Why nobody listens

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

Thanks to wordle.net.

The Narrative of Worship, Part II

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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

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?

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?

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

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?"