Tag: sacraments

Concert versus Worship

August 23, 2018 / / 1 Comment

 

Free-Photos / Pixabay

If the amount of time given to the singing of praise and worship songs, and the central position of the praise band on “the stage” is any indication, many North American churches are implicitly asserting that singing of praise songs as the main way we interact with God in our Sunday services.

This means we’d better get it right.

Worship Leader?

We have all heard people, including some worship leaders, speak as if the term “worship” was synonymous with “singing.”  Even the title “worship leader” suggests the reduction of worship to singing.  The appellation “Worship Leader” is appropriate if this person also leads the congregants in the many other aspects of worship.  For instance:

  • prayer
  • scripture reading
  • the offering
  • the reading of the law
  • confession and assurance of forgiveness
  • the recitation of the Apostle’s Creed
  • funeral announcements
  • pleas for volunteers for the Sunday School
  • and anything else besides singing that also constitutes worship

If the worship leader only leads signing, then they should be referred to as song leaders.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”If the worship leader only leads signing, then they should be referred to as song leaders. #praiseandworship #worshipleader #worship” quote=”If the worship leader only leads signing, then they should be referred to as song leaders.”]

But isn’t this just semantics?  Although it may seem like I am being petty, this is some serious stuff.

Little things will turn and shape our thinking.  Things like:

  • using the terms singing and worship interchangeably,
  • and calling song leaders, worship leaders,
  • and removing all sign of the sacraments from the stage,
  • and calling that area “the stage”
  • and calling that area “the auditorium,”

These are hugely important because we do them habitually.  If we habitually use the term “stage,” for instance, we will come to understand what happens on it to be a performance.

James K. A. Smith Changed How I Think About Everything

According to James K. A. Smith, human beings are liturgical animals.  He argues that our lives are not given direction by what we think, or even what we believe, but by what we love.  According to Smith,

what constitutes our ultimate identities—what makes us who we are, the kind of people we are—is what we love. More specifically, our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love, or what our love as ultimate—what, at the end of the day, gives us a sense of meaning, purpose, understanding and orientation

(26–27 Desiring the Kingdom).

Smith then argues that our loves are shaped and directed by “liturgies”–habitual practices.

Traditionally the church used to orient our identities toward God and the community of faith through all sorts of liturgies: the physical spaces of worship, the sacraments, the church calendar, genuflecting, kneeling, standing, offering  “Peace.”  Fish on Friday, the rosary, daily prayers, and many other regular and repeated practices linked the spiritual realm with daily life.

Secular Liturgies

In modern Christianity, we’ve abandoned almost all of these habits and rituals–liturgies.  But, we’ve not abandoned liturgies.  Being liturgical animals, we’ve simply adopted new ones.  We’ve replaced the old ones with new ones.  And the new ones are largely modern and secular: Starbucks and McDonalds, Saturday hockey and Sunday football, Homecoming and Holloween, Twitter and Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix, craft beer and green-coloured smoothies, inclusion and saying “I feel,” when we mean “I think.”   These are not just things we do, they shape who we are because they are regular, habitual–they are liturgies.

We have replaced sacred liturgies with secular liturgies.  This ain’t good if you believe that a spiritual reality is meaningfully interacting with the material one.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Why do people have such a hard time with faith in our culture?  Because our rituals direct our passions and desires to other things–other ultimate loves. ” quote=”Why do people have such a hard time with faith in our culture?  Because our rituals direct our passions and desires to other things–other ultimate loves. “]

Are we training people to leave the church?

There is some (a lot of?) anxiety in the North American Church about people, especially young people, vacating the pews.   To retain their members, and attract new ones, many churches have attempted to become more culturally “relevant,” but this has exacerbated the problem.  Being culturally relevant usually means importing secular liturgies into the church.  The Starbucks’ Coffee culture, showing movies on Youth Nights, dress-up parties on Reformation Day and the singing to the instrumentation and stylings of popular music are examples. The problem is that secular culture does these liturgies better than the church does, so the church is actually training people to eventually prefer Starbucks and pop concerts to Church.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The church is actually training people to eventually prefer Starbucks and pop concerts to Church.” quote=”The church is actually training people to eventually prefer Starbucks and pop concerts to Church.”]

The Function of Difference

According to the Westminster Confession, one of the functions of the sacraments is as a “visible difference between those that belong unto the church and the rest of the world.” The authors of the Confession understood the importance of having a different experience at church than in the world.

