all to the cross and that God changed his mind
about what happened in the Old Testament.
Styles may change. Ceremony may change. But the
why of worship did not ever change.
The why of worship in the Old Testament is also
assumed in the New. It is the same why. It is the
same God. God did not change. God didn't change
his mind. But when we ask the question why,
Old Testament and New, we're asking the
question who God is. Who God is. There's no
other place
to begin than who God is. And if you were to
ask the people of ancient Israel who God is,
the answer that is most likely to come back
because you find it over and over and over and
over and over again in the Old Testament, the
answer that's liable to come back is God is the
Holy One of Israel. That's the phrase. You see
it scattered from beginning to end in the Old Testament
and you see it culminate in the New. God is the
Holy One of Israel. Psalm 89:18.
For our shield belongs to the Lord, our King,
to the Holy One of Israel. One of dozens of examples
in the Psalms. 2 Kings 19:22. Whom have you
mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised
your voice and haughtily lifted your eyes
against the Holy One of Israel? 1 Samuel 2:2. There
is no Holy One like the Lord. No one besides
you. The Holy One of Israel. God is a Holy God.
God is a God who is other than we. God is a God
who is set apart for his purposes. He is a God
who in many senses is beyond. He is separate.
That's what the word holy means at its root.
He is separate. The opposite of holy is common.
The opposite of holy is common. Profane.
Leviticus 10:10. You are to distinguish
between the holy and the common. See those are
opposites between the unclean and the clean.
God is holy. W-H-O-L-L-O-Y. Holy other. God is
beyond and above all things. There are not enough
words to describe who God is. You take all the
words, all the concepts, all the phrases that are
used in the Old Testament to describe who God
is and they're subsumed under the title the
Holy One
of Israel. God is a God of glory. God is a
sovereign God. God is a God of loving-kindness,
of steadfast love toward us. God is a God who
acts in history on our behalf and you can string
all this together and tell all the stories that
are possible to tell about God and there is still
more to God than that. That's what holy means.
There's there are not enough words in the English
language or any other language to describe who
God is because of God's holiness, of his glory,
of his otherness, of his greatness, of his
splendor, of his magnitude. God is the Holy One
of Israel and here is the paradox. This is the
decisive message of the Old Testament and the new
that the Holy One of Israel is in our midst. On
a number of occasions, those phrases that are
antithetical phrases, they're nonsensical
phrases when you put them together, a complete paradox,
but those phrases are combined. The Holy One of
Israel in our midst, the God who is other mysterious
beyond, is present here and among us. Hosea
11:9, for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One
in your
midst. It's unfathomable. It's a paradox. It
can't be explained. Isaiah 12:6, shout aloud
and sing
for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst
is the Holy One of Israel. It's a constant theme.
You can just hardly not find, page by page in
the Old Testament, this concept, the Holy One of
Israel who is in your midst. Psalm 46, God is
our refuge and strength, a very present hell in time
of trouble. God is in the midst of the city. It
shall not be moved. The Lord of Hosts is with us.
The fact that the people of Israel could ever
be called a holy people was not attributable to their
greatness, their strength, their power, their
wonder, their obedience. They were called holy
only because the Holy God of Israel was in
their midst. And so when God says, be holy as I
am holy
in Leviticus 11 and Leviticus 19, a phrase that
is reflected again in the New Testament, 1
Peter 1,
be holy as I am holy. The only reason they
could ever be holy is not because they could do enough,
be great enough, learn enough, be obedient
enough, but because the Holy One of Israel was
in their
midst. He was with them. The mystery, the
separateness, the incomparability of God was in
the midst of the people.
I would assert that the uniqueness of Israel's
worship was not in her rituals.
The uniqueness of Israel's worship was never in
her rituals.
There were other ancient Near Eastern cultures
that had rites similar to the Sabbath
and to the Feast of the Unleavened Bread and to
the Passover and to New Moon celebrations
and the Harvest and the New Year Feast. There
were some uniquenesses in Israel, but it is not
the ritual that made Israel unique because
these events were significant for Israel,
not because of the ceremony, but because they
are associated with the acts of the Holy One of Israel
of the Holy One of Israel who is in the midst
of his people. Every one of those rituals is tied
to the acts of God in history. Who God is and
how God is working in our midst.
That God is the Holy One of Israel involved in
his people. God is always a God who has acted
on Israel's behalf and there are never laws,
never instructions, never commands that are given
separate apart from the nature of God whenever
just told simply to do things. Do this, do this,
do this, do this, hear the instructions, but
not leave us with our own testimony.
