Bonsai in the Tabernacle

21 April 2013

“Martial arts as a living tradition is like any craft tradition in that skills must be taught, learned, and performed by individuals who innovate even while reproducing the tradition.”
-Peter Lorge

Worship is a similar tradition, and it is the tradition that orders our world. This makes alterations in worship a big deal-whether we recognize it or not.

In this culture, we suffer from an overwhelming temptation to change it up constantly lest our worship get ‘stale.’ Now, this can actually happen, but far more commonly, staleness is not the problem. When the worship begins to feel a little dead, most of the time that’s not staleness, it’s winter.

As a culture, we’re nothing if not mobile. It’s always spring somewhere, and you can just keep moving with the weather. But you’ll never grow roots that way. You can stay alive in a bonsai pot — beautiful maybe, but stunted, bearing very little fruit, dependent on constant care from others. You were made for better than this.

Settle in. Endure. Pass through the winter of your discontent. Spring is coming, and growth. Keep at it, and your roots will sink deep into the aquifer. Bonsai don’t fare well in droughts.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Neighborhood Sacramentology: What the Table Does

31 March 2013

The first Neighborhood Sacramentology post on the Table considered the priesthood and the validity of the Eucharist, which raised the question of when we ought to observe the Table. The second post enriched the question by recasting it in liturgical terms, and that left us with three questions.
1. What are we doing/representing at the Lord’s Table?
2. How can we do that effectively in a given context?
3. Are there contexts where the Table should or should not be observed?
This post will tackle that first question.

Whether in a high-church Anglican service in Canterbury Cathedral or a secret meeting of a Chinese house church in a nondescript apartment in Beijing, the Lord’s Table will be the highlight of Christian worship around the world today, and rightly so.

On this day, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

A human being died, was buried, and on the third day, and was raised to new and incorruptible life.

But so what? It was 2000 years ago, in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, and nobody’s successfully done it since. Other than being a candidate for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, what does it have to do with me?

Nothing at all…unless somehow, I could participate in it. If the same thing could happen to me, then the resurrection of Christ is not just a historical oddity. It’s proof that new life and immortality await whoever follows in His footsteps, whoever partakes of Christ.

This is Paul’s point in Romans 6. We who believe in Christ participate with Him in His death and resurrection, and because He is raised, we also are raised to new life. Hebrews shows us Christ as our forerunner, the High Priest who leads us into the Presence behind the veil of the heavenly Tabernacle, going before us, whose ministry never fades because He always lives to intercede for us.

When we come into the Presence in worship, we find Him there ahead of us, blessing and breaking the bread and pouring the wine. “This is My body,” He says, and “This is My blood.” There in the throne room of His Father, He invites us to His victory feast: “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has everlasting life, and I will raise him up on the last day, for My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in Him.”

You are what you eat. We who eat and drink Christ are Christ’s Body, His hands and feet released into the world to do the works that He did, and greater works still. As the bread and wine are broken down and incorporated into our bodies, so He is incorporated into our hearts, as the Eucharistic exhortation also says: “Feed on Him in your hearts by faith, and with thanksgiving.”

This is what the Table does, and what the Table represents.

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

Comments Off on Neighborhood Sacramentology: What the Table Does | Kingdom Parish, Meditations, Mystical Union, The Lord's Table, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Neighborhood Sacramentology: Liturgy and the Table

27 March 2013

In the previous ‘Neighborhood Sacramentology’ post, we looked at the question of who may administer the Eucharist, and we addressed the question in terms of validity, and in terms of priesthood. Working with only those two criteria, I concluded that any baptized believer is a priest, and a priest may validly administer the Eucharist.

Those are not, however, the only criteria. When we gather together for worship, we always have convictions about what our worship is, what it means. We embody those convictions in a set of expectations about what we will actually do, an order of service — or to use the historical term, a liturgy. The liturgy and the beliefs about worship reflect one another. (I am speaking ideally here. In reality, our liturgies often embody beliefs and expectations we do not hold, either because we were taught the liturgy but not the underlying foundation of beliefs, or because we simply weren’t reflective about the liturgy.)

By being a reflection of our beliefs and inner life, liturgy is drama, an acting-out of our understanding of worship. Only it is performative drama, like a wedding ceremony. The smallest details of the wedding ceremony may be carefully planned to adequately represent what is happening on the wedding day, but on the wedding day, the ceremony does not just represent the beginning of a marriage. It also accomplishes what it represents.

