because daily we faced our limitations--our lack of cultural understanding, of physical stamina, of creativity, or wisdom. My hope as a team leader was that, no matter how dark our doubts or ambiguous our effectiveness, we would at least share the experience, trusting one another for encouragement and wisdom. Every day, we ended with a daily wrap-up, in which I would ask, "what happened today?"

To me, this is the essence of worship. A life lived together before God. We sang songs together, prayed for one another, talked about what we had seen and done and, if we could, point to where we saw God in all of it.

A year later, I still present that trip before God, and ask for his Spirit to help me discern: "What happened a year ago?" I ponder this because, while there are many things to which I can point definitively and say, "yes, we did help there," there are also many things that have not turned out the way I expected. I no longer belong to the church that sent me and my 15 other team members to Haiti, and the manner in which that relationship changed still confounds and saddens me.

But more significantly, I remember as I walked into the muggy heat of Port-au-Prince, I was open to the possibility, even eager to see, that this trip to Haiti would be the first step toward a long-term calling to serve there. It may still be that, I suppose, but the vision for such a vocation is much murkier to me now. I know I thought I would be returning sooner than a year, and now I wonder not just how I will go back, but for what purpose? What do I, a teacher and worship leader, really have to offer the desperately poor in another culture?

Without answers, I present myself as I am--disoriented, unsure of my purpose--before God, and seek his Wisdom, praying that I would have eyes to see, ears to hear, patience to wait, and courage to follow.

What would have been Good Friday, 2011

2011-04-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

I've recently stepped away from a church that was my home for the last two and half years. This being a public blog, and the reasons for my departure having interpersonal dynamics, I don't feel like it's appropriate to go into details here, or now.

It goes against everything in me not to explain myself. I hate being misunderstood, and I have felt that sting too many times. It is one of the worst feelings, to think you are being judged, not for things you have done (that's no fun, either), but for misperceptions. I want to justify my leaving. I want to be validated.

Jesus' death on the cross challenges me not to do so.

This, actually, would have been the central thrust of the Good Friday service I had been planning, before my departure: if we follow in the footsteps of Christ, if we take his salvation, then we are justified solely by his death. There is no room for self-justification if we accept his--this is what taking up our cross means: putting to death the self we tried to defend against all attacks, and standing only on Grace for our worth.

That gathering never took final form, but I thought I would share the reflections that were to have shaped it:

"The Woman gave it to me, and I ate"
"The serpent decieved me"

"When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. 'I am innocent of this man’s blood,' he said. 'It is your responsibility!'

The desire to defend and justify ourselves is as old as time. Adam and Eve, the archtypes of our fallen nature, do this immediately upon being confronted with their guilt: Don't blame me! It's someone else's fault! Pilate (in vain, of course) seeks to absolve himself, to find some measure of personal peace in telling himself that executing a man he believes to be innocent is the responsibility of the Jews.

The more I am aware of this bent of human nature, the more I realize how destructive it is. At every turn, we are confronted with attacks to our dignity, challenges to our worth. "This is your chance to show how committed you are to the success of this company." "It was your job to take the garbage out." "For what you spend on lattes, you could feed starving children in Honduras." In all areas of life, we could be doing more: we could improve ourselves or our situation or our world; to deny this would be the height of hubris.

I know I myself am constantly trying to outrun the doubts about my adequacy. The whole world is trying to prove itself, all of us trying to build a legacy, have something to show for ourselves and our efforts. We are trying to justify ourselves.

At the cross, however, we are justified by God, through Jesus' death. The price of our inadequacy is no longer ours to bear, but God's to bear and to banish. What does it mean to be justified in Christ? Certainly it means we don’t have to carry the weight of our sin any more--the perfect One has forgiven our imperfection. But it is more than that: it means we are no longer trying to show the world that we are a good person, worthy of love. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.

So we no longer have to carry the weight of righteousness either. Our worth is not determined by an adding up of the good and subtracting the bad, for as Jesus death shows us, God does not value us that way. We are beloved, worthy of the costliest of rescues, the death of the only Son, not because of our righteousness, but in the middle of our inadquacy.

If we crucify ourselves with Christ, we no longer have an independent self to defend. We no longer have to prove ourselves. Being a Christian is not trying to be a good person--the death of Jesus proves that being good enough is impossible for us--he died for all of us. We put to death the whole mess of trying to be good and failing. We put to death the losing game of failing to love others as much as we ought, as much as we want.

My temptation is always to self-justify, always to defend my honor. The world, the accuser, is always on the attack, always saying, “it depends on you, and you will fail.” If you do not love your kids, they will grow up to be miscreants. If you make a mistake at your job, you will be fired, passed over for a promotion, be stuck in a dead-end. You must measure up.

The cross says this: the measure was impossible for you, but it has already been met. If you accept the grace of the cross, there is no more measure to measure up to. God has covered it all. So do not only put to death your sins, put to death also your righteousness. If you accept the validity and worth God gives you, your righteousness is an outflow from him, a sign of his grace in you, not an insufficient effort on your part.

Here are my rights
Here are my deeds
I'm only made righteous
By the wounds where he bleeds,
The wounds of my God, who is gracious, so gracious to me.

So my prayer for myself, this Good Friday, is that God would take this, my desire to be understood and affirmed. Take this, the ache of separation and broken trust. Take this, the need to have been right in every decision I have made. These are my own attempts at righteousness. I lay them down, and again declare that I live under Grace. Amen.

K-Love Christianity

2011-04-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

Every so often, I try to listen to the local K-Love affiliate. If you don't know, their slogan is "Positive and Encouraging." As in, the rest of life/radio/music is negative and discouraging, but K-Love is the opposite. It's not actually a bad slogan for them--the words of the songs they play generally talk about how great God is and how following him is wonderful. I can't stand about more than 10 minutes of it.

Now, I do think Christians should be encouraging people, and I do think following Jesus is a path to joy and peace, and I do think God is great. But my life is not always positive. Singing songs that say it is does not encourage me. And there are times when following Jesus is a long, hard, lonely path that does not yield much in the way of immediate happiness or satisfying answers.

I recently had a conversation with someone who thought it was a good idea to use many of the same songs from K-Love's playlist in worship (and many of those songs, at first blush, seem to fit that purpose) because new Christians could listen to the songs on the radio all week, allowing them not only to learn them but also to start practicing worship as a lifestyle, rather than an event just on Sunday morning. In theory, this seems like a good idea.

The problem is that the path of following Jesus is not positive and encouraging, not most of the time. The people Jesus calls "blessed" do not have much to be positive or encouraged about. They are poor, hungry, empty of power, persecuted, to name a few. Even the pure in heart have to live among the rest of us, whose hearts are full of ugliness and pain and selfishness. Jesus is friend of sinners, but also speaks "Woe!" seven times in Matthew chapter 23. And of course, he suffered humiliation, betrayal, and death--John reminds us at the outset that "his own did not receive him."

I've read many places that at least one third of the Psalms are laments. The book of worship from the pinnacle of the ancient Israel's worship is filled with songs of desperation, sadness, anger, and questioning.

Worship does not pretend. God, who sees all, does not need us to put on our happy face. He does not want us to, because that is lying to him, hiding from him. It is the first consequence of sin, that we run away from God and try to hide our nakedness. The reason Christians are free to worship honestly is because God's approval of us is not dependent on us. We cannot become presentable to God. We do not have to be.

These are not new ideas. From the beginning, the mark of Christians has been sharing everything with one another, confessing and praying with one another, and recognizing, through wine and bread, that our righteousness before God is not of our own making.

There is nothing that can separate us from God's love. Not negativity or discouragement or anger, or any of the other things that are inevitable in a world that fall short of the glory of heaven--and we shouldn't hide these things from God, either. That is the kind of worship I hunger for.

Creativity and collaboration lose a home on the web

2010-12-06T16:13:00.001-08:00

This is a quintessenial blog post--a quasi-rant about a really esoteric topic. But it's about a website that has been a great resource and community for me, and I'm grieved by the news that it's terminal. If you've found me from that site, please let me know in the comments below about your response. Thanks.

The change that was to come
For some time (as you have been able to see on my sidebar), I've been a pretty engaged member on CreativeWorshipTour.com. I have had no economic interest in being active--I don't have a speaking schedule, I haven't written a book, I'm not even currently employed in any capacity that relates to creative worship. I just love the subject.

Several months ago, Creative Worship Tour administrators (the ownership and management of the site has never been made clear) informed us that a new site was being developed to replace it. It was supposed to be the next generation.

The disappointment of what finally is
Well, the new site is finally "up," and it's essentially a blog. Though the promises about what Clayfire was going to be were murky, the roll-out this week has been a huge disappointment to me, on two fronts:

First, the new site is not a platform for open-sourced free collaboration. It is a blog run by, it seems, three people heavily involved with CreativeWorshipTour.com site. If you want to share something, it needs to be in the format the site managers are asking for, and something they like. There are no discussion forums. Nobody except the administrators can post a blog. The only content and features that will continue to exist on Clayfire are the blog entries by the site administrators.

Secondly, the communication about and process of developing this new site has been abysmal. There has been little explanation for the decision to shut down CreativeWorshipTour. Here's one quote (from the Clayfire Facebook page):

Creative Worship Tour was launched as an exploration into the world of creative worship. Over the past few years we have learned a great deal from everyone involved. clayfire is the next phase in this process. While we love the name of Creative Worship Tour as well, know that the principles of the social network site will continue in a more focused way with clayfire. We look forward to moving forward in this exciting new direction. Hope this helps!

The original projected launch date of Clayfire--which we were told would be at www.weareclayfire.org, a site which does not now exist--was supposed to be October. That date came and went with no explanation.

Follow the money?
The most baffling part of this is why this change happened at all. I like CWT. There may have been a few features I would have liked to see improve, but it functioned well. The only explanation of this whole saga that is plausible to me is about the money.