Never is that the case. Look at the context of
the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 or
Deuteronomy 5.
The context is not just beginning with the
laws, do this. The context is
God, the great God of Israel. God brought you
out of Egypt. God saw you in your situation. God
delivered you from bondage. God led you into
the land of problems because of the nature of God.
So the instructions that were given to Israel
in all aspects of her life as well as worship
were given not just simply as commands to
follow, not just simply as a pattern to comply with,
but because they encountered God there. God in
their midst.
The very place of worship in the Old Testament,
the tabernacle and Temple, is a place that signified
the God who was with them, not just removed and
above, not just the holy, but God who was with them.
And so the tabernacle of the temple had the
holy place and the holy of holies where God
of holies where God was symbolically enthroned
on the ark as a throne. It's the language of
Isaiah 6.
God is sitting on the throne, but he's so great
that the holy of holies cannot contain him.
The presence of God in the midst of the people,
the holy of holies in the heart, in the midst
of them.
So God is with them. In the most decisive event
of the Old Testament, God was with them.
The defining event of the Old Testament is the
Exodus event. God led them. God has done it and
God continues to do it. God is still doing what
God once did in the Exodus event, and all of that
culminates in the Immanuel of God. The Immanuel
theme that you see running all the way through the
Old Testament. He says to Gideon, I will be
with you. He says to Moses, I will be with you.
He says
to Isaiah, I'll be with you. He says to
Jeremiah, I'll be with you. I will be with you.
All of
which culminates in the birth of the child, the
very God, the Holy One of Israel,
the Holy One of the world, who entered into
human flesh and was with us, God incarnate.
God met us here. We didn't meet God there, but
God met us here. God always meets us here.
The Immanuel of God, God with us. God meets us.
God seeks us. God encounters us. It is not our
questing for God, but God's questing for us.
It's not our seeking for God, but God's seeking
for us.
The question is, will we let him encounter us?
Will we let him see us, grasp us, change us here?
That is the heart of worship. In the Old
Testament and the New, the God who seeks us,
the Holy One who is in our midst. But there's
been a tendency for us to denigrate the whole notion
of the God who is present. Because we recognize
that there is a God who encounters us in all
circumstances, and there's a sense in which all
of life is worship, that we have come in the last
20 years to assume that there is no special way
that God encounters us in our assembly.
One of the passages that we go to, to
demonstrate that, maybe the clearest passage
that calls for
a different kind of model is in 1 Corinthians
14, because the language is all edify, edify,
edify. Each of you brings these various things
so that you may edify one another. There is no
question that one of the things that must
happen in our assemblies is edification.
That we encourage each other. That's one of the
reasons why we would rather not have auditoriums
where one just sits and listens and someone
does things from the front to them. There is a need
for mutual edification that is there. But it is
interesting in the midst of that passage of
1 Corinthians 14, as they're describing the
assembly. And Paul is not trying to get a
rationale for the larger set, the larger
context of worship, what worship is. The wild worship,
the wild worship, I think is assumed. He's
dealing with a problem. There's a specific
problem at hand
there. There are people that are ignoring each
other, the people that are avoiding each other.
There are people that are in cliques against
each other, that they are not a unified group
at all.
There's no encouragement that is taking place
at all. There are outsiders that are coming in and
the whole place is in confusion. That's the
problem. And in that context, he is addressing
how you act in relation to the outsiders, which
is often some concern for the Christian assembly.
It is important that we are aware of the
outsiders. And he says in that context, you
make sure that
as you are engaged with each other, that the
outsiders know what's going on. This speaking
in tongues with that interpretation doesn't
help the outsiders at all. You need to be
sensitive to
the outsiders. But there it is, right in the
middle of 1 Corinthians 14, he says, verse 25,
after the secrets of the Unbeliever's heart are
disclosed, that person, the outsider,
now we're getting close to the heart of Hawaii,
that person will bow down before God
and worship him. And listen to what he's going
to say, declaring God is really among you.
God is really in the midst of these people. As
these outsiders come to the assembly, the task
is not for them to say, wow, wasn't that
wonderful? Wasn't that exciting? Wasn't that interesting?
Wasn't that entertaining? Didn't that meet my
needs? That's not the end result.
That's not the end result. The end result is
the very same reason that Christians come together
to worship. These outsiders will see what goes
on in our assemblies and they will be able to say,
they'll be able to worship God, bow down in his
presence and say, God is really in the midst of,
he is among and with his people. The purpose of
appropriate behavior of members toward outsiders
is not just to please them, nor to please
ourselves. Not just a sense of one anotherness
because all that contributes to our encounter
with God. It's crucial because of the God that
we see.