Likewise, our liturgy does not simply represent worship; it is worship. As custodians of the liturgy, we have a duty to attend to the details so that the real worship of the church is adequately represented in the liturgy.

This means that when we turn to the question of who blesses and distributes the bread and wine, we are not simply dealing with matters of priesthood and validity. We are also casting for a role in a drama, and the role for which we are casting is Jesus Himself.

We need to recognize at this point that we have departed from “right and wrong” territory and embarked into “wisdom” territory. We already understand that any baptized believer can validly step up and represent Christ; in fact, that is exactly what we are all called to do in daily life. The question now is, “Given that anyone could, who is the best choice for the role in the liturgical drama we are carrying out?”

The answer, of course, is Jim Caviezel.

I kid, but to make a point: obviously, you have to choose from the talent you have available. You may feel strongly that it should be an ordained priest, but if you haven’t got one about, what will you do? You may personally feel it should be a man, but if you’re at a women’s retreat with five other churches and they plan to observe communion, you will be offered the elements by a woman. At that moment, the relevant question is not “Shouldn’t this be a man?” but “Shall I break table fellowship with five churches’ worth of my sisters in Christ over it?” No, you shouldn’t.

Now, for what my $0.02 is worth, I do think that a man should represent Christ in the liturgical drama, just as I believe the Prayers of the People should be led by a woman, representing the Bride. I also don’t really want to see a production of Romeo and Juliet where Romeo is played by a woman, or Juliet by a man (even if that’s how they really did it in Shakespeare’s day). Gender matters, and God was pleased to present Christ His Son not just as a man, but as the man, the new Adam, and to cast His Church as the Bride of Christ, the new Eve, the mother of all living on the New Earth. I believe this imagery ought to be honored and reinforced, especially in our worship.

That said, there remains the Jim Caviezel problem. This post is called Neighborhood Sacramentology for a reason, and we have to work with what we have. I once heard a story of a group of Russian Orthodox clerics who wanted to observe the Eucharist in the gulag. In their tradition, the Eucharist is served from an altar that contains the relics of the martyrs, and of course, they had neither altar nor relics in the gulag. These men, each one imprisoned for his faith, looked at one another and thought, “We’re all martyrs here!” So they laid one of their number on a bench and served the Eucharist off his chest.

While I don’t feel a need for the relics of the martyrs, that’s the spirit. Given that we’re doing our liturgical casting from the people we have handy, let’s be as clear as possible about what we’re seeking to represent, and then make the wisest decision we can with the resources at hand.

I ended the last Neighborhood Sacramentology post with a question: When should we observe the Eucharist? The observations above don’t answer that question, but they give us some better questions.

1. What are we doing (and representing) at the Lord’s Table?
2. How do we embody that in a given context?
3. In what contexts is the Table appropriate? Are there some contexts where it is required or prohibited? If so, what are they?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Neighborhood Sacramentology: Baptism

18 November 2012

In a previous post, I began discussing the gap between the western institutional structure we think of as “the church” and the activity of the Body of Christ as the Church in the world. Given that “church” as the New Testament uses the term is hardly coextensive with the 501(c)(3) corporate model that we use today in the US, what does that mean for sacramental observance?

For baptism, it’s a no-brainer. The New Testament shows us nary a single example of baptism in any other pattern than this: the new believer is baptized immediately upon profession of faith, by whoever is handy, with the nearest available water. There’s just no NT concept of getting interviewed by the elders or the priest first, waiting three weeks until the next time the baptistry will be filled up, none of that. Maybe there was an occasion with somebody, sometime, where wisdom dictated that one or more of those extrabiblical constraints was a good idea in some particular case, but there’s no call to be accepting that as the normal pattern.

So that one’s pretty obvious: if we follow the NT pattern, when someone professes faith, we baptize ’em right then. If they happen to be in a church building at the time, well, so be it. If not…the bathtub, pool, pond, or river will do just fine. If Baby Jesus could be laid in a manger, His disciples can be baptized in a horse trough.

1 Comment | Baptism, Ecclesiology, Kingdom Parish, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“Descriptive, not Prescriptive,” part 4: Options and Patterns

7 November 2010

Before I begin this entry, I need to make something clear to you, dear reader.  Some of the examples I use here are indeed topics of discussion and continuing growth in my church, and I am using them because they are very much on my heart of late.  But I am not picking on my church.  As my church has been prodded toward obedience on these things, it has responded very well.  So as I talk about evangelical resistance to growth in certain areas, that is not a passive-aggressive way of calling out recalcitrant people in my own circle.  There aren’t any.  I mean just what I say — I see this resistance in the broader evangelical church, and I am seeking to address it as best I can.