When I first joined CWT, I had one conversation with a friend who seemed to be privy to some of the process that led to the site's creation. Augsberg Fortress, the publishing wing of the ELCA, was looking to create a resource for post-modern worship. They reached the conclusion that a published book would not serve this well--the timeline for publishing a hymnal meant that all resources would be stale by the time the volumes were ready for sale. An online collaborative community would be much more useful. These were, according to my friend, the seeds of CWT.

Fast-forward to today. Clayfire is produced by Sparkhouse, "the ecumenical division of Augsburg Fortress, the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in a America (ELCA)." (see here). What's on the lower left sidebar of every page of Clayfire? An ad for their most recent book, Mark Pierson's new book "The Art of Curating Worship," published by, you guest it, Augsberg Fortress.

I don't know who was funding CWT. Ning.com, the company that provides the social network platform that CWT runs on, lists its prices here, and at the least, CWT was costing someone $20 a month (maybe more like $50). But it was not revenue-generating for anyone. The new site is clearly designed with that possibility in mind. But it was not designed for open-source collaboration.

Quo vadimus?
"Quo Vadimus," a term I learned from another cultural artifact that was too short-lived--the TV show SportsNight--means, "where are we going?" And that is the question I am asking myself, and, if you are a CWT refugee, I am asking you. Are you going to be active on Clayfire Curator? Are you going to turn your efforts to another network? Perhaps the Ning-powered Love is Concrete? Do we need to petition to keep CWT alive, under new management? Do we need to start our own site? Please comment.

Art, and the world as it should be

2010-07-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

I had a friend of mine joke recently that he didn't believe in "sin." I knew what he meant--the word seems to be permanently moored to its Puritanical witch-burning, Victorian prudish moralizing associations. The various attempts to recapture and renew the word, and thus the concept, are noble, but are fighting an uphill battle. Voices inside the church don't want to see us "go soft," and voices outside the church are happy to scoff at the hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and hopeless naivete of a religion that seeks to set moral absolute standards for everybody.

Most artists, I think, are loathe to embrace the term "sin" since it seems to represent a kind of absolute certainty--a clear boundary about what is "good" and what is not. And artists live in the ambiguity of this world--we reflect on, express, expose--and, yes, celebrate--nuance and double-meaning. Think of Shakespeare's Hamlet--a hero out to set right the injustice and betrayal and murder of his father, driven to near madness and while successful in his primary goal, he achieves it at the expense of his life and the lives of nearly all he loves. The enduring indigenous American musical tradition of Jazz makes it's bed in harmonic dissonance, from the most elemental blues to the most esoteric free Jazz. Irony, ambiguity, tension--these traits make art captivating and human.

And this is what we mean by "sin"--a world of broken symmetry, of seemingly unconquerable adversaries, a world that is impossible to resolve neatly. To those that would close their eyes to the suffering and dissonance of this world, art calls us back to the reality of that.

But art can do something more, too. It can point us beyond this world to the world to come, the world as it should be. That kind of art takes imagination and guts. It cannot be tame. The sometimes violent apocalyptic imagery in the Bible--of wars, of consuming fire, of terrifying signs (play Mozart's "Dies Irae" here)--is saying something about this. The world as it is will not be made right easily. There are too many forces pulling the world into decay for redemption not to be a struggle. It makes sense to me that the final complete redemption of the world would be a terror. Resurrection only comes after death.

It's much easier not to hope for a world set right, because that means facing the huge chasm between that world and the one we live in. It's easier to stop trying to imagine a world set right because it seems too far off, too improbable.

This is the other--and, I think harder and more dangerous--thing for art to do: to those that would not acknowledge or can not see the possibility of a world set to rights, of purity and beauty--the world of the age to come--art can show us that indeed there is something beyond the decay and corruption and failure of the world we see.

In a dying neighborhood overcome by violence and squalor, art can say, "we are human beings, intended for a life of dignity, freedom, and well-being." In a nation of profits and consumers, art can say, "love is stronger than money." In a generation of pleasure seeking, art can say, "the world will be redeemed by self-denial."

This is not art born of an easy, hopeless naivete. This is art of the resistance, and it is dangerous. Where have you seen this kind of expression? How did it interact with your life, your community?

Good Friday, Part 1: Planning and Design.

2010-04-26T20:23:00.000-07:00

Brace yourselves. This will be a two-part recap about our Good Friday Gathering. These posts are gonna be long. But when I am reading about others' creative worship ideas, I find details to be helpful. I hope what I've included is the good stuff. And if you want to just see what happened and skip the background and process, go to Part Two.

The Context

I am a member of small Nazarene Church just south of Sacramento, CA. Our meeting space is functional but aesthetically bland. We average around 60 people on Sunday mornings. Except for our children's pastor, we're all volunteers. I'm normally a just band member, but this was an opportunity to design the whole gathering from the ground up (this was my second year doing this).

Our Sunday worship gathering is typically casual-Evangelical: modern-rock style songs in the first half, a sermon in the second half. Our children meet separately during Sunday morning worship, and our youth leave for their own lesson when the sermon begins. .

The Vision
One of my chief goals was to work harder to incorporate more people into the creative process. This comes from my belief that worship created by community has potential to be a dramatically visible sign of God's working in community.

I often see these special gatherings as a chance to cast a different vision for worship than our usual practice, to whet the appetite for something deeper, broader, more eclectic, experimental and unexpected, more hands-on. So I wanted to bring our children and youth into the process of making this gathering, engaging them more rather than separating them out. I also wanted to make this a better multi-sensory gathering, not so focused on words and music.

These commitments are ways of intentionally counter-balancing my own weaknesses. Too, often, I do things all by myself rather than ask other people, mostly out of a
desire for creative control and a fear of trusting someone else's tastes and judgments. Also, I know I am a new music junkie; prone to going overboard on new songs because they fit the story or the message perfectly. That can lead to neglecting other modes of expression, and a lack of silence, listening, and undirected space.

The Process
My brother Phil likens worship design to a Mosaic--you may have a broad idea of what you have in mind, but you really start putting it together when you have the pieces in front of you.

I began this process about 5 weeks before Good Friday, and the first 3 weeks were spent exploring, thinking, and conversing. Collecting the pieces of the mosaic, as it were. Some of the pieces I collected are detailed below, and some, like the ones I mentioned in this CWT discussion on Lent ideas, didn't end up in the final version.

The conversations were a mixture of theological reflection and brainstorming ideas. Being intent involving the Youth Group, I had many conversations with one of the Youth leader. My youth leader friend brought in Max Lucado's book "He Chose the Nails," which she said was speaking to her deeply. Now, I'm not a big Max Lucado fan. So it was a good exercise in humility, listening, and patience for me to take this book and my friend's reaction and see where it would fit in. In the end, the concept--not so much the flowery writing--had a real impact on the direction of the gathering.

Taking these conversations and ideas and synthesizing them into something for our church--this was still largely something I did on my own. About a week and a half before Good Friday, an idea crystallized--an activity that would bring all these musings together. It was a participatory hands-on, full of symbolism but not to abstract. It was kind of thrilling for everything to coalesce, but also a little nerve-wracking, since it meant I had to get everything together in a short time period.

That's when I began bringing in more people to help implement the different elements of the gathering. I asked Youth and Children's leaders to help create some of the visual materials (like a craft project). I organized a musical ensemble--some of them didn't normally play on Sunday mornings, and they agreed to play. For the group activity, I asked for volunteers a week ahead of time to read an overview of the activity and pick one group to lead, based on what resonated with them.

On Good Friday, I went over to the church and, with the help of a few of these friends, set up the space. We did band practice just before the gathering (that's the only time everyone was available), and I asked a few people to do some readings as they came in 10 minutes or so before the service.

The Pieces

Much of my own reflecting centered on how to understand the Cross in today's so-called "post-modern" culture. Judgment is so scorned today, the idea of God bringing punishment for sin upon Jesus might seem to caricature God as a taciturn Victorian headmaster. How would our youth be able to really connect to the story of the cross from a cultural context that says "don't ever judge?"

It seemed to me like the "Don't be Judgmental" mantra really resulted in a "Don't Care" mentality. I wrote this in my working notes:

Sin is what causes us to withdraw, to stop caring, to protect ourselves from getting hurt. But love, Real Love, does care. Real Love does get hurt, because the alternative is a comatose, existence, where nothing matters enough to be sad when it is destroyed. Jesus is God refusing to protect himself,
refusing to withdraw.

I thought how radical it is to die for something, and thought this gathering might be about exploring what Jesus died for, what his intent and purpose was. It was time to start announcing the service, so I put together the graphic at the top of this post for our Sunday announcements, bulletins and website

I read the gospel stories of Jesus' passion, trying to identify some way to organize the story, to find the structure of the narrative. I identified these ways Jesus suffered:

Afraid (sweating blood)
Alone (disciples sleeping, deserting him)
Betrayed (Judas, Peter)
Falsely Accused/Misjudged (Sanhedrin, Pilate)
Humiliated (beaten, mocked, rejected by his own)
Killed (torture and death)

I wrote this in my working notes:

"Christ is the example of how to redeem suffering. We share in his suffering because he sets the example for us: we follow in his footsteps at each point, confronting our fear, facing ridicule, dying (to self), so that we may participate in the redemption of the world."

In past creative elements I had designed, I found that many members of my church were reluctant to do or say anything in front of everyone, but are very open in smaller groups. I wanted to do some activity in small groups.

I made a list of possible songs, and one that I really set on was "At the foot of the cross" by Kathryn Scott (lyrics | music video). I found the language full of rich imagery: "where grace and suffering meet"..."trade these ashes in for beauty, and wear forgiveness like a crown." The idea of ashes for beauty got me thinking about how I might use real ash to make some kind of picture. The end of the chorus became my kind of mission for the service: "I lay every burden down at the foot of the cross." How, I thought, can we actively lay our burdens down? How can we let Jesus bear the weight of sin--all the things the break us and hold us back--as he really did?