But the Hawaii worship is the clear realization
that the Holy One
is in our midst.
Well, that's where we want to begin. We have
other directions. We want to continue pursuing
some things at the second hour concerning the
Hawaii of worship because the Holy One of Israel
in our midst is only half of the Hawaii of
worship. There are other things that must go
into it,
I think, biblically. Any insights we've got
three or four minutes before?
This is a very good place, I think, for us to
stop. I do have a couple of things I wanted to
talk about if there was ever a place in the
talk this morning, this afternoon, where we
could just
work them in. This seems to be a good place for
one of them. I think implicit in a lot of what
Jack has said is that there is a terrible lack
of the sense of the mystery of God in our worship
today. And if we could capture this sense of
the Holy One of Israel in our midst, that would
be one
way to bring us back to mystery. In the 60s, a
lot of our people left our fellowship for the
charismatic experience. In the 80s and 90s, a
lot of the people are tempted by things like
New Age
thinking and New Age thought. And I think it's
precisely because in the kind of secular modernist
world we live in, there is a terrible lack of
the sense of the mystery of life and of God.
And these
other attractions seem to promise it. Rather
than try to build barriers to keep people from being
attracted to these other experiences that are
bogus, it would be wonderful if we could return
to the Bible and recover the sense of mystery
that is in God and Christ. C.S. Lewis said that
we dwell today in the 20th century in a tiny,
windowless universe. There's no mystery. There are
no distant horizons. Walker Percy said, life is
a mystery. Love is a delight. Therefore, I take it
as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing
less than infinite mystery and the infinite delight
that is God. In fact, he says, I demand it. I
refuse to settle for anything less. I think we
have believers sitting in our churches who are
looking for mystery. That is to say, the Hiddenness
of God, the otherness of God, the holiness of
God, the numinousness of God. And those are not
unbiblical concerns. They are at the heart of
Christian experience and the Jewish experience.
And I think we need to get back there. Would
you bow with me?
Holy Father, how great you are and how
wonderful are your works. We praise you,
Father, for working in our lives and we thank
you, Father, and stand in awe of you this hour
knowing that you are in our midst. We realize,
Father, that you are enthroned in the praises of
Israel. And we thank you, Father, for being
Emmanuel with us. Father, bless us in our study
together. Open our hearts and our minds so that
we may truly see your will for us in our community
worship. Through Christ, we pray. Amen. Amen.
Daryl, it is my pleasure to be with you today
and to share this material together. This is the
first time we have shared this together, and
we've looked forward for a long time to this
collaboration. I have a great deal of
confidence in Daryl and his insights, and we
have given each
other permission to interrupt the other one at
any time we want to. That does not extend to everyone
in this room, only to Daryl. There may be or
may not be time for questions. We don't know at the
end. We're trying to avoid questions if we can,
but there may be time for questions at the end.
We would encourage that, but Daryl can
interrupt me as he wishes, and I will interrupt
him as we
need to. But we are sharing this material
because of our deep commitment to helping congregations
and churches of Christ improve their
congregational worship. Would you read with me
aloud, please,
these verses from Psalm 73 that are a response
to the God who encounters us here?
I am continually with thee. Thou hast holden my
right hand. Thou will guide me with thy counsel,
and afterward receive me to glory. My flesh and
my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my
heart and my portion forever. Churches of
Christ are in the midst of incredible change
in our concept of worship and in the practice
of worship in our assemblies. It is an inevitable
thing that is happening, and I think that most
of you as you're involved in congregational life,
whatever part of the country you come from, are
aware that there are some things happening,
there are some things changing. Some of us are
uncomfortable with it, some of us are concerned
about it, some of us are asking why, but
whatever our response is, things are changing.
The way we
are conceiving, the way we are practicing
congregational worship is changing, but that
shouldn't be surprising to us. The worship that
we have participated in for the last 30 years that
was consolidated, I think in the 1950s, is in
all frankness different than the worship of our
congregations in the 1920s, which was quite
different than the worship of the 1870s,
which was remarkably different than the worship
style of the 1820s. We would hardly recognize
the worship services of Alexander Campbell and
his group. It's not that either has done it
right or
wrong, particularly they are different in their
approach. Campbell's group met for two to four
hours, which our groups would not much tolerate
these days. At the beginning of the Great American
experiment, there was a great concern for
democracy. There was a president at these early
assemblies, he called the group to order. There
were lengthy prayers, lengthier sermons still,
often had meals in the midst of their
assemblies. Someone would motion for an
adjournment. If it
did not meet approval for the whole group, it
was not adjourned and they continued longer.