Options and Obedience

Many believers will simply fail to notice a biblical requirement — say, the one to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.  They may have read those passages many times, but it simply doesn’t occur to them that they should do something in response.  The first time this dawns on them, it is because someone is pushing for a particular type of obedience — say, “We need to sing the Sons of Korah version of Psalm 148 in the service this Sunday.”   Upon being challenged as to why this is necessary, the speaker will respond with Ephesians 5:19.

The response at this point is pretty predictable.  “There’s nothing there that says we have to sing that particular song this particular morning.”

This is of course true.  The church could be in complete obedience to the biblical requirement and never sing any song by that particular band, ever. Unfortunately, too often what happens next is…nothing.

Because we need not sing that particular arrangement of that particular psalm this week, we don’t.  Also we don’t sing any other arrangement of that psalm.  Or any other psalm.  And in this way the fact that God gives us freedom in how we obey becomes the occasion for not obeying at all.

Patterns

This is where biblical patterns of obedience are so helpful to us.  The Bible not only gives us requirements to obey, it gives us patterns of obedience to emulate.  A particular example may not be the only way of obeying, but it is a way of obeying.  We don’t have to start from scratch.

The first problem evangelicals have with these patterns is failing to even notice them.  We notice that the early church successfully resolved an important theological disagreement in Acts 15, for example — but we pay no mind at all to how they did it.  We recognize the commands to be of one mind, to submit to one another, to contend earnestly for the faith, and so on.  And Acts 15 becomes a sermon illustration: “See, they stood up for the truth.  We should too.”

Yes, but how?  Are we acting in continuity with the way they did it?  We don’t know.  We never even checked to see how they did it.  We just take the goal that the requirement gives us, and improvise something that we think will get us there.

At some point, some observant soul may point out how they did it, back in the day.  “Look at what they did.  They appealed to another church with more theological ‘horsepower,’ they appointed a day to gather, they pursued the dispute until everyone had fallen silent, and then they responded, unanimously, to the issue.”

Most evangelicals respond to that observation in the same way that they do to the suggestion that we must sing this arrangement of this psalm this week.  That is, they say “Sure, that was a good way to do it.  But it’s descriptive, not prescriptive.  We don’t have to do it that way, just because they did.”

True, up to a point.  Every situation is somewhat different, and it is the province of God-given wisdom to appraise those differences and tweak our response accordingly.  This is to say that we will not respond in unison with our fathers at every point; sometimes we will be in harmony with them.

But what madness makes us suppose that we may simply invent an approach without regard for the examples that God gives us in inspired Scripture?  What makes us think that we may act out of harmony with the way in which our fathers obeyed?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Praise

7 June 2010

Truly, all wisdom is Yours,
And from Your lips come knowledge and discernment.
Before I cried out to You,
Before the prayer was formed in my heart,
Your eyes saw my plight
And You gave Your servant understanding.

Therefore I will praise You while I live,
I will bless Your name in the company of Your saints.
For You have dealt bountifully with me.

Sing to the Lord, my nation!
And kneel before the Lamb, all you nations of the earth!
Serve Him gladly, for He is great;
Inquire of Him, for in Him is all wisdom and knowledge.

He founded the seas;
He conceived the plankton before any existed.
The blue whale is His;
His mouth spoke the hummingbird,
The lions in their pride and the larks in their exaltation.
The ebbing tides proclaim His glory,
And the rising mountains utter His words.

Who is like Yahweh?
Show me, and I will praise him.
Who is like the Son of God?
Display him, and every knee will bow.
But the gods live at His pleasure,
And at His rebuke they will burn like chaff.

4 Comments | Meditations, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

GES Conference 2010

25 April 2010

I spent the better part of this past week at the annual GES conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

The Lord blessed us with a number of good speakers, and the mood of the conference was phenomenal.  I got a strong sense that the majority of the attendees really desire reconciliation within the Free Grace movement.  This is a marked change from when I was last there two years ago.  That, for me, was the highlight of the conference.

