John was the man that stayed and hanging around with Jesus changed his life.
Many men wanted to follow Jesus until the Teacher said some hard things. Jesus demanded people think, but most men just wanted Him to provide bread and edutainment.
John saw people look for easy answers and miss Jesus.
A few men were intrigued with Jesus, but balked at giving up their stuff. Jesus saw one such man, but Bible readers never learn this young man’s name, because he passed on making it into the New Testament in order to keep his local wealth and fame. Judas made money by following Jesus, but lost his soul.
John saw friends love money and fame and miss History and Love Incarnate.
Three men were part of Jesus’ inner circle, but when things did not go well, all but one man ran away. These two had given up everything for Jesus, but could not give up their fears or their disappointments. Sacred blood was shed and they were in hiding with nothing to tell of Good Friday, but their failures.
John saw Peter and James run and miss the Cross.
Only one man followed Jesus all the way to the Cross: John.
What did John gain? He stood at the foot of the Cross and Jesus gave him a job. The woman who first said “yes” to the Word of God was placed in his care. John was the friend that Jesus could trust with His mother, because John stayed.
Jesus had been followed by many men, by a few, by three, and now only by one man. The women were there, but only John was faithful amongst the men.
This is not strange to any Christian alive today. The hard times in a Church will often see a few women and one man standing ready to do their final duty. Too many men have chosen simple mindedness, money, practicality, or their fears to stay.
Staying the course sounds easy, but only John succeeded.
Why?
John was a “son of thunder” in his early days. He was brave and only a brave man can succeed. He would become known as “the theologian. Only a man who wanted real answers could look at the Cross standing next to the mother of God. Fundamentally, John became the apostle of Love, because John was a true friend to Jesus. Where others saw a miracle worker or a sage, John saw a man worth his highest devotion.
Simon knew talent. Simon was brave. Simon loved his nation.
Simon did not say much, but Simon followed Jesus.
This Easter Simon the Zealot has been on my mind. He was a follower of Jesus easy to forget, because we only know his name and political point of view. Simon wanted freedom for his people crushed by Roman tyranny.
When he saw Jesus, Simon heard a call and followed. With the other disciples, he seems to have lived in the constant expectation that at any moment Jesus would restore the kingdom to Israel. Jesus kept disappointing them with cryptic statements.
Palm Sunday must have thrilled Simon, because at last Jesus rode into Jerusalem as king. The crowd rejoiced and then Jesus cleaned out the Temple from the crooks that had set up shop in that holy place. We know Peter, the leader of the gang, had a sword and I cannot help suspecting that Simon had the other.
Simon was zealous for his people and for God.
Jesus must have been hard to understand. He claimed the Kingdom of Heaven was now, but then refused to do practical things to make it happen. It was “within” and Simon wanted it “without.” Jesus spoke of a better age to come, but seemed to do nothing to make it happen.
Simon was zealous to change the outer state of his people, but Jesus was playing a deeper political game. Jesus wanted new men and only from these men would the King form a new nation.
Simon wanted Jesus to kill Romans, but Jesus wanted to transform them. Simon wanted Jesus to bring justice, but Jesus was going to make men just. If Jesus had been just another rabbi, his goals would have been fine, but impractical, but Jesus was God as well as man. It is hard to blame Simon for his mistake. Usually someone like Jesus would have been one of these folk too good to help real people, too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.
Jesus was minded to bring heaven and earth into union. Simon the Zealot was following the one King in history that did not need to claim His crown. His very being was greater than any Kingdom.
God doesn’t do political games, because He is and every other role depends on Him.
Simon must have thought that Passover would mark the start of the inner reality becoming an outer one. He was right and his zeal would prove useful, but he was wrong about the Kingdom. Jesus was not satisfied with freedom for Israel, He wanted freedom for the whole earth. He was not just knocking down the Roman Empire, but every Empire that would not submit to His rule.
Jesus was after Hell and not just hellish rulers. His zeal for conquering death and Satan made Simon look cowardly and weak. Simon wanted to defeat Emperor Tiberius, but Jesus was after Death, Hell, and the Devil. When the test came, Simon ran like everyone else. Zeal cools fast in defeat.
Jesus was braver, his zeal hotter, and He plunged all the way to Hell to rescue his people.
Sometime on Easter morning, Simon must have understood. Tradition suggests he preached the gospel from Egypt to Persia and gave his life for Jesus. His zeal had finally found the Kingdom worthy of death, because martyrdom brought eternal life.