We wouldn't tolerate those kinds of assemblies
today, but that was a style in those days. It
should not be surprising that as generations go
on and change, that styles, that approaches,
that emphases change. We are in the midst of
those kinds of changes. Culture changes, words
change, clothes change, our understandings
change, and we're in the process of that kind
of change
within churches of Christ. Right or wrong, like
it or not, we are. And it seems to me that this
is a
time above all times to question something that
is more basic than style. We will talk some about
style today, but there's an issue at stake
within churches of Christ that is far more significant
than style. What style of worship do we choose
in our congregations?
I think it is fairly apparent among many of our
churches across the country that there is a sense
of dissatisfaction with the status quo, with
the things as they have been for 20-30 to 40 years
within churches of Christ, an order of service
that was solidified in the 1950s. And you know
the order, the two songs in the prayer, another
song, the Lord's Supper, and the contribution,
which is hardly disconnected from the Lord's
Supper, and a song in the sermon, and a song
in the announcements, and a song in a prayer.
With very few variations, that has been our
order of
worship for the last 40 years. It is criticized
by many because it is so predictable. It is,
in spite of the fact that it is predictable,
often disjointed,
the songs having nothing to do with one
another, the songs having nothing to do with
the prayers,
Scripture rarely being read, except perhaps by
the preacher, songs and prayers and Lord's Supper
having very little to do with the Sermon,
services that are largely disjointed, songs
that are often picked on Sunday morning, based
mostly on what the song leader likes,
and very little sense of community and change
and encounter that takes place there. And many,
I'm not just talking about preachers, I'm
talking about people in the pews all over the country.
Many are saying, we just can't stand it anymore.
We've just had all we can take and we're not
going to be sounding anymore with these kinds
of thoughtless assemblies. No life, no thought,
no feeling, no understanding, just perfunctory.
We just do it. We do it every week. We do it the
same way. If we do it any different, someone's
liable to be upset. And so I am sensing all
over the country, dissatisfaction from all
ages, all different types of people.
And so there is an ongoing search for new and
different things that some of you may have been
experiencing in, in your assemblies, new things
of all sorts, new songs, devotional songs,
contemporary songs, songs that are not in our
books, songs that don't have music accompanying
songs, often that they grow up from our
teenagers and college students into the congregation,
congregational readings, which has not done
much when I was a child, but has done far more
frequently among churches as we began our
service today with a congregational reading
calls to
worship multiple song leaders. I've noticed
that many churches are trying two or three or sometimes
four singing various parts. It's new, it's
different. Special songs, what some are calling
presentation groups in the assembly. And in a
few rare cases, full fledged choruses, often singing
from the back or from the balcony to not be
distracting. But nevertheless, these things
are happening, like it or not, rightly or
wrongly, these things are happening and need to be
addressed and communicated about. And as these
things are happening, there is a strong reaction
against them. And there's a lot of discord
going on in many of our congregations concerning
how worship ought to be conceived and
constructed. Many of our congregations now publish
an assembly sequence or an order of worship
that is, that is passed out to the congregation.
And, and there is, in many cases, a backlash
against that because it seems denominational,
because that's what denominations have done.
And it just seems too denominational or it
seems too
high church for some. And we, we're not, we, we
don't like that very much. There has been a cry
in some places to have orders of worship. It's
interesting that the place that we're in is
to have orders of worship. It's interesting
that the places that have it don't want it.
The places that don't seem to want it, whatever
we have, there's some that are crying out for the
other. There's dissatisfaction. I grew up in a
congregation where an order of worship was almost
always done. Now part of a congregation where
it's being done for the very first time in its history.
In either place you go, you're liable to get
some dissatisfaction with the status quo.
There are some that are saying, we need to get
back to the old songs. I miss the old songs. And
what we mean by that are not songs 200, 300
years ago, but songs 50 or 60 years ago. Songs
that we
sang when I was a child. Songs that we loved
and sang in the 40s and 50s. Let's get back to the
old songs. We wish we could use more songs from
the book, people are saying. We can't do those
kinds of things because you can't have two acts
of worship going on at the same time. All kinds of,
of reactions to these changes and apparent
innovations that are taking place within our
assemblies. But again, like it or not, rightly
or wrongly, those issues have to be addressed.
Our congregational assemblies are changing all
over the country.
And it seems to me that, that there are two
bases for this change. As Daryl and I have
talked in our experiences, this, the rationale
seems to be in many places, one of two things.