Some other personal highlights:

  • Bob Swift’s session on the Johannine prologue was both simple and very, very deep.  It goes well with Jim Reitman’s “Gospel in 3-D” series, which presents some additional refinements.
  • Dan Hauge’s workshop on 1 Samuel.  He aimed to equip us to teach 1 Samuel and convince us of the value of doing so.  It worked.
  • John Niemela’s presentation on Hebrews 12:14 was very good.  His thesis: “Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord (in you).”
  • I had the privilege of presenting a plenary session on Hebrews, and a workshop on worship.  You can find them both here.
  • My good friend and future co-worker Joe Anderson came to the conference, and we partnered up for some serious psalm-singing (more info here).  Monday night we spent working on matching lyrics and tunes, Tuesday night we spent a few hours in a corner of the Riley Center with a few friends, singing, sharing, and praying until midnight or so.  Wednesday night the same, but with a very good conversation about worship dance…and a little actual dancing, even.
  • We also got the chance to introduce psalm-singing to the whole conference in the main session after lunch on Wednesday, and in the prayer time.  That was a lot of fun, and very well received.
  • The fellowship was outstanding, as always.  Made new friends, reacquainted with old ones, and got to meet an online friend and fellow worker in person for the first time, which was a real pleasure.
  • Jim Reitman (knowing that my presentation would be discussing unity in the body of Christ) brought me a t-shirt that said “Ask me about my dysfunctional family.”  Priceless.

A good time was had by all — as far as I know — and I’m looking forward to next year.

1 Comment | The Free Grace Food Fight, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Liturgy Or Two

21 December 2009

I know there are several of you who read this site because I post on liturgy from time to time, and I owe you folks an update.  I haven’t posted on liturgy in a while, and it’s not because I’ve been dormant.  We had reached the stage in the life of the church where our discussions of liturgy were becoming very particular to our own individual concerns.  It didn’t seem appropriate to share all of that with the world, so I haven’t.

What I can share are the results.  Some potential points of interest, in no particular order:

  • We are using the 5-C covenant renewal pattern cribbed from Jeff Myers’ excellent The Lord’s Service.  This is not the result of a solid theological commitment on our part, but we have to do everything in some order.  We picked this order on the principle that it makes sense, and given the choice between a sensible order that we might not have to change much and a cobbled-together pastiche that we know we’ll have to fix, we prefer the former.  We’ll examine it more closely as time permits, and of course it’s all up for grabs at that point, but ya gotta start somewhere…
  • Page numbers for songs are from Cantus Christi, unless otherwise noted.  (Note that verse numbers will also be different from one hymnal to the next.  Particularly in Cantus, where the editors have a definite antiquarian streak.)
  • The opening prayer is inspired by the Book of Common Prayer, and edited as seemed appropriate.
  • The confession and petition prayers were drafted corporately, the former based on Nehemiah’s confession for the nation and the latter based on a grocery list of things we should pray for. We know there are going to be problems here.  Be interesting to find out what they will be.
  • The fact that everybody is reading a scripted prayer together is not one of the problems.  More about this later, but here’s the short version: (1) teamwork requires coordination; (2) nobody complains about this when corporately singing to the Lord; (3) why is it a problem when corporately speaking to Him?
  • We left the “c-word” in the Creed, with no apologies.  We mean it when we say we believe in the holy catholic church, and we also mean the unspoken “and they don’t!” that comes with it.  In this we stand with the Reformed and Anglican portions of the Protestant heritage, as over against the Lutheran tradition, which chickened out.
  • Weekly communion, yes.  Grape juice thus far.

So, without further ado, here is our very first attempt at formal liturgy.

We knew we were going to need to tweak it, but we weren’t sure how.  A few things became clear once we’d actually done it once, and here are a few of them:

  • The petition prayer was composed without any regard for cadence or ease of corporate reading.  This is entirely my fault, because getting it into final shape was my job.  The content, if I do say so myself, is pretty good.  But it’s ugly, and it shouldn’t be.  Although I have no doubt that I can fix it, this is not a kind of writing I’ve done before, so it’s going to be a process.
  • That prayer is also really, really long.  We may shorten it a bit.
  • There is such a thing as too fast.  In my zeal to keep the corporate portions from dragging–come on, you know what I’m talking about–I led us through at a breakneck pace.  This is a Bad Thing, because if people can barely get the words out of their mouth in time, then they have little chance of absorbing them.  Must slow down.  Happily, we have the time to do this.
  • Four songs in a row is too many, especially in a congregation that’s not accustomed to a lot of singing.  Need to break this up into more manageable chunks.
  • My local Stater Brothers doesn’t sell matzoh, or anything else much in the way of unleavened bread.  This may not sound relevant, but when you’re out shopping for a communion bread that you can actually break instead of those awful little square white things, it matters.  Must find a local source.