I read two descriptions of a kind of group art project, where participants make one piece of a larger picture, often not knowing what the final picture will be. See Linda Sines' blog post on what she created. I did a lot of searching for images, using Google Image Search and Creativemyk, to name a couple. I found this artwork by artist Gregory Eanes using Google Image Search, and I really like the way it abstracted the crucifixion into four different elements. I also was struck by the painting by Emil Nolde shown on the right here.

Music was actually a challenge. I wanted to do my best not to pick a whole bunch of new songs. I the three weeks prior to Good Friday, we introduced "At the Foot of the Cross" (including it twice in those three weeks), but our standard repertoire had little offer in speaking of suffering, of living in the moment of sorrow, of confessing, hurt, shame, grief, anger, and rejection. (Eric Herron just surveyed the 25 most popular worship songs and found some of the same deficits)

One of my favorite hymns relating to Good Friday is "O Sacred Head." I know I'm not going to top Bach's classic chorale harmonization of this, but that kind of music--something I deeply love--just doesn't communicate well in our church, and even if we tried it, we couldn't do it justice. So instead, I wrote a new tune for "O Sacred Head," a kind of scots-irish-inspired folk tune.

Lastly, I checked with our sound/video expert to see if he would be willing to set up the space differently, so that the video would be projected away from the band, letting us in the band stay out of the field of view for people looking at the screen.

Part Two: The gathering as it happened.

Good Friday, Part 2: the Gathering

2010-04-26T20:21:00.001-07:00

This is a description of our Good Friday Service. For background about the context, concept and process, see Part 1.

Layout
I set up the room differently, as sketched below. The normal setup is on the left, with the band spread across the stage in front. Besides having a communion table, I also set up four stations for the small-group activity: poster-size images for people to interact with (description of this activity is further down). Those stations are the thick lines in the sketch on the right.

Visual Environment
Our ambient lighting is fluorescent (yuck!), so those lights were off. I put together makeshift stand lighting for musicians and speakers (the podium for speakers was between the communion table and the screen). The four images were pinned to black screens, lit by a small reading lamp on the floor, (I removed the shade and taped a piece of paper around half of it, letting the light shine onto the screen).

I use Powerpoint because I find it easier to customize layouts and transitions for each slide, and I like being able to put the readings in the Notes field, and the export it all to word for a handy visual play-by-play. Here are a couple examples of the Powerpoint slides:

The Gathering
Here is the "Order of Service." (Four people rotated through the different scripture readings.) We began with a song familiar to our church, Chris Tomlin's riff on When I Survey (The Wonderful Cross). After that, our pastor opened with a prayer, and I followed with a short introduction, encouraging people to listen, watch, and meditate.

Readings from Matthew 26, John 13, and Isaiah 53.

Then I gave this reflection/invitation: "Jesus suffers for our sake; he takes on the suffering that we have caused, and endures the suffering that we endure. Why? Because of his great love for us. The Bible tells us that he went to the cross for us not because we are worthy of it, not because anyone else would say we are worth dying for. But Jesus does. Jesus’ life tells us that God thinks that our salvation is worth dying for.

Tonight, we will look at four ways that Jesus has born the burden of the sins of the world through his suffering. And then we will be invited to follow in his footsteps, laying our burdens on him as he carries them to the cross. Listen to the story..."

Following this, we heard selecting readings from the Gospels related to four ways Jesus experienced suffering: Betrayal, Abandonment, Humiliation and Injustice:

Next, we sang "O Sacred Head" (to a new tune I wrote.)

Then I shared a brief reflection about what Jesus accomplishes on the cross for us, why suffering is the way Jesus shows his love, and how his suffering and death are an invitation to lay our burdens at his feet, so that we would not have to carry them.

Then I invited people to go to one of the stations, respond according to the instructions, and then come to the communion table. Here are what the four stations looked like, and how people were invited to respond:

Betrayal - In the paper hands that are holding Jesus' arm on the cross on this poster, write the names (or initials) of friends (or relatives, or other people) who have betrayed, abandoned or failed you. Or, write the names of friends, family, or other relationships that you have hurt, betrayed, or abandoned.

Humiliation - Around the picture of the crown of thorns, write something that signifies your own humiliation. Perhaps it is the worst insult someone has ever called you, or the cruelest barb someone has thrown your way. Perhaps it is the most embarrassing moment you suffered. Or write something that signifies the worst name you have ever called someone, or a time when you tried to take someone's dignity from them. Jesus' death has paid the price for that guilt, too. Even if the exact words or situation are too personal to write down fully, try to think of initials, a single word, or a simple picture that would be make sense to you.

Injustice - On the sign above Jesus' head, the Romans wrote the accusation against him: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews (In Latin, the first letters of each word spell "I.N.R.I."). On this poster of the sign, write the accusations and injustices you have carried with you. Perhaps they are instances you have been cheated or falsely accused. Perhaps they are injustices in the world you have witnessed or have grabbed your heart. Perhaps they are times when you have had the power to make things right, but have acted in your own interests and have not done so. Perhaps they are ways you have cheated others. Even if these things are too personal to write clearly, think of a single word, or of initials, that would represent this burden you carry.

Pain - Jesus sufferers pain and wounds; his body is broken for us, so that when we suffer in our bodies, we can know that he has endured this and that his love is greater. Take an index card and write about the pain, disease, and suffering that you or a loved one has endured. Take a push-pin and stick these somewhere on the image.

The above instructions are excerpts--each group leader was given a few paragraphs to read that summarize the way Jesus suffered, and each instruction ends with a reminder that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; these burdens we have carried can be put to death with him, so that we are freed from them.

After about 15 minutes of open ended time, as people began to take communion, we sang Kathryn Scott's song "At the foot of the cross." Then I wrapped it up with a few parting words. This was the only time I spoke off the cuff, but I said something like this:
"When the disciples left the cross that day, they were full of confusion, sadness, shock. And so we're going to leave tonight remembering that sorrow that Christ took on himself, and leave quietly. But we don't leave without hope. We know what Jesus' death means. Look around. Look at the burdens he has taken from us, that he has suffered for us on our behalf. You don't have to carry them any more. So Go in Peace."

I think what made this really special for me is that even though I had been planning this for months, and had scripted out almost all of it, I was still able to participate myself, to engage in these acts of worship on a very personal level, not just stand and observe or direct from a distance. Seeing people literally giving their burdens to Jesus was very moving.

Why nobody listens

2009-06-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. Why is this not good news for anyone anymore? Why are we, at least in the Western Church losing generations?

Some of us are quick to point to moral relativism: nobody believes in Truth anymore, Right and Wrong are personal opinions, and the only people concerned about condemnation are those religious fanatics who would make themselves and the rest of us happier if they just stopped moralizing everything.

But very few people really believe in moral relativism. Anarchists, perhaps. But most of us do believe in right and wrong; most of us are outraged at evil, at corruption. What spurred the anger at AIG bonuses? What fueled the recent political protest against the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold the controversial Proposition 8? Why do courtroom dramas grab our attention? Why, in any movie or television series, do we savor the moment when the villian gets his comeuppance in the end? A sense of moral outrage.

So, in the context of all this outrage, why is the Church so laughably irrelevant to most people? Is it the scandal of Grace, where we offer forgiveness and love where everyone else demands blood? Where, against all other voices, we say "no offense is unpardonable?" Hardly. We're doing just fine demanding blood.

Instead, WE have become the outrage. The Guardian recently printed letters in reaction to another clergy abuse scandal. Line after line, the indictment of the Church's reaction to this, yet another scandal, shake with moral outrage. Outrage at the perpetrators of abuse, for certain. But more than that, outrage at the cover-up, the protection of the clergy at the expense of children, and outrage at a lack of "real contrition."

How can we witness to Grace, when we have committed the offense? Apparently, leaders in this case figure that "there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus" means "what I did wrong doesn't matter anymore to Jesus, so I shouldn't have to bother with real apologies to anyone else." This is a perversion, the complete opposite of what the presence of Grace means.

What Grace means is this: because of Jesus, we no longer have to protect our image. We protect our image because we fear condemnation, we fear what people will think of the church if they knew (we like to dress this notion up by talking about "preserving our witness"). But through Jesus, we encounter how fully and completely God loved us while we were still sinners and how he does not seek to condemn us, but to rescue us. If we truly believed that the love of God is eternal, unconditional, unwavering, and that that is enough--if we truly had surrendered our lives into his care--then we could admit to the worst of offenses without fear. There is no condemnation.

But we are still trying to prove ourselves. We are still trying to be Righteous. Don't we know that is impossible? Do we need yet another example of how Law leads to death? How long will we hang onto the impossible hope that we can justify ourselves?

Not that we would not grieve for the offense, or for the consequences, intended or otherwise. We know that since nothing can separate us from God's love, we can endure the worst humiliation, the most wretched rejection. God has already done this on our behalf (though in his case it was entirely unmerited).

So, because Christ has done the same for me, taken the condemnation on my behalf, I can say this: I am sorry. What we did and did not do was terrible, evil, and there is no excuse for it. I'm sorry for the abuse, for the cover-up, for the excuses, for the public shaming of abuse victims, for the incompetence and cruel indifference of church leaders. I am sorry for the spiritual abuse, the violation of a sacred and spiritual relationship, for the wounds we did not try to heal and the offenses we did not redress.

But I am one voice, and there are so many others in the Body of Christ that are quick to blame and slow to apologize, assign punishment and slow to accept penance. No wonder nobody listens to us. We do not really believe in Grace. Our actions say that we are not really forgiven, we are only under the Law, that there really is no good news. God help us.

What I'm talking about, apparently

2009-06-01T13:12:00.003-07:00

Thanks to wordle.net.

The Narrative of Worship, Part II

2009-05-07T11:55:00.005-07:00

In Part 1, I described what narrative worship is, and where the process of designing narrative worship starts. Here I'm going to give you a practical example.

In September of 2007, I had the chance to lead worship for Santa Barbara Free Methodist Church. The text for the week was the parable of the lost sheep, and our pastor intended to ponder the question, "How lost is too lost?"