One, we don't like what's going on. We'd like
to try some new things. And so the decisions that
are made are made often on the basis of what we
like. We want songs that are different kinds
of songs. The style is a different kind of
style because we like different songs. We want more
feeling. We want more emotion. We want more
aesthetic beauty. We want more praise. We want
more encouragement of others. And so one of the
pervasive questions is what, what do we like?
And I don't want to denigrate that question
this morning because I think it's an appropriate
question. I think some congregations are
struggling because they don't know who they are.
They don't
know what they like and they need perhaps as a
congregation to make some decisions about what
style is appropriate to them and the variety of
styles that are themselves biblical. It is an
important question that shouldn't be ignored.
What do we like? The second question that is being
asked is how can we attract outsiders? What can
we do to attract outsiders? There is an assumption
that the assemblies that we've had, I think
maybe rightly, exclude the outsiders, are not engaging
with the outsiders, don't communicate to the
outsiders, don't draw them in. What can we do to
make the outsiders more involved in our
assemblies? What will our community like? And
so we began to
ask questions about the kind of language that
we use. What religious things do we do that turn
people off? And sometimes we make some terrible
decisions, in my opinion, for our concern with
outsiders. I know of one congregation, for
example, where one of the ministers has said
on, on several
public occasions that our outsiders find the
Lord's Supper part of our service rather boring. And
they don't know what's going on there. So we
always make our Lord's Supper service as short
as possible
for our outsider's sake. Changes, concerns for
the sake of the outsiders. There is a strong movement,
not only in the restoration tradition, but in
other traditions, to sense the needs and desires
of the outsider. Many of you are aware of
what's going on at Willow Creek Community
Church up in
Chicago, where Bill Hybles is a preacher, or
the Saddleback Community Church in Mission Viejo,
California, whose great concern is, what can we
do to draw in urban, suburban, educated, turned-off
secular human beings? And some of the things
that they're doing in that context are interesting.
Some of the things that they're doing helps us.
Some of the things we can learn from, but some of
the things, in my opinion, are done for the
wrong reasons with the wrong result.
Well, as we discuss these issues of style and
of what we like and of where we're going and
whether we should be pleasing ourselves,
pleasing outsiders, pleasing God, there are a
number of
issues that are laid out that Daryl and I feel
are false issues, false oppositions, if you would,
arguments among people that are really the
wrong arguments. Let me list five false oppositions.
One, high church, low church. Should we have
high church, low church? That's a false opposition.
Firstly, because high church is a meaningless
term within churches of Christ. High church, frankly,
is a meaningless term outside any tradition but
the Anglican tradition. High church has to do with
Anglican Episcopalian theology. It has nothing
to do with worship largely in the Protestant world,
much less churches of Christ. It is a false
issue. High church, low church is a false opposition.
The things that are associated with it,
however, and this is a second opposition, is a European
classical style or a rural American style. As
one friend of Mine says, it's Bach versus bluegrass.
Oh, sacred head versus he bore it all. But as a
false opposition, that is not the ultimate issue.
That's not the battleground for which worship
needs to be fought. The third opposition that is
a false opposition related to that is formal
and informal. Should our services be formal,
should our services be informal? The answer is
yes, both, either. That's the wrong issue,
formal and an informal. The fourth is
liturgical and non-liturgical. Liturgical
meaning highly
structured. A service that is carefully laid
out versus non-liturgical. It's interesting in
the history of Christian worship that there's
been an opposition between the liturgical
churches and
what are called the free churches. And in
church history, churches of Christ are part of
a movement
called the free churches, which is to say a
non-liturgical type of experience where there
is no
order of worship that is laid out. Ironically,
all throughout history and all the free churches,
free churches tend to be less free than
liturgical churches. It's interesting. We tend
to be more
structured than churches that have their orders
of worship that are published years in advance.
But that's a false issue when all is said and
done, liturgical and non-liturgical.
And fifthly, a false issue is an opposition
between what pleases us as Christians and what
pleases the community as outsiders. As if those
two are different things. We may want to address
that in the third session this afternoon.
That's a false opposition. Do we cater to what
we must
prefer or do we try to cater to the community
of which we are a part? Those are not the issues
that I think we are most facing within churches
of Christ. And to center on those issues are to
center on the wrong things. So when we bring
about change and when we're concerned with change,
we often are concerned with primarily issues of
style. And when our focus is primarily on style,
we may very well miss the heart and why of worship.