We went back to the drawing board and tweaked a bit.  Here’s the second version.

Comments and critiques are of course welcome.

3 Comments | liturgy, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Church Music Through History

26 April 2009

For many people caught up in the worship wars, the history of church music is presumed to look like this: Generation A comes to faith, grows up, and introduces its music into the worship of the church, bringing fresh vigor and new life to the tired and outdated tunes that preceded them.  Then Generation B comes to faith, grows up, and introduces its music into the worship of the church, bringing fresh vigor and new life to the tired and outdated tunes of Generation A, who have in the meantime become a bunch of obstructionist old geezers.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

It is assumed that each generation’s music is the popular music of its youth, and it is assumed that this pattern has gone on since living memory, or at least since Pentecost.

Both of these assumptions are wrong.

In truth, the pattern is only about 200 years old.  For the preceding 1800 years, the church drew on a rich heritage of singing that was consciously shaped, not by the Top 40, but by the needs and demands of worship, and was made consciously different from the music outside the church.

Now, I’m not saying the early church had the whole thing knocked, and if only we’d forget the last couple of centuries everything would be fine.  Maybe our fathers were right, and maybe they were wrong.  But it seems telling to me that we’ve so thoroughly managed to forget what they did that we just assume the way it’s happened since the 1970s is the way that it has always been.  We’ve forgotten 1800 years of the music that nurtured our fathers, and it seems likely that they knew a few things that might benefit us.

I’d love to go off on this subject at great length.  I am preparing to do so.  But I am still in the midst of the preparations.  In the meantime, I would like to recommend a little audio set you’ve probably never heard of.

Some while ago, Duane Garner did a little four-lecture series titled “Church Music Through History.”  The lectures were delivered as part of a ministry training program run by a church down in Louisiana, and but for the miracle of the internet, very few people would ever have heard them.  I would certainly never have heard them.

Thank God for Christendom 1.0, which gave us modern science, a ridiculous degree of wealth, and, in its death throes, the internet.

Garner walks through the history of the church’s music from the beginning right on down to today.  Of course, four lectures is barely enough to give the big picture — we’re talking about millennia here — but he does a masterful job of synthesizing.  These lectures are designed for musical laymen, so don’t worry about getting lost in a tangle of clefs, modes, and dotted sixteenth notes. By the same token, if you want to go further, Garner mentions a number of other resources in the course of his lectures.

Prepare, by the way, to be offended.  As Garner turns the spotlight on poor worship music from the last couple of centuries, it’s highly likely that he’ll be criticizing something you like, something you grew up with.  (His analysis of “There’s Just Something About That Name” was sobering, but hilarious nonetheless.) Don’t feel bad; he did it to me, too.  I was irritated to hear him picking on a song I used to sing when I was a worship team member…for about two seconds.  Then I realized that he was rather clearly right.  I would have wanted to argue more strenuously, but when the weak stuff was being presented cheek-by-jowl with the strong stuff, the comparison was so revealing that I didn’t have the heart to try.

That’s the value of big-picture historical survey.  In C. S. Lewis’ words, “Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds… by reading old books.”

And listening to old music.  As another friend put it to me a few years ago: “Musicians that aren’t conservatory-trained are pretty much trapped in their own century.”  We are Christians; the pilgrim citizens of the New Jerusalem.  Our culture spans the millennia, and we are a singing priesthood.  We, of all people, should not be trapped in our own century, musically or in any other way.

These four lectures are not a conservatory-in-an-ipod.  Not close.  But they’re a good, good place to start.

So get on over to Auburn Avenue Media Center and buy them.  They’re about a third of the way down the page, and at $1.99 a lecture, you’ll get the whole set for less than $8.

Not bad for a ticket out of your own century.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Liturgical Theology

22 March 2009

Liturgy is one of those unavoidable issues.  If you gather in church, you’re going to do something.  The word for that something is liturgy.

To my considerable detriment, and the great shame of my tradition, I managed to get through 4 years of Bible college and 4 more years of seminary, graduate from both, and be ordained as a minister of the gospel, all without receiving any training in liturgical theology.  Not one course; not one recommended book; not so much as a casual conversation over coffee.

If you paid close attention to my first paragraph, you’re probably wondering, “What? First you say it’s unavoidable to have liturgy, and then you say you got no training in liturgy?  How’s that possible?”