So I asked the worship team to ponder this question: what is it look and feel like when we are aware we are lost? We spent the week as a team sharing our experiences of wandering, reflecting on how God had come to find us when we had gone so far away. The story of the Prodigal Son seemed to fit many of our own experiences, to be a parallel to the text for the week. We thought about what it meant to be a long way off from God, to return.

We asked that, contrary to our usual practice, that people remain seated or kneel, to enact where we start when we return to God: kneeling in contrition, or sitting in refection

Then we began with a reading from the voices of the Prophets:

Leader 1: We all like sheep have gone astray...
Leader 2: ...people lost in the Darkness...
Leader 1: ...Everyone to our own way

1: Even now, Declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart
2: Rend your hearts, and not your garments
1: Return to the Lord your God for he is gracious and compassionate

Leader 3: (Will you respond in this call to worship--) As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, my God
Congregation: Lord Jesus, our hearts can find no rest until they rest in you

And we began singing "Hungry, I come to you for I know you satisfy..." Our next song, Come ye Sinners, invited us to move from contrition to action, from the awareness of our need to the promise of God's sustenance. We did this by using the traditional minor-key hymn tune for the first two verses, and segued to the major-key version written by Robbie Seay. During the segue, we read this text, from Psalm 51:

Generous in love—God, give grace!
You have all the facts before you;
whatever you decide about me is fair.
I've been out of step with you for a long time,
in the wrong since before I was born.
Going through the motions doesn't please you,
a flawless performance is nothing to you.
I learned God-worship
when my pride was shattered.
Heart-shattered lives ready for love don't
for a moment escape God's notice.
What you're after is truth from the inside out.
Enter me, then; conceive a new, true life.
God, make a fresh start in me,
shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.

And as we sang the chorus/refrain after the third verse ("I will arise and go to Jesus...") we invited people to stand. We finished with Chris Tomlin's Holy is the Lord ("We stand and lift up our hands...") and Your Grace is Enough. Musically, these songs move from mellow and reflective to driving and jubilant. Lyrically, we sequence the songs to match our bodily posture, going from sitting or on our knees in confession to standing and lifting our hands at the celebration of God's all-sufficient grace.

There are all sorts of ways to bring narrative structure to a worship gathering. As in the example above, you can consider the content of the message and build a narrative around that. A number of weeks ago, I structured our whole Sunday morning gathering using Psalm 40 as a template (and singing the U2 song of the same name as an opener and closer). For our church's recent Good Friday service, I used the classic Seven Last Words of Christ in a tenebrae service, darkening the room with each reading. The point is to listen to the story before you, structuring your story around that.

One more thing to consider: the more willing you are to treat the liturgy as a living tradition and not a script set in stone, the more freedom you have to arrange and re-invent elements for the gathering, and the more vital I believe your storytelling can be. If you don't follow a formal liturgy, you miss the benefit of being formed by the work of generations of saints before you, of the larger communion of the body of Christ. Worship is then only what you invent yourself. (See Jodi-Renee Adam's recent post for more thoughts about this.) Other other hand, if the liturgy becomes a formula, a law, then you miss the reason it came into being in the first place: to structure worship gatherings in a way that forms us into the story of God. To re-use a phrase of Jesus: the liturgy was made for man, not man for liturgy.

The Narrative of Worship, Part 1

2009-05-04T11:48:00.009-07:00

Thanks to Josh Linman from CreativeWorshipTour.com for suggesting this topic. Part 1, here, will give some of the background on what narrative worship is (and what it isn't), and where we have to start when approaching worship as narrative.

As worship designers, we try to think about putting all the elements of a gathering together so that they fit. Every church does this at the most rudimentary level when they sing "Silent Night" on Christmas Eve and "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" on Easter Morning. Most churches will not end the service with a "gathering" song, nor begin their church service with a "sending" song. The content of our music--and by extension, the rest of what we do in worship--should exhibit some internal coherence within the service and some external coherence with the season or occasion.

But what happens if we are more intentional about the internal and external coherence of our worship design? This is something we value and appreciate from the pulpit: most pastors will seek to organize their sermons well, perhaps outlining three interpretive points and turning to application at the end (internal coherence). And most embark on sermon series, either topical or exegetical, or alternatively follow a lectionary that reflects the Christian calendar (external coherence). So why would we not think to do this in all elements of our worship gathering?

When I am planning worship, I find it most helpful to think as the gathering (the service) as a narrative, a story to be told. When I lead a creative team, my question is, "What story are we telling?" Storytelling, after all, is how God communicates with us in Scripture, how Jesus teaches those who have ears to hear. Next, I often consider three more detailed questions: "What story are we telling," I follow by asking "where do we start?" "where do we need to be in order to hear the message of the sermon?" and "if we hear that message, what would our response be?" (This is assuming, of course, that there will be a sermon. In our recent Good Friday gathering, we did not have a sermon per se, but a series of texts and reflections.)

This is more than just finding songs to fit a theme, though that is an important step. It is about orienting songs, words, and actions toward a focal point in the gathering, and orienting our gatherings toward a focal point in the season or series. It is structuring our worship with spiritual awareness and purpose.

Designing narrative worship also must be a process of submission, like any creative process. Madeleine L'Engle talks about this creative process in Walking on Water:

If the work comes to the artist and says, "Here I am, serve me," then the work of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about....When the artist is truly the servant of the work, then the work is greater than the artist....When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work. Getting out of the way is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer....We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not, otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it.

So it is with designing narrative worship. We must learn to listen to the particular story that God would have us tell. Unfortunately, we don't often do a good job of listening at a church. One church I'm familiar with always starts with a fast song, and gradually gets slower. To them, you have to start a service with something flashy, exciting. And fast = flashy and exciting. And then to be ready to hear the message, you need something reflective, emotional, introspective; and this, to them, obviously calls for a slow tempo. This rigidity doesn't lend itself to a narrative aesthetic, or rather, it lends itself to only one narrative. And Jesus didn't tell only one parable. The Bible doesn't only one gospel, it has four.

Another example: I remember hearing an organist who always did some sort of modulatory interlude between the third and fourth verses of the hymn, raising the key a half-step, and pulling out all the stops. When we get to the fourth verse of "Crown Him with many Crowns," and we sing "Crown Him the Lord of peace, whose power a scepter sways/ From pole to pole, that wars may cease, and all be prayer and praise," we don't want to sing this like a Sousa March. If we listen to the story of this hymn, we will hear that the reign of Christ culminates when the lion lays down with the lamb. And our music should reflect this.

Narrative worship can only happen if we learn to listen, to pay attention not just to the moral of the story, but the contour and structure of the story as well.

Where does this story start? Dispair? Complacency? Thankfulness? Anger?

How do we get from that start, to the place where we can hear God's word to us today? Where we are open to the possibility of something transformative? Does it require confession? Brainstorming? Silence? Movement?

And what is different now that we have heard? What has Christ made new? What captives has he freed, what mission is he sending us on?

In defense of church buildings

2009-04-15T10:12:00.006-07:00

Earnest Goodman doesn't like church buildings. Or rather, he doesn't like what church buildings do to churches. In the seventh part of his Counterintuitive Church blog post series, Goodman describes the vicious cycle that church buildings embody. First a Church outgrows the living room it started in, then it outgrows the storefront, and then it outgrows a single location and goes multi-site. Each decision to "upgrade" seems sensible at the time, but with the effect of tying a church to its capital assets, rather that to the mission of God. Imagine, he blogs, if Mars Hill church sold all its facilities and unleashed itself and its pastor for greater things.

Goodman is articulating a large vein that runs in the Missional Church conversation, where planting churches is valued more than growing churches. I resonate with this line of thought. After all, I have worked at two churches where their buildings were the proverbial albatross around the congregation's neck. In his book Culture Making, Andy Crouch profiles this all-to-common scenario in writing about Boston's Church of All Nations:

It was then that the church’s leaders’ retained an architectural firm that designed an ultramodern building, a pure two-story cylinder of dull brick, without a single window…. The Truth is that the church’s fate was sealed with that single architectural decision made in the late 1960’s. The church was doomed not by theology or ideology, but by its captivity to a culture….A few years ago, its doors closed for the last time.

I get it. Buildings take vast amounts of resources, and church buildings lay dormant for so many hours of the week. Why not devote those resources elsewhere? Why not store up for ourselves treasures in heaven instead of treasures on earth, where moths and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal?

Except.

Walk into a cathedral, or a grand colonial-style church, or even visit a little country chapel. There is something that buildings dedicated to worship offer: a sacred space. I remember the first time I attended the Compline service at St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle. Hundreds of kids my age (I was in high school) sat outside before the service, and when the doors opened, we slowly made our way into the Nave, before which a sign requested that we remain silent (the practice of silence at this service has since ended, much to my disappointment). If at no other point in the week, these peers of mine were experiencing something transcendent around them.

Great church buildings are icons, through which we catch a glimpse of Divine mystery and beauty. They are sacraments, where the Christ is proclaimed Risen until the day of his coming. My friend Alissa just wrote about her Easter experience, a beautiful piece that I would ruin by trying to pull out an excerpt. But if you read it, notice the role that the permanence of her congregation's worship space plays. Can you imagine trying to capture the same kind of beauty, mystery, and power of the Resurrection in a bowling alley?

Jesus was not spectacular. He came into the world in the humblest of settings, and died by one of the most gruesome and cruel methods of execution devised. We do not need a cathedral for Christ to be present.

And yet, God creates us to be creative people, to "make something of the world," to quote Crouch again. When we create all manner of cultural artifacts, and some specifically for worship, why would architecture be the arena where God's image cannot be seen in our creativity? Why can we create sermons, music, paintings, potluck dinners, softball teams, but not buildings?