I think Jack is exactly right on when he says
that so much of the discussion about worship today
is on surface matters. How modern, how
traditional, how ordered and liturgical, how spontaneous,
how long the sermon versus the other parts of
the service. And what's really sadly neglected
in our opinion is that we don't talk very much
about the biblical point of communal worship.
Christian worship in our tradition, but I think
if you talk to people in other traditions too,
Protestants in general, there is an agreement
that our worship has become tiresome, boring,
and exhausted. But it's not because we're too
quick or too slow to change. It's because we've
lost the point. I believe there is no solution
to our problem, our dilemma in either a dry formalism
or in an exuberant experimentation if worship
is not rooted in God himself. Thomas Carlisle once
said, if we could but find the point again. And
I think that's my point this morning, that we need
to go back to the point again. I myself have
participated in worship planning services where
we get together in a group and we're all
serious and we're all dedicated, but the way
that the
discussion goes is this, what's a song you like?
Oh, this is really a neat one. You know, this is
nifty and we kind of put together a service of
nifty things that we like and we never spend any
time asking questions about what is the point.
Why are we here? Why do we come together? Until
we address this most basic of questions,
discussions of music or responsive readings or
three songs in
a prayer are trivial and beside the point. Who
cares if we sing a German anthem or bringing in
the sheaves if we don't know why we're there?
Even if our style and form are correct, they become
idle and idolatrous if we don't know the point.
Without a point, we are bewildered, impoverished
and estranged people. What is the point? We
worship because we want God. We want God
himself. We come
together in the assembly to meet God, first of
all. We come together because we have an appointment
with the Lord God. In the words of Carl
Alemarni, the eternal cannot be cornered, but
he can be
encountered. All of the ancient worshipers that
I read about and read knew why they came to the
assembly. It was a meeting place with God. The
Psalms reflect this spirit very clearly.
As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul
longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God,
the living God. When shall I come and behold
the face of God? You are holy, enthroned
on the praises of Israel. Seek his presence
continually. Early worshipers didn't come to
the assembly to get anything. They came in
order to offer something themselves to the Lord. They
came to the assembly to meet someone. Imagine
the oddness of a question like this. You meet someone
that's very important to you, and someone says
to you, did you get anything out of it? In an
encounter with someone that you love, imagine
the lover in the beloved meeting, and after the meeting
you say, well, what did you get out of it?
Maybe at some level that's an appropriate question,
but to me it's highly inappropriate when we
think of meeting God himself. Early worshipers
came to
the assembly because they wanted God himself.
The early church knew that the coming together was
important because there you met the Holy One in
a very special way. The assembly was first of all
the synaxis. It was the coming together for a
meeting. Just as the Jews assembled where the
horn blew, the new Israel assembled at the
cross. In Christ they met God. In the assembly they
encountered the Father. In worship they drew
near to God. It is the continual theme of the
book of
Hebrews that you can approach God. You approach
him with a true heart, chapter 10. You have come
to Mount Zion. You have come to the assembly of
the firstborn. You have come to the festal gathering.
You have come to Jesus, the mediator of the new
covenant, chapter 12, verse 22. This sense of
meeting God, I mean really entering the tent of
meeting in order to encounter the Almighty,
is hardly common though with many of our
services today. In biblical worship, a whole
range of
emotions flow out of the encounter with God.
The irony is we often start with the emotions
we want
to generate. We try to figure out what will it
do? What must we do to make people feel a
certain way?
Feelings are secondary to the encounter. We
must encounter God first. People didn't feel
enthusiastic or inspired in biblical times
because the song service was special or the
preaching outstanding. They felt awe and
reverence and joy because they had met their creator,
redeemer, savior. The service is a meeting
place. The assembly was also Eucharista.
The assembly was the place where you did your
thanks. The assembly was the place where you gave
thanks. Today we have almost lost the sense of
the assembly as Eucharista. The early church knew
the service was a Eucharist, a thanksgiving
service. Our gratitude unfortunately is depleted.
It runs out and we are largely thankless people.
We are in fact afraid to make the service a
Eucharist service. It sounds foreign to us,
unrestoration-like, and the great irony is it's
the most fundamentally biblical concept you can
find about worship in the Bible. Jesus broke bread
and he gave thanks. The Hebrew writer knew this.
Look at Hebrews 12:28 and 29. Let us give thanks
by which we offer to God an acceptable worship
with reverence and awe for indeed our God is a
consuming fire. Jesus institutes the Lord's
Supper as a thanksgiving service. In ancient
times you
began a feast by pronouncing a blessing, by
giving thanks, by showing gratitude. The sense of
gratitude is at the very heart of New Testament
worship. Third, the assembly was an occasion for
sacrifice. The occasion where one brought an
offering or a sacrifice, not a bloody animal
offering, but an offering of one's heart, mind,
and soul. Worship is fundamentally a giving.