May I like Simon be a subject to King Jesus this Easter.
As we have already seen, Ayn Rand was really big on self-esteem.
One of her “inner-circle” disciples, Nathaniel Branden, is often called “the father of the self-esteem movement.” As I mentioned yesterday, Rand and Branden (he was 14 years her junior) felt good enough about themselves to have a sexual affair with both their spouses’ knowledge. After all, as Atlas Shrugged makes perfectly clear, smart and successful people deserve each other. To object would be to admit you aren’t the kind of person Rand admired. Famously, however, sexual hijinks also ended Rand and Branden’s social and professional relationship when Brandon—apparently feeling too good about himself—had an affair with another woman without telling Ayn (their sexual relationship had already ended—Branden had blamed it on some unresolved psychological issues). To say Ayn was livid is an understatement akin to saying toddlers shouldn’t kiss rabid Dobermans.
Did you feel the love? Umm… pleasure seeking?
But, I can hear you thinking, “in spite of their sexual peccadillos the self-esteem movement is still a good thing, right?”
Wrong.
But let me back up a minute. Here are some of the principles upon which Brandon’s philosophy of self-esteem is based:1
“I have a right to exist.” But if you are a murderer do you have the right to live?
“I am of high value to myself.” Okay, but that’s like saying, “I can’t live without me.”
“I have a right to honor my needs and wants….” Apparently, even if what I “want” is adulterous.
“I am lovable.” But what if you’re just a selfish, gravy-sucking pig? Just saying that doesn’t make it true.
“I am admirable.” Maybe not! Does anyone admire Charlie Manson?
“I deserve to be treated… with respect by everyone.” Does Charlie Manson deserve this?
“I am worthy of happiness.” Regardless of whether I treat others responsibly?
“My happiness and self-realization are noble purposes.” It is true that everyone wants to be “happy” but on what basis is that want noble?
Now granted few people are like Pol Pot or Charlie Manson but the point is that simply being human, particularly from Rand’s or Branden’s atheistic worldview, doesn’t confer your right to exist, the right to honor your wants, or that you are lovable, admirable, or respected, etc.
No wonder that studies in the last ten years have revealed that the self-esteem movement is creating societally lazy, sometimes thuggish, ne’er-do-wells who, nonetheless, believe they are really wonderful.
One major study concluded that high self-esteem does not lead to better school performance and that “narcissists are charming at first but tend to alienate others eventually. Self-esteem has not been shown to predict the quality or duration of relationships….” Also, “High self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex.” The study concludes by pointing out that “Praising all the children just for being themselves… simply devalues praise and confuses the young people as to what the legitimate standards are.”2 After all, saying “I am valuable simply because I am human” isn’t saying anymore than “I’m one in seven billion.”3
Thankfully, there is a God who created humankind in His image and so there are absolute standards upon which we can base our worth. And if we do well on this earth we can look forward to His one day telling us “well done.”
2 Corinthians 10:17-18: “‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’ For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.”
Yesterday I said there was some good in Ayn Rand’s work. Today we look at the bad. This blog post is longer and more sobering given the issues involved.
Rand was an atheist and as such she failed to take in the whole of reality (taking in the whole of reality is a tenant of Objectivism). That certainly confused her thinking but atheism will be the topic of future blogs so there’s no point in my discussing it specifically regarding Rand.
Like the communists, Rand rejected the Bible’s teaching of “original sin” and declared that “men are born tabula rasa” or blank slates.1 That was a crucial mistake.2 Rand is rejecting the evidence. What follows is at least evidence to falsify a tabula rasa view which the Bible’s teaching on “original sin” would confirm.
First, in just the last 100 years humans have tortured and murdered each other at staggering rates. Conservatively, the USSR from 1917 to 1989 killed 20 to 26 million people3; Germany about 13 million (not including war dead), China between 26 to 30 million,4 and the United States has suctioned, scalded and scraped to death over 50 million unborn children.5 It is difficult to choose among all the historical examples of the depth of human depravity, but this one will suffice as evidence for how a tabula rasa view of human persons is disconnected from reality. In 1937 Japanese raped, tortured or murdered 300,000 in Nanking China. Iris Chang wrote about this (warning: graphic violence follows):
The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000–80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of “bestial machinery.”6
Second, in response to the Holocaust, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a study where he found that with little provocation 65% of men and women would torture people with electric shocks7; In a similar study David Mantell found even higher numbers.8
Third, even victims of mass atrocities like Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel and gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concluded that it is the average member of a society that commits such horrors.