Our rituals used to be different than those of the world, but in some churches, even our sacraments are being secularized.  For the health, and perhaps survival, of the North American church, we need to be different, not the same.

Here are some questions that might be a part of a discussion around how to make the singing part of worship, unlike the secular liturgy of the popular music concert:

  • How can we increase the involvement of the congregation in the singing part of worship?
  • Is there a way to teach the worshipers how to harmonize?
  • Should we sing more hymns?
  • Should we sing different hymns (than just the 5 we do now)?
  • Should we sing hymns in their original forms, same harmonies, and no modern (and inferior) additions?
  • Are volumes and mixes supporting congregational singing, or drowning it out?
  • Can we use different instrumentation than a typical rock and roll band?
  • Can we develop different song structures besides the verse-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-chorus pattern?
  • Could we create a new genre of Christian music for corporate worship?
  • Is it necessary for the worship band to be front and centre?
  • How can we utilize lighting to take the focus off of the musicians?
  • Can we resurrect some traditional liturgical forms or elements of worship?
  • Can we invent new liturgical forms that are different than secular liturgies?
  • How can we emphasize God’s action in worship and the sacraments?
  • Can we move toward thinking about the sacraments as more than ceremonies of remembrance?
  • Can we mention, or even link our sermons to, the church calendar?

This list includes just some of the ways that we could bring more sacred liturgies into the Sunday service.  Do you have any ideas you could add to this list?

In my series The Poetry of Worship, offer ways we can improve the lyrics of the praise and worship songs we sing.  More importantly, I explain why we ought to.

Spiritual Mysteries in Worship

November 1, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Skitterphoto / Pixabay

When I was a university student, I came across a graphic in a textbook which put the major denominations on a continuum from Roman Catholic/Anglicans on the one end, to the “Evangelical” churches on the other.

I can’t recall the exact wording, but my recollection is that the continuum compared the degree a denomination was open to the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in and through the physical elements of the sacraments. The mainline churches, like the Christian Reformed Church to which I have belonged since birth, was right in the middle.

Spiritual Mysteries in the Sacraments

At the time, I was puzzled by this.  I didn’t understand exactly how my church was at all open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the physical elements of the sacraments. It was nothing like the Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Roman Catholic worship services I had attended over the years. These services were full of mysterious objects and activities that I didn’t understand and I definitely got the sense that the physical elements of the sacraments were infused with mystery and power.

Then I started to attend an Evangelical church.  It has a strong emphasis on biblical teaching and a contemporary style of corporate worship.

I now understand that continuum in the textbook.  In the Modern Evangelical churches, the sacraments are strictly human activities.

  • Baptism is an external sign of a decision to follow Jesus.
  • Communion is a meal of remembrance; participants remember Christ’s death on our behalf.

In the Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Roman Catholic expression of these sacraments, God is active in some very specific ways.  In the church of my youth, God was also active, but the explanation as to how, was a little less specific.  The sacraments were cosidered a neabs by which we receive Grace.

The Call to Worship

I once went to a Greek Orthodox on a Sunday morning but hadn’t bothered checking when the service began, so I got there about an hour and a half too early. Although the pews were completely empty, there was a lot of activity behind the heavily iconic screen in the middle of the sanctuary.

The priests were chanting and praying and doing things with the Bible and candles and incense and I don’t know what else. What struck me was the lack of an audience. Adorned in their priestly vestments, they were going through all sorts of complex ritual and there was no one there to see it.

Or was there? It’s interesting that as much as we talk about God being the centre of worship in our Protestant churches, our rituals suggest otherwise. In the churches I’m familiar with, the worship starts when the congregants show up and not before.

The Physical Space of Worship

Besides meaningful interactions with God and preparing themselves for their role in the service, I think the Greek Orthodox priests were also engaged in activities that prepared the physical space for worship. It makes some sense that you can’t just have people walk into a place and start worshiping the Almighty, Triune, Creator God.

I was thinking about the space of worship in the church of my youth. Back then it was called a “sanctuary.” I know that the worship space in many churches today is called an “auditorium.”

Labels make a lot of difference. A sanctuary is a sacred or holy place. An auditorium is a place where you hear things. Notice how the first suggests the presence of the holy and the spiritual in the physical space, where the second places an emphasis on human activity; humans making noises and hearing them.

I’m glad my new church doesn’t call the space we gather for corporate worship as “the auditorium.” But what about the sense of holiness for the space in which we worship?

I wonder if we have gone too far in the last 500 years.

 

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