The problem, as I see it, is a lack of creativity. So many church buildings are such poor icons. The first church I worked in was absolutely terrible. It was both ugly and impractical, like the Church of All Nations described above. But we should think beyond functionality; we are re-created not to function, but to have life and have it to the full. If we build a permanent structure, it should express that no less than the songs we write or the families we raise.

These kinds of buildings aren't easy to come by. I think many, if not most, church buildings do sap resources that would otherwise be devoted to bringing the light of Christ incarnationally into their surrounding neighborhoods. Consequently, the bar for starting construction should be high, much higher than it has been for most churches. But I cannot conclude that all church buildings work against the mission of God.

Lamenting our way to the Cross.

2009-03-16T18:59:00.004-07:00

I am now part of a congregation that does very little with the traditional/formal church calendar. I would say we are very casual--we don't dress up, we have little scripted in our gatherings, we speak extemporaneously in the Californian vernacular, and we don't follow a lectionary. Having served and worshipped in churches with more formal habits, I understand both the blessings and perils of a more overt formalism. One of the perils, for example, is that it can very easily lead to a kind of legalism, where anything outside the norm is inherrently disruptive. One of the blessings, however, is the discipline of encountering all of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, including the parts that make us squirm. Lament can be one of these parts.

So I am happy that my church is taking the journey with Christ into the desert, a 40 days of facing the difficult realities of following Jesus. I am happy we are exploring what it means to surrender our whole selves to God, including the times we are angry, disappointed, and full of dispair. I am leading my congregation in a segment of the service after the message, using the Psalms as inspiration. Much of what we are doing is a kind of lament.

The first Sunday, I did Charlie Peacock's "Down in the Lowlands," based on Psalm 69, invited them to sing along. This is not because I expect everyone to get into the same emotional place as the song, but because it is good practice, if you will, to learn how to call to God when he seems distant or unconcerned. Too, it is a good reminder that our mission is to welcome the brokenhearted, to mourn with those who mourn.

The second Sunday, I did an original song that I wrote after reflecting on the message, based on the passage in Mark 8 where Jesus rebukes Peter ("Get behind me, Satan") right after Peter has confessed Jesus as the Messiah. My pastor's take was that following Jesus means we must accept and follow Him on HIS terms, not according to our own expectations. The song is called "Still I come." Here's an excerpt:

This is not how I hoped it would go
I triumph much less than I fail

Still I come--where else would I turn?
Still I come; for you my heart yearns
Still I come, though I cannot discern

This past Sunday, I led worship for the whole service, and came upon the idea of using Psalm 40 as a blueprint for ordering the songs. I had been wanting to use U2's "40" in worship ever since my friend Dan did it at Rivercity Community Church in Kansas City. The Psalm worked as a blueprint, in part because it has such a range of emotion. The other song I used was one written by my friend Dan, called "I confess, " a fantastic song that speaks of bringing everything we have to the cross.

That's ultimately where we're headed--bringing everything we are and have to the cross. And that means not just our sins, but our righteousness, too. We repent not only of our failures, but also of trying to be our own savior. (I like how this idea is expressed here.)

I have one confession: I was pretty casual about the start of Lent myself. I have just come upon what I will fast from during Lent: chocolate, and specifically the chocolate that sites in the candy bowl that is in arms reach of my desk at work. But whether formally or casually, with deep piety or near apathy, we will, together with all the saints, come before the Lamb on Good Friday and remember what is is to share in the sufferings of Christ. On Easter, then, we will invite Him to turn our mourning into dancing.

What's missing?

2008-11-15T11:54:00.004-08:00

You remember those drawings in the newspaper, usually near the comics or crossword puzzle and Dear Abby. At first blush, they look identical, but the reader is instructed to find a handful of differences--the left picture has 3 coat buttons instead of four, the tree in the background is smaller on the right, and so forth. Read this excerpt (selectively edited, yes, to serve my own purposes) from a story from NPR's weekend edition:

...an abandoned gas station along old Route 66 is the unlikely home for another kind of Sunday-morning service, and it's one that you won't find anywhere else.

Felix Wurman...didn't feel at home at church. ... He's trying to make it more than that: a community, a spiritual place, like a church for people who don't go to church.

On a typical Sunday morning, a crowd gathers at the Filling Station, an old gas station that's been converted into a theater. It's in one of Albuquerque's oldest neighborhoods, surrounded by small brown adobe houses, a few blocks from the hulking shell of the old Santa Fe rail yards.

Coffee is a major part of the liturgy here — good coffee. Two cheerful baristas serve everyone free espresso in brightly colored ceramic cups. Laura Motter and her husband Nathaniel, who rode to the church on their tandem bike, have been attending faithfully since last spring.

"The first time I came, I heard about it from a friend who was reading poetry here, and we were just kind of blown away by what you can hear in a gas station in Albuquerque," Motter says.

Wurman says he doesn't want the church ... to grow into a megachurch, because that would destroy the intimacy that makes it meaningful.

That sounds like a great church! A cool, artist-friendly, community-centered, postmodern-grounded fellowship. It looks a lot like many of the new generation of congregations sprouting up around the U.S., right? Except this is the Church of Beethoven:

"Really, the idea is to find spirituality through culture, through the cultural gifts that so many people have suffered for and created over so many
generations," Wurman says.

The new (post-modern? emerging? ancient-future? pick-your-term) Christian churches emphasize creativity, community, and usually try to serve good coffee. They aren't often mega-churches, because megachurches work against the intimacy that makes their community meaningful. Is Wurman's church missing anything?

I've just started reading Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water, in which she suggests that true art is Christian art, and conversely, art that is not true isn't Christian no matter how many much it pictures or mentions Jesus. "Whenever we taste the truth," St. Augustine writes, "God is there." L'engle's reflections on art make me suspect that she would agree that spirituality can be found in culture, that God is indeed present in Wurman's church because God is present whenever art elevates our vision and stirs our soul.

But she might also suggest that great art--including Beethoven's music--enfleshes a reality beyond itself. The artist does not serve himself or his audience, but the work that calls to him to create it. But that work is not created out of itself; L'engle, quoting Leonard Bernstein, says art creates Cosmos out of Chaos. Or put another way, art is the window to that Cosmos, not the Cosmos in itself.

What's missing, of course, is Jesus. Yes, we want to love our neighbors, to create meaningful works of art, to enter into deep and meaningful relationships. But we are the followers of Jesus, who says, "I am the truth." That is not very palatable at times, and it's easy to snicker at the overblown sanctimony of, say, religious broadcasters who seem to name-drop Jesus like a politician trying to ride another's coattails into office. God knows I roll my eyes at it.

I do think the congregants of the Church of Beethoven are experiencing God in their community and their music. Heck, I'd love to go to what Wurman envisions as a future sister Church of Berstein. ("Beethoven? Hello, the 1800s called and want their composer back.")

But beyond good coffee, authentic community, and great art, this is what we witness to : we know and experience God, and his name is Jesus.

The chicken or the egg?

2008-06-18T21:19:00.003-07:00

A recent conversation with my older brother had me musing:

Which comes first, worship or mission? (Please understand, when I say "worship," I refer to the activity of God's people gathered to praise Him and proclaim the gospel to one another.)

Growing up in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, I was reminded, the task of our local congregation was to support missionary work. The CMA started as a missionary organization, and eventually the support groups in the US became congregations and the whole thing turned into a protestant denomination. (As if we needed another one--but that's another discussion). My brother remarked that this approach had the effect, in some ways, of devaluing corporate worship.

My Kansas City church featured a sermon series last spring about their mission statement, "Outward Focus, Inward Change." In introducing the topic, our pastor said that try as they might, God wasn't going to let them come to a consensus about whether they were going to teach that Inward Change must occur for focus to turn outward, or if Outward Focus promoted Inward Change. Both happened at the same time.

A favorite blog of mine picked up this topic, too, in discussing the nature of building a missional community from the ground up. How, David Fitch pondered, do you attract people to a missional community? Read the full post and comments here.

At this point in my life, as passionate as I am about worship, I am increasingly convinced that worship grows out of the soil of mission. To be fully invested in the songs about who God is and what God does in the world, we must be active participants in that mission. Worship services that do not have a foundation of missional work are just good shows.

Yet at the same time, I am cautious about dismissing the purpose of gathering. So often, we are filled with so much unresolved pain or crippling fear that we cannot see beyond them to the needs of the world that God desires to meet. Gathering together, I hope, allows us to offer comfort and to challenge one another as we sing of God's love, pray for one another, and renew our hearts, minds and spirits. Gathering together is not merely a celebration of the work of God, it is preparation for God's work for us, too.

In A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren relates the story of how he forumates his language for what the purpose of the Church. I still embrace his last addition: "To be and make disciples of Jesus Christ in authentic community for the good of the world." That purpose should inform what we do when we gather, and what we do when we disperse.

Diversity in the Emerging Church

2007-12-03T15:51:00.000-08:00

I suppose it should come as no surprise that there's diversity in the emerging church. That term "emerging" has been thrown around a lot, but more and more I understand it in cultural terms. We are moving from modern culture to post-modern culture. Perhaps the best symbol of this is the way we learn and communicate. The printing press revolutionized learning and commmunicating in its day, and its effect is pervasive: many Christians consider personal bible reading a hallmark of Christian discipleship (as do I), when this wasn't even possible for the first millenium and a half of Christianity. We are entering the full-blown information age, one that began with mass communications, but has really hit its full stride with the Internet. So the "emerging church" for me just means the church that is coming into being with the emerging post-modern culture.

It should come as no surprise that emerging congregations aren't any more homogeneous than the church in ages past. Some draw heavily on liturgy and ritual, some find their identity in challenging the doctrinal status quo, some celebrate the arts, some, like the church I've started attending on Sunday mornings, feature mainly music and preaching in a casual atmosphere.