It is bowing, kneeling, adoring, honoring the
one who gave us everything. Again, Hebrews 13:15.
Through Christ then let us continually offer a
sacrifice of praise to God. Share what you have
for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
Fourth, the assembly was a place for
remembrance. Not just
casual recollection, but a spiritual
reenactment of God's goodness towards his
people. It was in fact
a re-experiencing of the graciousness of God.
The assembly was a place for a story to be told.
The story of divine salvation, of human
liberation. The psalmist shows this over and
over again.
Psalm 40, verse 9. I have told the glad news of
deliverance in the great congregation. See,
I have not restrained my lips. As you know, O
Lord, I have not hidden your saving help within
my heart.
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your
salvation. Notice that the glad news of deliverance
is delivered in the context of an assembly in
the great congregation. Worship is about declaring
God's goodness, his love, his mercy, his rescue.
Fifth, on this point of what is the point,
the assembly is above all something that you do.
In the words of Weber on your bibliography,
worship is a verb. It's an active verb. It's
something you offer to God. Where you meet him,
you encounter him. You do not merely sit or
listen or see. You act and you enact. Worship
will not be rejuvenated in our day until we end
the passivity. Only when a spectator disappears
and we quit calling our places auditoriums
where you go to sit to hear, will we become
true participants and only then will the
renewal occur. Above all, worship is a meeting
with the
master of the universe. I don't know where we
came up with the very shallow notion that there are
only five acts of worship. And acts of worship,
verbs, I do teach literature and I do teach
language and I know what verbs are and I know
what active verbs are. I challenge you to go through
your Bible and find only five active verbs
describing worship. It's absolutely impossible.
You can't reduce it to 10. You probably can't
reduce it to 50. Worship is praying. It is singing.
It is chanting. It is preaching. It is reading.
It is hearing. It is remembering, sharing, giving,
kneeling, lifting, bowing, embracing, blessing,
kissing, glorifying, confessing, eating, exhorting,
encouraging, declaring, and meditating. And if
you want some more verbs, see me after class.
I'll give you some more. What should we do?
What can we do? Well, we can recognize the seriousness
of the issue before us. Marnie says again, I
consider the death of dynamic worship the great
danger of our time. Karl Barth said, Christian
worship is the moment the most momentous,
the most urgent, and the most glorious action
that can take place in human life.
We need to rediscover the point again. We need
to avoid getting sidetracked into endless debates
about issues of style and form. Today, I look
at Jack Reese's tie, and I think of the ties
that used to hang in my father's closet in the
50s. You know, it would be strange if Jack and
I were to meet, and I would say, let's talk
about ties today. You know, style is really interesting,
and styles are changing. And that's sort of at
the level I see a lot of the discussion of worship.
We would rather talk about the superficial
matters of dress and not talk about the soul
and the heart
of a Jack Reese or a Darrell Tippins. If we
don't get beyond the style, let me tell you
where we're
going to end up. We're going to end up talking
about novelty, what's most interesting and
titillating and amusing. We're going to be
interested in talking about what sells, what attracts,
and what entertains. And we're going to forget
that there's a difference between worship and
vaudeville. Worship is not a Hollywood
production. Worship is not crowd manipulation.
Or we're going
to talk about utility, what works, what gets
the job done, what feels worshipful. Or we're going
to end up in a basically humanist position, and
we're going to talk about what meets your needs,
what meets my needs, what gives me a lift, or
what gives you a lift. And this puts us in charge,
unfortunately. And I think this may be the
worst aspect of our discussions of worship today.
We've got the heavy responsibility to
orchestrate or to direct a, quote, meaningful worship
experience, end quote. It's a job that simply
cannot be fulfilled. It totally distorts the
nature of worship by moving the focus away from
God back to us. We cease to think about the awesome
meeting with our Maker, and we think about what
will give us a meaningful worship experience.