Fourth, every genocide scholar I’ve read similarly concludes that it is the average, ordinary member of a population who commits atrocities. I could provide many examples but the words of historian George M. Kren and psychologist Leon Rappoport must suffice:
What remains is a central, deadening sense of despair over the human species. Where can one find an affirmative meaning in life if human beings can do such things? Along with this despair there may also come a desperate new feeling of vulnerability attached to the fact that one is human. If one keeps at the Holocaust long enough, then sooner or later the ultimate truth begins to reveal itself: one knows, finally, that one might either do it, or be done to. If it could happen on such a massive scale elsewhere, then it can happen anywhere; it is all with in the range of human possibility, and like it or not, Auschwitz expands the universe of consciousness no less than landings on the moon.9
Those who don’t see something desperately wrong with the human species haven’t looked hard enough—no animal is so intentionally, exquisitely cruel.10 Apparently we were all born Auschwitz enabled.
Rand contorted selfishness into an ultimate good and even entitled a book The Virtue of Selfishness. “The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s own hierarchy of values: the time, the money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one’s own happiness.”11 Thus you should only take the chance to save a drowning stranger “when the danger to your own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem” could “permit” it.12 But, by her logic, if there is any danger to your own life, why risk it?
Rand’s rejection of God and her ignorance of human sinfulness ultimately led her to believe that man should be worshipped. “If anyone should ask me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark: I will hold up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say, ‘The explanation rests.’”13 “The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it…. those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.14
It is no surprise that Rand would consider Jesus’ crucifixion a horrible waste: the “ideal” dying for the “non-ideal.” And, indeed, why should Jesus die for people who are, of themselves, glorious? As Rand put it in her interview with Playboy: “according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice.”15 Here Rand is right. Her problem was that she really didn’t think people vicious and so she didn’t see the reasonableness of sacrifice. If she had, and if she had known her own viciousness—the viciousness that led her to convince her husband and her lover’s wife that her affair with self-esteem guru Nathanial Branden should be tolerated—she might have welcomed the “man of perfect virtue” dying for her.
Romans 1:22-23: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man….”
There is much in Ayn Rand’s works that many find refreshing and it is no surprise that she’s the darling of many Libertarians and Republicans.
Rand recognized what should be “duh!” to everyone: contradictory statements cannot be true at the same time and in the same way! As she put it: “A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.”1 Yes! Would anybody mind if I ate that last slice?
Rand demanded that we can know reality, and that too is refreshing in this age of postmodern poppycock. “‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—‘There are no absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge….”2
Since we can know reality, it followed that we must use our minds to the fullest. “Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.”3 Of course, this leads logically to a constant theme in her books that people need to stop making excuses for their failures and get to work!4
She argued that lazy thinkers often resent other people’s achievements and so many of them like the idea that we can’t know reality because that excuses their failures. In discussing the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, Rand wrote that, prior to landing, newscaster “Harry Reasoner summed it up by saying simply, quietly, a little sadly, that if the moon is found to be made of green cheese, it will be a blow to science; but if it isn’t, it will be a blow to ‘those of us whose life is not so well organized.’ And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational and that there is no loophole, no escape from reason and reality.”5 Thus “the obliteration of reason obliterates the concept of reality, which obliterates the concept of achievement, which obliterates the concept of the distinction between the earned and the unearned.”6
Contrary to communism and most socialist philosophies, Rand recognized that humans are selfish and will not work hard (or even work at all) unless they believe their efforts will be rewarded. Although Christians completely disagree with Rand on the nature of selfishness (she thinks it’s a good thing), she’s right that it is the natural human condition that if people aren’t incentivized they will not excel. Communism’s failure to recognize human selfishness is the number one reason for its collapse. It’s no wonder then that while the West German was making the Mercedes, BMW, and Porsche, the East German working for the “collective good” was making trashbin Trabants, “the car that gave communism a bad name.”7
So logic works and we can know reality and we should stop making excuses and we should work hard for our labor will be rewarded.
What’s not to like!?
We’ll begin to look at that tomorrow.