Hey, there are even emerging fundamentalists--that's what I've come to believe about Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Unbeknownst to me until recently, apparently Driscoll called Rob Bell a heretic. Besides it being laughable, it is part of a growing trend from the Seattle pastor, in which he calls into question the fidelity to orthodoxy of other (emerging) church leaders (e.g., Karen Ward, Brian McLaren). While others become apostates, he holds the doctrinal line, so he purports. Some time ago, My younger brother's blog opened a discussion about what fundamentalism is; is it just conservative theology, a literalistic approach to biblical interpretation, a detachment from culture? I came to believe that a defining characteristic of fundamentalists is the way they fail to engage others in theological conversation, because they don't accept that their understanding of the bible is an interpretation, just as everyone else's is. Everything I have read of Driscoll's suggests that he believes that people who disagree with him must just not take scripture seriously, because if they did, they would agree with him.

Some people may question whether Driscoll is really an "emergent" voice, but I believe he is, in that he comes out of, and speaks to the emerging post-modern culture. I heard him speak one time in college (at Seattle Pacific University), and my recollection is that he did very much understand the crisis of identity that many post-moderns face because of relativism. I didn't find his exploration of the text (from Ecclesiastes) very sophisticated or nuanced, essentially a restatement.

This isn't a sentiment I'm proud of: I would feel really good if Driscoll's church failed. I know, it's terrible, but the vindication would feel very satisfying. Someone who preaches the inferiority of women, who mocks and insults those with whom he disagrees, even those who honestly seek dialog--I don't want that person to be fruitful, and so claim that God is with them. I want churches who preach the dignity of all, who show empathy and respect for everyone, who recognize their own limitations and welcome the intellectual refinement of honest dialog--I want those churches to succeed, because I believe deeply that they truly bear witness to God as we understand Him through Jesus.

Somehow, in the mystery of God's working through his church, he continues to call people through churches of all flavors. Somehow, people come to know Jesus at Mark Driscoll's church. I don't get it, probably anymore than Mark Driscoll gets how someone could believe in the bible and believe women can be leaders in church. For whatever reason, God sees fit to work through a diverse collection of congregations. I don't really understand, but that's okay. I have to accept whatever way God wants to save the world, even if it includes emergent fundamentalists.

If not Seeker-Sensitive, what then?

2007-10-01T20:42:00.000-07:00

I recently finished Blue Like Jazz, a terrific book by Donald Miller. Partly it was terrific because Miller can actually write (see below), but also because had a number of really profound insights. Really great books don't just reveal their own insights; they inspire new perspectives. Blue Like Jazz ignited me: ideas that were just smoldering embers--just the suggestion of illumination--have caught fire.

One of these epiphanies is about the Seeker-Sensitive movement in American evangelical Christianity. When I first heard about Willow Creek, the pioneering seeker-sensitive church, I was excited. Here was a church that realized most unchurched people were tired of "churchy" stuffiness and bewildered by the Church-speak and idiosyncratic culture so prevalent in so many American congregations. Willow Creek's Sunday morning services were designed for people who had not (yet) professed Christian faith. Their "Believer's Service" was on Wednesday night. People who scorned the seeker-sensitive model as "selling Jesus," were, I thought, simply denying the problem that churches were only drawing people who already understood and liked church. How could anyone be content with the status quo?

Recently, however, whole seeker-sensitive model has been unattractive to me. Seeker-sensitive approaches bother me. Why?

I think it because the seeker-sensitive model is attractional. The goal is to get people to come to church, and the Sunday gathering is designed to get people to want to come, to bring their friends. Since the goal is to attract people and to keep them coming back, churches try their hardest to put on a good show. Music and drama have to be really good: culturally relevant, witty, poignant. They don't want visitors to think they're out of touch with the real world; the church has to keep a credible voice. This was the allure of the seeker-sensitive movement for me: finally, we are acknowledging how embarrassing it is to take your friend to church and have the whole thing be so hokey, so amateur.

One reason I'm moving away from embracing the seeker-sensitive approach is that it's kind of a bait-and-switch. We try to get people into church with a flashy show, but hope they'll stay for the deep spiritual growth. Besides, we're not really all that put together. We're broken human beings, prone to arrogance, half-hearted attempts, embarrassing mistakes--we are hokey and amateur, and the good news is that God loves us anyway. Or, put another way, church should be "for people who are tired of trying to be cool, tired of trying to get the world to redeem them." (Hey, look, that guy again!)

But the primary reason I've changed my mind is that the attractional model, at its core, expects people to come to us. Our efforts in "reaching the world for Christ" are consumed by trying to get them to come to our place, our turf. In a recent article in Christianity Today, Tim Stafford contrasts the attractional model with the missional model (as does David Fitch). The missional model (as I understand it) is one that sees the meeting of Christians as the time to celebrate the work that God is doing in the world, a re-invitation to participate in that. Our meeting is all about coming to God again, receiving his blessing through community, that we may better the world with Him. The missional model means "reaching the world for Christ" happens out in the world.

One of the things Miller talks about in Blue Like Jazz is love, and how too often we use love like a commodity. We reward people with love, or use love as an incentive. I fear this is what is behind the seeker-sensitive model. "If you will only come inside, we will love you like family." But the missional model says that love is intrinsically good to give, so go give it away. Love can't be a commodity if it comes from God, because commodities have limited supply. But God's Love is infinite, and we can never run out of it. Why not love everybody you meet, love them deeply, love them recklessly? Because infinity minus anything is still infinity. Indeed, God's love is the only thing that is infinite; knowledge, prophecies, awe-inspiring displays of power and creativity? They will pass away.

I think we don't trust the transformative power of Love. "It would be great if it were that simple," we say, "if all we had to do was just love everybody, but how can we be confident anyone will get saved?" So we try to construct good arguments, design cool worship experiences, put on spectacular and aesthetically sensitive productions, because we fundamentally believe that Love isn't enough. When we are missional, the reason we gather together is to learn again how to Love, to be renewed and transformed into Lovers of the world, the same way Jesus Loved the world, while we were yet sinners.

I've been using the word "We" because while I get excited about these epiphanies, I know I am so far from living them out. I withhold love in order to control. I try to design cool worship gatherings to make people want to come to church. This is why I need a worshipping community in which to confess, pray, ask questions, be challenged, and receive God's blessing.

What happened to writing?

2007-09-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

I admit, I've been doing a lot of reading in a very narrow subset of a niche market: Books about designing/directing Christian Worship. Be that as it may, I wonder why so many people who write about worship can't seem to write. (An aside: I won't get into any detailed criticism here, but Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life book is another example of terrible writing in Christian Lit.)

I just recently finished Emerging Worship by Dan Kimball. There are two forewords, by David Crowder and Sally Morgenthaler. Both forewords are better written. I've never met Dan Kimball, or been to his church (Vintage Faith), so he may be a dynamic speaker, an effective and creative leader, a person of great spiritual depth. But he can't write, and apparently Zondervan couldn't be bothered by assigning him a good editor.

Kimball's problems start with a poor vocabulary. A good vocabulary results in an economy of words and a precision in meaning; a poor one yields vague, shallow wordiness. People that lack a good vocabulary start reusing some words and misusing others in an attempt to avoid the words they have been reusing. They attempt to sound sophisticated, but in so doing expose their weak writing all the more. When I graded papers of undergrads, I saw this sort of writing all the time.

For example, he writes on page 172: "Historically, church ministry functions in a certain way and there was a specific approach to looking at the church leadership structure. But Graceland [an alternative/emerging worship gathering] started going against the norms of consistency and church uniformity!" Lots of words, little clarity--I really have no idea what he is saying except that Graceland operated in a different way than the main church.

Or another passage, this time on the following page: "Instead of our discussions being exciting ones about mission and innovation, they turned into discussion about squeezing Graceland into how the rest of the church functioned....So, once again we began having discussions." Again, clumsy and vague

So what if I were writing it? Here's my armchair editorial suggestion: "Where our discussions used to focus outwardly on mission and innovation, they now focused inwardly on on conforming Graceland to the rest of the church....So we went back to the drawing board."

But the book suffers from a larger problem: Kimball is trying to represent a movement that resists generalizations. Emergents--and Dan Kimball is one--champion the unique identity of each worshipping community and reject formulas for designing worship. (See his most recent post from Out of Ur . "It depends on..." is his mantra.) He avoids making specific recommendations because he believes each worship gathering should be unique, but the consequence is that his writing lacks focus and purpose.

Another book I read recently, Designing Worship Teams by Cathy Townley, suffers from this same problem. Because she asserts that each body of believers has its own way of operating (it's unique DNA, in her terminology), she takes pains to avoid specific recommendations, for fear that she will be guilty of fostering the very kinds of formulaic worship gatherings she decries. (See my review on Amazon for more thoughts on that book.)

Both Kimball and Townley would do better to tell their specific stories, explaining what they have done and why. This would allow them to write with clarity and depth, since they know their own stories well. In fact, the best part of Kimball's book is when he profiles several Emerging Worship gatherings, giving specifics about what each gathering is like, and some background from leaders of those gatherings on why they approach worship the way they do. Kimball still isn't a great describer because of his poor vocabulary, but at least he isn't obfuscating. Townley makes no real mention of any specific situation she has been involved in, and that omission left me curious and a little frustrated.

Telling ones story in this way leaves it up to the reader to determine what elements of their ministries will transfer well, and does open the door to some futile attempts to copy their approach. That could be easily warned against in an introduction or opening chapter, and those who disregards such an instruction will learn soon enough their mistake. The rest of us would actually have a good, helpful book.

Moving on

2007-08-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

It's official now: I am no longer the music director at Crossroads United Methodist in Belton. The decision to step down was made over a period of months, and actually I knew my days were numbered there long before I figured out what exactly were the reasons, and when exactly I would resign. There were mixed emotions in thinking about the decision, but I'm very happy to be moving on now.

I wanted to write a little about the process of deciding to leave, mostly because I wasn't able to find a whole lot of resources for "When, Why, and How to leave your ministry position." Those that I found were often directed towards established career senior ministers.

