Summer 2012 sermon series at Cherry Creek Presbyterian ChurchI’m preparing to preach (for the second time in my life) on Psalm 1 this Sunday. As I re-engage the exegesis, I am struck again by the message of this first hymn in God’s inspired hymnal. When we exegete Scripture, we dissect the language, we peer into the mind of the author, and we immerse ourselves into the worldview and situation of the original hearers. But with the Psalms, some additional things … Read More
Was Early Church Worship Reserved and Stoic?
Lunette with Orante. From early Christian fresco, second half of the third century. Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, Italy. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.Traditionalist critics of modern worship often point to the hyper-emotionalism associated with the movement as evidence of its imbalance toward expressiveness over and against theological depth, biblical accuracy, and historical connectivity. Sometimes, these critics will point to “how the church has historically worshipped” to advocate for more reserved, “reverential” forms of worship expression. They will admonish the church … Read More
The Right and Wrong Kind of Ancient Future Worship
As Holy Week rolls around every year, our worship senses are heightened toward tradition. Evangelical churches who once adopted a more “low church” model for worship are returning to the value of worship expressions which typically have characterized “high church” environments–Holy Week noon-day services, celebrations of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Saturday vigils, etc. Ancient future worship–blending old forms with creatively new expressions–is something many churches are now seeking, perhaps in reaction to the hyper-now-ness and contemporaneity of the of … Read More
How Sermon Analysis Can Lead to Soul-Death
We evangelicals love, love, love those Bereans. They were proto-sola-scripturites:
As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. (Acts 17:10-12, NIV)
Some of us take the Berean model of scripture-reception as the hard and fast methodology for how to listen to Sunday morning sermons. When the sermon rolls around in the worship service, we turn off our feelers and turn on our analytic receptors. We slice and dice every word, every phrase, every proposition. We analyze everything so that we know what we can agree with and “take away” and what we can leave behind. We want only the meat, so like a dead carcass, we pick at it to ensure that we digest no bones, fat, or entrails.
Worship & the Body: The Heresy of “Purely Spiritual” Worship
Most students of church history eventually run across that nasty heresy called “Docetism.” It comes from the Greek word dokeo, which means “to seem.” Docetism is the belief that Jesus only seemed human but was actually spirit taking on a “human shell” for a time. Underneath Docetism lie the Greek/Gnostic emphases of glorifying the spiritual and disparaging the physical. Thus, when we speak of something as “docetic,” we often mean that it has the tendency to negatively view physical, material reality and prize that which is purely spiritual.
In all this liturgy-hype, we need to remember that liturgy isn’t the answer
“Nicodemus came to Jesus by night” (Photo: Matson Photo Service)
In many ways, “liturgy” is all the rage right now. Our postmodern context has effectively rooted out our roots, and the emerging newest adult generation (perhaps the first group of evangelicals to have grown up in the purely “contemporary” church) is feeling the fragmentation and ahistorical nature of much of evangelicalism, especially as it pertains to worship. And we want our roots back.
How a High View of Worship Challenges and Affirms Missional Thinking
The missional movement is now firmly established and influencing all kinds of churches, including mine, to the glory and praise of God. I love this re-energized focus of the church toward abandoning purely “attractional” models of evangelism and embracing the missionary-hood-of-all-believers paradigm. I’m enthralled by the resurgence of interest in the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation and its accompanying emphasis on the humanity of Christ as just as important as His divinity. I’m encouraged by the resulting discussions about contextualization, cultural exegesis, and externally-focused living. And I’m cheering on and supporting the uprising of new church plants, especially in all the major urban centers of the United States.
Is the Christian Calendar a Biblical Idea?
I’m a latecomer to the church calendar year. I didn’t grow up in a “liturgical” context. The worship of my youth was dynamic, free-church-style evangelical worship—a block of songs, special music accompanying an offering, and the sermon, in a nutshell. The first time I was exposed to the Church year was in college. It seemed foreign and unbiblical. (Well, maybe not unbiblical, but at least extra-biblical.) It seemed to be “unnecessary tradition” with little to no value. My conversion to … Read More
An Important Dialogue About Worship Music
This has been floating around in many of the online circles I run in. It’s a very, very good dialogue between three guys who I admire for thinking theologically and pastorally about worship–Kevin Twit, Mike Cosper, and Isaac Wardell.
Here are some of my takeaways:
- On the topic of songs and “singability” of modern musical idioms:
- It is often said that a lot of “contemporary” music is unsingable…too many flourishes, too many pop-vocal-isms. People say that about U2’s music–too high, too irregular. And yet, for many reasons, you attend a U2 concert and you find thousands of people joining in songs, where many people who would normally say “I’m not a singer” or “I can’t sing” find themselves singing away. There is something profound about this observation.
What is Biblical Worship?
The Difficulty of “Biblical Worship” Discussions
I’ve been in conversation with some trusted friends over the issue of “biblical worship” and how many people (including us) toss that phrase around, often meaning very different things. The concern is that people use the Bible to talk about worship without admitting that we approach the Text with different methodologies in place that color what we pull out of it. When well-meaning Bible thinkers exegete Scripture and come out with defenses for quite different worship practices, we need to pause and ask the meta-questions about how we’re approaching the text, which texts we’re approaching, and why some texts are informative to the topic while others are not.