This is a mistaken view. Worship is not an
enthusiastic pep rally, although it may be
highly enthusiastic at points. Worship does not
have to have all upbeat songs, so everyone
will be conjured into talking about what a
beautiful day it is. There is a difference
between worshiping the God Almighty and secular
sentimentalism. There is a third way, or another
way. Over the last few years, I have taken the
liberty to visit other churches and other
religious traditions to see what they're doing
in their worship. And I have to tell you, I've seen
some surprising things. The most surprising
thing is that I find some traditions doing some things
more biblically than we are. I was in Wales a
couple of years ago, and there was no Church
of Christ within miles, as far as I could find
out. And I was on foot, and I attended the church
right next to the campus where I was in a
seminar. And in this Welsh church, which was
highly formal
and highly liturgical in many ways, singing
distinguished European hymns for the most part,
and highly formal sermons, I experienced one of
the most interesting worship experiences of my
life. I saw some powerful things illustrating
Eucharista, Thanksgiving, and Synaxis meeting
together, coming together. A powerful example
of how people can give thanks in their lives,
demonstrating sacrifice and remembrance and
action. Last spring, I visited a black church,
one of our churches of Christ in Los Angeles,
much more informal, much simpler. Hymns simple,
gospel songs. The service was anything but
liturgical by our definition. And yet I have
to say, the experience, the quality of worship
in that church was just absolutely phenomenal.
Not because I felt particularly enthusiastic,
but I knew we were meeting God. We were at the
tent of meeting. And the people there knew it,
and I knew it. And it wasn't measured in terms
of how loud the songs were or how upbeat the
tempo was. It was something beyond language
and description. The point is, there's
something here we've got to talk about other
than style.
It is the meeting of God.
As Darryl and I have talked about style within
churches of Christ, it strikes us that there
are essentially three styles that are fairly
predominant among us, and don't know exactly
how to label them. Once you label them,
you oversimplify. But we have talked about a
style that we might call urbane, which is educated,
sophisticated songs that are more classical
European in nature and more formal. There's
a style that we might call folk, which has its
roots maybe more in rural America in the last part
of the 19th and throughout this 20th century,
where the music might be more Stamps Baxter in
its orientation. There's a style that we might
call contemporary, which are the kinds of devotional
songs, songs that our high school students and
college students are singing and have been singing
for the last 20-25 years. Each of us might have
a preference. Each of us might have a preference
for style. I have a preference for style. I
think it would be difficult to be a part of a congregation
that tried to do all three well. It's one of
the reasons why we suggested earlier that maybe it's
important to ask from time to time for our
congregation, what do we like? Because that's
a legitimate question to ask. And I think that
for the most part in our multiple congregations,
our heterogeneous congregations, that we need
to have a broader than one single style, but
it would be difficult to do all three in any
mixture thereof. Well, sometimes we just need
to form a congregational identity of the style
that is comfortable to us. But our fundamental
point is if all we focus on is style, we have
missed the point. We're also suggesting that
if the issue is primarily should we stay the
same or should we change, that misses the point too.
And that's why we've described a third way. If
you can see a continuum on the board,
just kind of imaginary behind us, on one side
would be status quo, things as they are,
things as they continue to exist in churches of
Christ, same old order, same old way,
the same song leaders leading the same songs
without much thought over a long period of time.
But I also would suggest on the Continuum that
we have on the board that the group that is
attempting to make it exciting and interesting
and innovative and all these changes is on the
same side of the board. A side on this
Continuum that has to do with what can we do?
How can we
make it right? How can we be interesting? How
can we get something out of it?
On the other side of this Continuum is what is
God doing? Where is God in the process? What is the
why of worship? And on this side, there may be
any of a variety of styles, simple style, complex
style, formal style, informal style,
contemporary, folk, urbane, whatever it might
be. But are we
encountering God? Is God working and meeting us
in our midst? And I think it is on this side,
this third way that Daryl and I are attempting
to suggest that in churches of Christ, we simply
must go. And that comes when we ask ourselves
the question, why? Because I've been a part of
worship committees for a number of years, both
as a minister and a congregation, and as
someone not
on a ministerial staff, it is too tempting, as
Daryl has suggested, to go quickly into,
what can we do? What can we do this week? And
what can we do next
week? And I'm not sure that is a significant
change over non-questioning at all. It's still
us, us, us. We are concerned with encountering
God, and we recognize clearly
that God is encountered beyond the assembly.
Don't let anyone hear us say that God is only
encountered in the assembly. God is encountered
in every moment. God is present with us here.
God is present when I'm by myself. God is
present with me in my car. God encounters me in
all kinds
of ways and on all kinds of occasions. But when
we stand in the presence of a congregation,
when we see the very face and presence of God
in each other, we are encountered in significant
ways. When the Word of God is spoken and
proclaimed, when we respond with songs to God,
there is
something special that happens as God is
clearly seen in our midst. And so we ask the question,
why, why, why, why do we do what we do? Let me
suggest that to begin to answer the question, why?