The trouble for me was sorting out whether I was just weary from the logistics, or perhaps just needed a little separation from the week-to-week grind of it in order to reflect and find new energy and purpose; or, was I really reaching the end of my tenure there? Was this a natural feeling of stagnation after two years working at one place, one that would pass if I kept at it? Or was this feeling an indication that it was time to move on? (Obviously, I came to the conclusion that it was the latter.)

It would have been an easy decision if I hated everything about the job, and nobody at the church liked what I did either. (That situation is, I think, thankfully rare in churches.) On the contrary, I did like the work, and I have a growing sense of calling to ministry because of my service at Crossroads. This is due in part to the encouragement that I received from key members at the church. Yet I had a growing feeling of frustration that while many people encouraged my efforts, participation and passion in worship were still woefully sporadic.

I had lost the belief that what I was doing would make a have a lasting effect toward changing the church, and by extension, the community and the world. When I began working at Crossroads, I did not know the congregation's character. As I learned it, I tailored my efforts to try to address its particular strengths and weaknesses: trying to harness the creativity and passion that did exist, and challenging them to a greater surrender to God's purpose and a greater sense of mission. In considering resigning, I had come to believe that these efforts were not really making enough of a difference to see.

More than that, I had lost the energy to rebound from disappointing results to give a true effort the next time. It would be one thing to simply fail to see the fruit of my labor. That, perhaps, is an issue of faith--that I must simply trust God that perseverance and faithful service will bear fruit, even if I cannot see it. But at some point, I have to acknowledge that even if disillusionment is my own lack of faith, it still affects my work. A church is best served by someone with passion and joy, not just determination and perseverance. I didn't think I could muster even the latter traits for much longer.

To be sure, there were tantalizing personal benefits, such as more time for other creative efforts, including a post-modern minded evening service at another church I had begun work on. But I didn't want these to be the main reasons; I wanted to leave because I felt my work was done there. Practically, leaving during the summer makes sense for the church, giving them time to get a new music director in place in time to prepare for the Advent season.

To summarize, my decision to leave came from:
1) A growing sense that, despite any and every approach to leading worship, my efforts were having little lasting effect
2) A weakening energy to face the challenge of overcoming entrenched and recurring barriers to spiritual growth and impact in the church
3) The presence of other endeavors that excited and stimulated me

One final note: I recently spoke with someone more experienced in this field, who said that the average tenure for a church music director is two years. If my experience is any indication, the reason for that may be that many churches have made music the primary marker of their identity. Even at Crossroads, many people felt that music is what would impact lives, draw in visitors, set the tone for spiritual growth. I believe quite the opposite is true. In the healthiest, most vibrant churches that I have attended, music is not the engine, but the caboose: the expression of the community of faith, of changed lives, of their mission to bless the world. We can't sing passionately about music itself for very long; but if I have a passion for God, as my favorite hymn says, "How can I keep from singing?"

Reflections on the past year

2007-05-31T19:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, it has been that long. So what have I learned?

I am more convinced than ever that Christian leadership must be, following the example of Christ, the way of brokenness. I'm thinking about this now because I recently read Henri Nouwen's In the Name of Jesus. If I try to be impressive, to be relevant and useful and successful, I am not following the path of Christ. The path of Jesus leads to the cross. I am working hard to show my churches (I'll get to that) that I am not specially skilled or remarkably talented, but just me: broken and beautiful, an incomplete child of God
Trusting the Spirit of God to work is hard. I want to engineer things--I can't stand it when what we do in church is mediocre, un-purposeful, and half-hearted. Yet there have been moments when I believe the Spirit of Christ has truly worked that I thought were hopelessly lost causes. In some ways, it is frustrating; I want to think I know what makes a good church service, what will work. But sometimes the best laid plans don't work out, and sometimes the most poorly planned things work splendidly. This is teaching me humility: God will work as he chooses, in unexpected places.
Churches are living organisms, not machines. If a church is struggling, people often want to "fix" it. But living organisms don't get fixed; they heal. If a plant gets sick, you can't fix it--you can enrich and fertilize the soil, shelter it from the elements, keep it watered, give it sun, and wait for growth to occur--but that sometimes takes years!

Service texts--Theme: Remaining in Christ (John 15)

2006-05-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty.
Just and true are your ways, King of the ages.
Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name?
For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you,
for your righteous acts have been revealed. (Revelation 3:15)

Your name is holy
What A friend we have in Jesus
Without Christ, we get mired in that old stagnant life of sin. But God’s gift is this: he takes our sin-dead lives and makes us alive in Christ. When we make our home in Christ, God works in us and through us, recreating us into the people he created us to be, doing the work he created us for. (Ephesians 2, The Message--sort of)

He who began a good work in you

Oh, how great is Your goodness, which You have laid up for those who fear,
revere, and worship You, goodness for those who trust and take refuge in You!
In the secret place of Your presence You hide them from harmful plots; You
shelter them from strife in Your pavilion. Blessed be the Lord! (Psalm 31)

You are my Hiding Place
O Blessed Spring

Guide me O Thou great Jehovah

Service texts--Theme: Love overcomes evil

2006-05-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

Scripture: 1 John 4: 7-21
A note about this week's topic: The scripture for this week talks about the source of love, and how it cast out fear; the title of the sermon is "How can we make our House a Home?" (The answer found in this text is, of course, love--that is, the perfect love of God found in Christ.) Henri Nouwen's book Lifesigns: Intimacy, Fecundity, and Ecstacy brilliantly and deeply examines the difference between "the house of fear" and "the house of love." It's a book the profoundly affects me each time I read it, and I really ought to read it once a year just to hear, through Nouwen's words, God say again "fear not." Seriously, if you haven't read it, go get it. It is short, readable, pithy and inspiring.

Service Texts:

The Psalmist cries: Whom have I in heaven, but You? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. Though my heart and my body fail, God is the strength of my heart. Brothers and Sisters, we gather in Christ name to find strength in God; as he gave the Israelites their sustenance in the dessert, so we ask him to send his Holy Manna to strengthen and nurture us today. (Psalm 73)

Christians we have met to Worship
I lift my eyes up
Jesus, God’s Son, is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being; He holds everything together by what he says--powerful words! This is the same Jesus we can trust as our Savior, the Jesus who says “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
(Hebrews 1 and Matthew 28)
'Tis so Sweet to Trust in Jesus
Pass me not, O Gentle Savior
The River (Brian Doerksen)
Closing: He came down/We are Marching

Service text--First Sunday in Lent (Theme - The deadly sin of pride)

2006-03-05T18:03:00.000-08:00

A Voice calls in the Desert:

“Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him.”This is the first
Sunday of Lent, the season when we examine ourselves, letting the light of
Christ illuminate every corner of our lives. As Christ was called out into
the desert to prepare himself, to be tested, so we begin our own desert journey,
into a land where we cast off the things that hinder us so that we may hold on
to what matters most. Called to this journey together, we reflect,
repent, and commit ourselves once more to the mercy and love of God.

Sunday's Palms are Wednesday's Ashes

Our journey into the desert reminds us that we are not without
hope. Our only hope is in the Oasis of God’s love, offered through
Christ. We come as those sick to the Healer, as those thirsty to the
Fountain of Life, as souls in need and desolation to the King of Heaven, to the
gentle Comforter.

All who are thirsty
Come, ye Sinners

Pass me not, O Gentle Savior

During Lent, we find again our true hope—one found not in ourselves, but in
the steadfast love of God. For the one who hears the words of Christ and
puts them into practice builds a sure foundation.

Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me

"Upbeat" Worship

2006-02-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

Woe to the person who suggests to me that the music be more "upbeat." What they think is an innocuous remark or mild suggestion is going to get them an earful, or at least an extended discussion.

"Upbeat." Could there be a more amorphous, ambiguous, malleable term? What to one person is "upbeat" is "hokey" to another, "boring" to yet another "blasphemous" to still another. The way we react to music is intensely personal and thoroughly abstract, which makes it very difficult to give meaningful and specific descriptions.

Anyone who asks for music that is more "upbeat" is going to get this explanation, followed by a question: "What would make the music more upbeat?" Are they asking for a change in the style of accompaniment, the selection of songs, the instrumentation? More often than not, people fumble with their words, ultimately realizing that they don't have the perception or the language to be more specific.

But these questions miss a more fundamental question, which is: Why do we want church music to be uniformly "upbeat?" In response to a recent post on Out of Ur, Taylor Burton-Edwards (about whom I know nothing) describes his a period in his life of intense grief, during which most ministries and programs of his local church were unhelpful and meaningless to him. Moreover, most people weren't equipped to engage and walk beside him in that darkness:

Very few programs form people who can walk alongside a journey like this-- and that is because those programs are simply not designed to do this. Worship that is "happy clappy," always "upbeat" has no hope of doing this.

This is the fundamental reason why "upbeat" music is an inadequate standard, regardless of any agreed-upon parameters of what constitutes "upbeat" music. Music in church needs to give voice to our frailty and brokenness--and if we don't respond to that music, perhaps it is because we fail to grasp the true nature and extent of our weakness.

Service texts--Theme: Waiting on the Lord

2006-02-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

(What's all this about then?)

(Lamentations 3)
I remember my affliction and my wandering
I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning: Great is your faithfulness.

Blessed Be The Name of the Lord

(Psalm 89)
Your love, God, is our song, and we’ll sing it! We’ll forever tell everyone how faithful you are. Your love has always been our lives' foundation, your fidelity has been the roof over our world

My life flows on
He is Exalted

(Psalm 40)
I patiently waited, LORD, for you to hear my prayer. You listened and pulled me from a lonely pit full of mud and mire. You let me stand on a rock with my feet firm, and you gave me a new song, a song of praise to you.

You are my hiding place
I lift my eyes up
Communion: There is a fountain filled with blood

Standing on the Promises of God

Hymnody or Christian Rock?

2006-01-31T06:48:00.000-08:00

Music in most American churches today usually come from one of two traditions: Hymnody or Rock and Roll. Many churches refer to these musical styles as "traditional" and "contemporary," but both of these are misnomers. Each is a living musical tradition, that comes from different historical and cultural roots.