It’s not.  Everyone gets training in liturgy every time they go to church.  I was no exception.  I even got a little formal training in liturgy.  Not much, but enough to get me through my first church service, first communion service, first wedding, etc., without disaster.  What I didn’t get was training in liturgical theology — being conscious of what the liturgy communicates, understanding the underlying theology of it.  I had lots of training in the theology of what I say in church, but none at all in the theology of what we do in church.

God be praised, He maneuvered me into a pastoral situation where a couple of very divergent liturgical traditions were coming together, and this forced me to confront these issues.  If I’d taken a pastorate in a normal church in my tradition, I could have gone to my grave having never thought these things through.

But it was not to be.  The only way we could have church at all without fighting about what to do was to agree that nobody, including the pastor, was allowed to import traditions into our church without a discussion of the issues and a biblical grounding in why we were doing that particular thing.  The resulting ground-up examination of every last facet of the service has been excruciating for me, very slow going for everyone, and generally a difficult process, but very, very rewarding.

Why excruciating?  Not through any fault of my congregation, I can assure you.  They’ve been unfailingly loving, patient, and helpful throughout the process.  I couldn’t ask for a better group of fellow believers to hash through these things with, and I couldn’t possibly have gotten where I am without them.  I thank God for them constantly.  In spite of that, this process has been very painful for me because I had thought of myself as pretty well prepared for the ministry.  Oh, I knew I had a lot of experiential learning to do, just like every young pastorling does, but I though I was pretty solid in terms of what I knew.  Liturgical reform forced me to confront my abysmal ignorance in a very basic area of church practice.  Worse yet, about half of the little I thought I knew has turned out to be, not just wrong, but utterly indefensible.  So far.  I’m not making any bets about the reliability of the rest of my tiny fund of knowledge, either.

Unfortunately, I am far from alone in my benighted ignorance.  I recently heard a former Presbyterian minister bewailing the fact that there’s not a Reformed seminary on this continent where a student can get a course in liturgical theology.

Why is that?

I suspect because it would force us to confront areas of weakness and sin that make us very, very uncomfortable.  The implicit theology of a church service from my tradition is heartily gnostic.  The focus of the service is on delivery of information from pastor to people.  The hymns are screened for doctrinal content (and little else), the Lord’s Table is an occasion for a sermonette on the cross and resurrection, and the baptismal services are used as occasions to preach the gospel to unsaved loved ones who are invited to the service.  Everything is a sermon — spoken, set to music, or presented as an object lesson.  In some subsets of my tradition, even the word “service” has been replaced with the term “Bible class” — because that’s all it is.

It’s all about the ideas, disconnected from historical, experiential reality.

Now someone will justly complain that of course, the preaching — musical, spoken, and object lessons — hammers unceasingly on the need for the ideas to be applied into daily life.  Sad to say, there are occasional exceptions to this, but for the most part, this is true.

But that’s just the point, isn’t it?  While what we say certainly passes all the tests of orthodoxy, what we do in the church service pictures a different theology entirely.  The entire service is delivery of intellectual content from pastor (or choir) to people.  It pictures a theology in which pleasing God is all about knowing things, and the more content you know, the more pleased God will be with you.

That’s gnosticism.

And it leads to believers who have heavy notebooks bursting with information, and unholy lives empty of meaning.  And as much as we might decry the results from the pulpit in the next week’s ‘Bible class’, those very problems we so despise are results of our bankrupt worship.

As opposed to what?

Thought you’d never ask.

As opposed to the Church gathering consciously as the Cabinet of the New Jerusalem (temporarily in exile), in order that we, as royal priests ordained through baptism into Christ’s one body, might enter boldly into the Holy of Holies to confess our sins, receive grace to help us in need, offer up the new covenant sacrifices of praise, hear His Word to us, and be fed by Him at His Table.  Gathering as royal priests to bring the world before God in prayer, that God will bring HImself to the world through us, and gathering as royal priests that we might wage war in the heavenly places against the ruling powers of that same world, secure in the knowledge that its many kingdoms will become the single Kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ.

In other words, an actual, Christian worship service,  a time in which we serve God through worship rather than just downloading some content from the pastor’s head.

Now what does the liturgy look like when that is the implicit theology behind it?

I don’t know.  (I have no training in this, remember?)

But by God’s providence, through study and prayer and lots of trial and error, we’re going to find out together.

2 Comments | liturgy, Meditations, Worship | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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