1 Thessalonians 5:21: “But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.”
By Ken Myers Touchstone Magazine, March/April 2011
In his 1983 Templeton address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began by recounting a memory from his childhood. “I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why this has happened.’”
As a telegraphic summary of the source of Russian ills under communism, it would be hard to improve on those four initial words. Since Solzhenitsyn spoke them, they have served many Christian pundits in the West as a description of the disorders within liberal democratic regimes. But while this slogan boasts a certain scrappy punchiness, it doesn’t offer us much help in figuring out how the memory lapse in question was provoked.
The modern forgetting of God has many intertwined causes, some of them the result of well-intentioned efforts to sustain God’s “relevance” for people living in a culture that eclipses God’s identity. It is a forgetting induced by systemic forces, and so it will not be reversed through piecemeal efforts such as keeping God’s name on our coins or his laws memorialized in public places.
Remembering God is not like remembering your brother’s birthday or remembering where you left your car keys. Remembering God is not sustaining awareness of an isolatable fact. The God we must remember is the source of rationality in which memory and personality have meaning. He is the origin of all being and order, all truth and coherence. The God we must remember gave all of Creation its shape, then entered Creation in the form of a man, and thereby reaffirmed his love of man and his love of all he has made. Trying to remember God as anything less is to ensure our forgetting.
Misunderstanding Creation
If we are really concerned to remember God, we need to attend to the various dismemberings that have made it easy to forget him. Since God has chosen to use Creation to reveal himself, and then to reveal himself most fully in human form, it is not surprising that the modern forgetting of God is intimately tied with confusion about the nature of the human, the nature of Creation, and the nature of human perception of Creation.
The English theologian Colin Gunton (1941–2003) left us with a number of books exploring these themes and how they relate to our understanding of God. Much of his work revolved around the doctrine of Creation and the doctrine of the Trinity, and his most insightful work interweaves those two concerns. It was through -Gunton’s work that I first encountered the observation that most Christian reflection on Creation might as well be Unitarian, and that this has contributed to our careless acceptance of many modern cultural innovations. We misunderstand Creation and we misunderstand God (and thus risk forgetting him) if we fail to acknowledge that it is in Christ that all things hold together.
One of Gunton’s earliest books is a slim volume called Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay Towards a Trinitarian Theology. The book explores themes developed more fully in Gunton’s later writing, but I know of few volumes that summarize so well the destructive “cast of mind” introduced by the Enlightenment. As Gunton demonstrates, the confidence in allegedly unaided reason championed by the Enlightenment is intertwined with a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge (particularly an unprecedented emphasis on precision and certainty), the nature of perception, the relationship between knowledge and belief, and the place of man in Creation.
As he traces the dominant threads in the development of modern ideas about human knowing, he introduces various critics of that main stream. There are some tantalizing excursions about the place of the imagination in the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, about the true meaning of human freedom as discussed by Iris Murdoch, and (most importantly) about the necessarily personal nature of human knowledge as explored by Michael Polanyi.
Throughout the book, Gunton keeps coming back to theology. Consider this Christological comment, part of his defense of the reliability of knowledge gained through the senses:
A world that owes its origin to a God who makes it with direct reference to one who was to become incarnate—part of that world—is a world that is a proper place for human beings to use their senses, minds and imaginations, and to expect that they will not be wholly deceived in doing so.
Alienation & Idolatry
There are numerous “alienations” in modern culture; among those addressed here are the dismembering of knowledge from belief, the stark separation of reason from the senses (of the mind from matter), and the alleged conflict between freedom and obedience. But the alienation that Gunton is most concerned with in this book is the alienation from Creation that modern thought and culture have encouraged. By making ourselves into the makers of all meaning, we cut ourselves off from “things as they really are,” and so, as he notes early in the book, “Despite the massive advances in knowledge, understanding and the protection of human life from threats to its physical well-being, we are no more at home on the earth, perhaps less so, than other-worldly mediaeval man.”
The modern forgetting of God is not a careless slipping from consciousness of an important fact. It is a product of various idolatries that have coalesced into conventional mindsets and cultural institutions, many practiced by well-meaning Christians. In Enlightenment and Alienation (as in his other books) Colin Gunton does more than identify those false gods and how they secured the fealty of their followers: he confidently and hopefully offers encouragement for a way forward for those who wish to honor in their engagement with Creation the three-in-one true God.
Is a Worship Service More Like a Concert Hall or a Banquet Hall?