Not being an expert in hymnodic history, I'll keep my comments generally about my own perceptions and experience. Typical characteristics of Hymns: strophic (one tune for many verses), designed for four-part choral singing, syllabic text-setting (each syllable gets its own note) with mostly simple rhythms, linguistically and theologically complex and developed (i.e., lots of words, poetically arranged with carefully developed theological messages).

Like many living musical traditions, the Hymn tradition has shown the remarkable ability to incorporate different musical traditions throughout its history: ancient folk tunes ("Let all things now living"), renaissance dance tunes ("A Mighty Fortress is our God"), Bar songs ("We praise the O God"), Gospel music ("Pass me Not O Gentle Savior"), and even elements of contemporary popular music (such as in "Here I am, Lord" or "Gather us in"). Yet hymns have kept most of their trademark identifiers (listed in the previous paragraphs); these other musical influence have not replaced hymnodic stylings, but have been adapted to fit them. Most importantly, new hymns continue to be written, and the best name for these would be "contemporary hymns." It's what makes hymnody a living tradition.

Rock/Popular music, its roots largely coming from African-American rhythms and blues harmonies, also has its own set of typical music characteristics and stylings. The kind of pop-based music most churches sing typically feature: syncopated rhythms, melodies with extensive use of repetition (an important musical device, and what makes the tunes "catchy"), shorter stanzas that are linguistically closer to today's vernacular speech. These songs are less rigid with metrical consistency--each verse may have a different number of syllables in each phrase, and each phrase has a different number of syllables, too. That is, many hymns can be categorized by a number meter (e.g. 8.7.8.7 D), while many pop-based worship songs cannot (marked "Irregular").

Mark Allan Powell has recently compiled an Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music and was interviewed about it by Christianity Today. He makes some important comments about Christian Pop/Rock:

It is a musical tradition, and deserves as much attention as other kinds of church music.
The people who write it are sincere, faith-inspired, and incredibly diverse.
It's purpose is to express and embody Christian piety, in contrast to the hymnodic tradition's usual practice of expressing Christian theology. To quote the article:

Two aspects of faith are theology, which can be explained as matters of the head, and piety, which is matters of the heart. I usually call this the prose and poetry of faith. Theology is the prose, and we need good theology to know what it is we believe and know how to articulate what we believe.
Piety is the poetry of faith. In it, we pay less attention to precision than to honest expression. Contemporary Christian music needs to be theologically sound, but its real strength is in the realm of piety. It touches the heart, it's relational, it's empathetic and it's emotional in a way that is completely appropriate for a holistic understanding of faith.

What's helpful about understanding these things is that it allows us to appreciate each musical traditions for their respective strengths, removing us from judging church music solely on personal preference. It helps to free us from self-centeredness and toward communal identity, away from isolation and toward community.

Performance or Participation?

2006-01-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

I practice music in two very different settings: my church, where I serve as the music director, and the UMKC Conservatory of music, from which I will be receiving my Master of Music in Composition (as soon as I finish my thesis). Both these worlds put unique and extremely different demands on me and the music I do.

The purpose of music at the conservatory is aesthetic excellence. The conservatory's aim is to develop musicians with technical and artistic skill--that is, the ability to conceptualize musical works of beauty, power, and depth, and the ability to execute those conceptions. Training, done right, is rigorous and plays no favorites--the best students excel, the worst students fail and drop out. It's a good thing, too: the biggest disservice the Conservatory could do is deceive students by allowing them to believe they are skilled musicians when they in fact are not. Such students need to be redirected to areas in which they will excel.

The purpose of music at church, however, cannot be the same. The reason we do anything at church is fundamentally about community. Why else would believers meet together? It is possible to pray, sing, read scripture--even prepare and consume bread and wine--on our own. But we meet together because God comes to us in community, when we are gathered together. The triune God himself is a communal being, having relationships between each person of the trinity. The purpose of music in church, then, is fundamentally communal.

Consequently, our goal for church music should be participation from everyone, for this is music's most powerful effects: many voices join to become one sound, all occupying the same space together. Where rigorous performance standard asks that only the best sing--for example, we audition for solos, and the best performer wins--our goal of communal worship invites everyone to participate.

Recently, this has been made very personal to me by relationships I have built with some in my church. One member of my choir suffered a stroke a few years ago, and decrease mobility has also been accompanied by decrease vocal strength and control. This person always loved to sing, and they sing in choir now, even though the vocal ability isn't what it used to be. Singing in choir is, for this person, a cathartic excercise, and a gesture of faith that one day their body will be restored. I wouldn't for the world have this person leave my choir, even though they often have trouble matching pitch. I love the way my choir sounds, not because of their musical precision, but because theirs is the sound of the Body of Christ working together.

But if the primary of church music is participation, not excellence, is there any pursuit of aesthetic goals at all? We don't want to do bad music, do we?

My current thinking is that there is a delicate, even precarious balance. I used to be very embarrased by bad church music. I'm still embarrassed by a lot of Christian pop music. Are cheap knockoffs the best that we can do in praise of Christ? Furthermore, if each member of Christ's Body has different gifts, shouldn't we encourage those with gifts other than music to pursue their true calling, not be misled into futile attempts at endeavors to which they are poorly suited?

Somehow, I have to find the right approach that encourages everyone to participate, but that urges everyone toward better music as well. As with all areas of Christian discipleship, there is always room to grow. The real problem isn't with bad music, it's with apathy. Whatever we do in Christ's name and for Christ's body, we should strive to do it well. But this is a journey together, where we do not leave even one out of a hundred behind.

As a trained musician, aesthetic excellence is a hard idol to let go, but ultimately, I believe, one that I must. An important witness for the church is the witness of weakness: that we do not rely on ourselves, but we confess readily our frailty and our reliance upon God's grace. Therefore, we don't shun brokenness or imperfection--we give thanks that in our weakness, Christ's power and grace is made evident. As with any activity in the church, when we sing, we should do our best in praise of Christ, but what's more important is we all do it together, expressing God's grace through our cooperative efforts, through our communal work.

2005-11-19T11:59:00.000-08:00

Theme: Giving Thanks to God

[before song]
Clap your hands, all you nations;
shout to God with cries of joy.
How awesome is the LORD Most High,
the great King over all the earth!
[in the middle of song]
God has ascended amid shouts of joy,
the LORD amid the sounding of trumpets.
Sing praises to God, sing praises;
sing praises to our King, sing praises

Come, All You People

Blessed Be the Name of the Lord

The Apostle Paul writes:
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.

We gather today to sing our thanks not only to God, but to teach and admonish one another by singing songs and speaking words of peace to each other .

Let All Things Now Living

O Blessed Spring

James tells us to “consider it pure joy whenever you face trials.”
Peter tells us to “rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ.”
And Paul tells us to “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
How do we do this? We give thanks because our trials produce perseverance, because our Savior gave thanks even on the night he was betrayed, and because, as Paul writes, “These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There's far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can't see now will last forever."

Stay with Us

Worship: Honesty or Decorum?

2005-11-17T05:44:00.000-08:00

I stumbled onto two really fascinating blog entries over at Christianity Today:
Expletive Undeleted: Dropping the F-bomb in Church
and
Expletive Undeleted 2: The F-bomb Fallout

As I comment after the second entry, I think this was a tough call for Pastor Mike Sares to make, given his wonderfully unusual church. (I don't think I'd even be faced with this decision in my church.)

I'm most disappointed with those who respond dismissively, as in "The fact that this even up for discussion is mind boggling." I'm not sure why anyone with that mentality would even be reading a blog and offering a comment. I believe Engaging in discussion is always beneficial. And I believe, if we are Christians following Christ's example, engaging in discussion is part of refusing to give up on others, just as God doggedly pursues us.

What's all this then?

2005-11-16T08:22:00.000-08:00

This blog is a collection of resources and thoughts related to my job as Music Director of a small United Methodist Church in Belton, MO, which is in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan area.

Much of what you'll see is the stuff I prepare weekly for worship services--the list of songs, the texts of scriptures, meditations, calls to worship, etc. that are interspersed between songs or within songs between verses. If you're looking for this sort of stuff, feel free to use it if it suits your purposes.

Occasionally, you'll see postings of my own reflections related to music, worship, working in church, my own spiritual or personal journey, or about society in general. You won't see anything related to baseball, because I have my own blog for that. Increasingly, I've wanted to write about other things that readers of that blog would probably not be interested in. That's what this space is for.

Comments and emails are encouraged--people who know me know that my interest is always in dialog and mutual understanding, even if we ultimately disagree with one another. Strong opinions are great, but isolating oneself because of them is, I believe, a great tragedy.

Finally, a word about the title of this blog; five years ago, I would have told you quite confidently that I was not the sort of person who would ever be a worship leader. I had tried before and it was clearly not how I was gifted. I can't say now that I'm a different person, or that I was being stubborn before, but I've come to realize that when the prophet of Lamentations speaks of God's mercies as "new every morning," that it means, ironically, that the future is open. Somehow, in the midst of our predictable Universe, God keeps throwing us surprises. Count me in as one who's excited (and maybe a little bit scared) about what unknown mercy is around the next corner.

2005-11-12T19:20:00.000-08:00

Theme: Giving ourselves, our dreams, and our concerns over to God

Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,

for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

Therefore I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.

(Psalm 46 and Philippians 2:13)

What a friend we have in Jesus
Christ beside me

Jesus says to us: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” Why should we not be afraid? Because he has sent another in his place, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who will teach us and light our way. Let us rejoice, let us proclaim this joyful sound: the Comforter has come. (John 14)

The Comforter has Come
You are my hiding place

Oh, how great is Your goodness, which You have laid up for those who fear, revere, and worship You, goodness for those who trust and take refuge in You!
In the secret place of Your presence You hide them from harmful plots; You shelter them from strife in Your pavilion. Blessed be the Lord!

In his presence
Lord Listen to your Children Praying
My life Flows on