Glenn Lucke is the creator of Docent Research Group, which provides customized research for pastors, churches, and parachurch organizations. He has been doing sermon research and consulting pastors on constructing their sermons for ten years.
Isaac Wardell is the Creative Director of Bifrost Arts and the Director of Worship at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a graduate of Covenant College.
Glenn Lucke: Isaac, in the last year since the remarkable Bifrost Christmas album released, you’ve been in some cool situations with some interesting people. Any stories?
Isaac Wardell: Well, a few months ago, we were invited to take part in a worship conference with David Crowder, Louie Giglio, Matt Redman, Bob Kauflin, and a number of other writers and thinkers on the subject of worship.
That event was a new one for Bifrost. Folks who have been following our work will know that we generally teach and lead worship in groups of 50–100 people, using little or no amplification, and working with people to see worship as more participatory and less of a spectacle.
That part of our message is challenging when leading worship for thousands of people on a big stage with all the trappings of the concert arena. But we found that challenge to be really worthwhile, and it made us think a lot harder about the core message of our project. Ultimately, we were so encouraged by the warm response we received in that context, and it has us feeling very optimistic about direction of music and worship in the coming years.
As far as a particular story, here’s one: At an event this year with Francis Chan and other well known leaders, I led the congregation in a prayer, in which I prayed through Psalm 104. Afterward, a number of people, including pastors and worship leaders, came up and asked if they could get a copy of “that beautiful prayer.” Repeatedly, I’d answer that it’s just Psalm 104.
One pastor even pushed further: “But where can I get that setting of the Psalm?” and I answered “the NIV.” That interaction really underscored to me the problem of so many churches regularly not using the Scriptures–the Psalms in particular–as a framework for our worship services.
Framework for worship
GL: That brings up the question—if we’re not regularly using the Psalms in particular or the Scriptures in general—what are we using as a framework for worship services?
IW: In many larger churches (and I work at one, so I’m aware of the difficulties) it seems to me that we often take our cues from the larger media culture. That is, the feel and rhythm of our services is designed with the sole purpose of making people feel at ease; we use familiar technologies and cultural cues so that our people know when to laugh and when to applaud. But we sometimes use the Scriptures themselves so sparingly, in such small sound bites that we people can construct those little Scripture sound bites into whatever constellation fits most comfortably into already-determined lifestyles.
To counter these tendencies, many smaller churches that see themselves as counter-cultural outposts, taking a stand against the “spirit of the age,” often adopt a more formal classroom model for worship. In this model as well, churches inadvertently bear witness to the false notions that our emotions are suspect, and that the ultimate goal of worship is education and cognitive understanding.
So I’ve made the observation several times that the church today generally takes its liturgical cues from the concert hall or from the lecture hall.
This is Part 2
What Kind of People Are We Forming With Our Worship?
Thoughts About Liturgy
Glenn Lucke: What would you say to someone who says, “We don’t have a liturgy. We’ve left the traditional church world behind. We’re passionate about creativity, about excellence, and about connecting to people where they are.”
Isaac Wardell: That’s a great question.
First of all, I think it’s worth clarifying some terminology. To use the word “liturgy” is really just a fancy way of referring to our regular public practices of worship. Many readers of this will be familiar with this viral internet video last year from the folks at North Point Church:
In this video the North Point folks spoofed their own worship practices and poked some fun at some of the more predictable elements of the contemporary/relevant worship format. What I found most interesting about the video was that the spoof was really only possible because the viewer’s familiar with this set of highly specific “liturgical” practices, even in a service that seeks to be spontaneous and approachable.
Concerning the more general question about creativity and connecting to people where they are, here are a few thoughts:
One of the main points of our new worship curriculum is that corporate worship always has both an expressive and a formative quality. That is to say, that worship, properly understood, “meets us where we are” in the way that the music and forms of our service allow us to express our love for God with authenticity and in a way that stresses the accessibility of our Savior.
At the same time, however, we also must recognize that in addition to worship expressing our love, worship also forms our love. When we enter into worship week after week, our hearts are actually being shaped and taught how to adore him, how to give thanks for his goodness, how to confess our sins, and how have hope for the future.
So the great challenge of creativity and excellence in worship leading, it seems to me, is to lead God’s people in worship that is deeply expressive, and at the same time forming us into the kind of worshipers that God would have us to be.
Are We Thinking Much, If At All?
GL: I may be misunderstanding what goes on in the many churches I visit across the country, so I want to be explicit with this caveat: this is my impression, formed by anecdotes, and I may well be wrong.
My impression is that almost all of what lead pastors, worship pastors, worship teams, and creative teams focus on is the expressive aspect of worship. I wonder a) how many leaders and b) to what degree these leaders give attention to the formative aspect? Do they realize that the forms of worship are shaping people? I deeply believe that worship is primarily about honoring our Covenant King, but worship also acts back upon the worshipers. When you talk to pastors and worship leaders about the formative aspect, what kind of responses to do you hear?
IW: I think that your observation is correct, and that most pastors and church musicians are not thinking much, if at all, about the ways that we are forming our congregations over time.
It seems to me that one of the ways that consumerism has really afflicted the church, is in the urgency and pressure that churches are under to deliver an “experience” at every single service that will keep the attendee coming back. The result is that we grossly overestimate what is possible in a 75-minute format, and we tragically underestimate what it is we’re doing in a 20-year format. It strikes me that most of Jesus’ illustrations for spiritual growth are botanical illustrations—seeds, branches, vines—and that, by implication, Jesus is stressing that our long-term spiritual health may not be so much about mountaintop experiences as about faithful practices and obedience.
So all that is to say that when it comes to the corporate worship, it seems there is an enormous amount of literature and teaching on how to improve or maximize the experience of worship, but a relatively small amount of resources that really address what kind of people we are forming with our worship, over the course of their lifetimes.
This is last segment of a 3 part interview
Liturgy, Music, and Space
Deeper than contemporary conversation
GL: You’re hosting a conference this March. Tell us about it.
IW: Over the past three years, I’ve visited over a hundred churches around the country, everything from conservative reformed churches, to broad evangelicals, to Anglicans.
Generally, we’ve done very short events, in the form of a workshop or an evening hymn sing. Consistently, the feedback we’ve gotten is people asking for the institutional means to start fleshing out these concepts in their own congregations. So this year, we’ve spent the last 7 or 8 months writing a 12-week curriculum for Sunday Schools and small groups, and taught it at our own church. During March 29–31, 2011, we’ll be presenting this curriculum for free and teaching pastors and church musicians how to teach it, at a conference in St. Louis, MO.
The conference will also feature some presenters and musicians who share this vision or have been influential to the development of the curriculum—Nicholas Wolterstorff, Bryan Chapell, Kevin Twit, John Hodges, Greg Thompson, and also musicians, The Welcome Wagon.
The conference is very inexpensive, with discounts available for employees of smaller churches. Our hope is that we’ll have many folks attend whose congregations are wrestling with difficult worship questions, who are looking for something richer and deeper than the old traditional/contemporary conversation.
Jesus doesn't need a dramatic entrance
GL: I told a pastor about the Liturgy, Music and Space conference and the pastor asked me how participating in this conference would help him and his worship leaders lead the congregation in connecting to Jesus. What would you say to this pastor?
IW: At a very fundamental level, I’d say that to talk about connecting to Jesus is to talk about worship. That is, that corporate worship is one of the most basic means we have of loving Jesus with our bodies, our words, and hearts.
But to be a little more specific, here’s a way to think about it: In evangelical circles, there’s often an enormous amount of emphasis on what I’ll call “Damascus Road” experiences with Jesus—that is, experiencing Jesus dramatically in our lives and seeing our lives’ fundamental trajectory reordered by Jesus’ lordship. These are often conversion experiences, or re-dedications in which we can point to a specific moment when we connected to Jesus in a pivotal way.
And, of course, these experiences are a wonderful gift from the Lord that we all affirm together. However, one of the ways we sometimes neglect Jesus’ work in our lives is what I’ll call “Emmaus Road” experiences with Jesus. Many of your readers will be familiar with the Gospel account of Jesus appearing to two of his followers after the Resurrection—walking with them, talking with them, and ultimately breaking bread with them—without them being aware of his presence.
Many of us have a tendency to watch and wait expectantly for Jesus to appear in our lives dramatically, even to the extent that we do not notice that he is walking with us, teaching us, shaping us, even in the mundane experiences of our lives, and in the regular act of worship. It’s our hope through talking about this aspect of knowing Jesus that we’ll actually awake congregant’s sensibilities to seeing Jesus at work constantly in our churches, both in the excitement of “revival” moments and also in the stillness of our weekly prayers and confessions.
