"Contempervent" Worship

Many months ago I saw a video poking fun at so-called "contemporary worship" and have been searching for that video ever since. Today, it crossed my Facebook page, so here it is:



I do like songs that I hear on radio stations like K-LOVE, but I recognize the temptation to let the means of conveying the message of the Gospel become the Gospel itself. This is no less of a danger for more liturgical churches. Everyone has the temptation to say "It isn't worship if ____ isn't included." So, enjoy the humor but also get the point.

Great Music, Great Message

As we begin to wind down the season of Advent, I ran across the following video for Canticle of the Turning, one of my favorite worship songs. It is one of my favorites both because I love Celtic music and because of the words. Is the world about to turn do you think?

From Across the Pond: Bishop Nick

Through the Gathering the Next Generation (GTNG) clergy email list, I've recently been put in touch with a great blog from Bishop Nick Baines of Croydon (Diocese of Southwark). Hosted by Fulcrum, his blog makes interesting reading, relatively free from either the distress or the enthusiasm of some of the bishops from The Episcopal Church. I was particularly interested in this part of one of his posts:

When I asked a Zimbabwean bishop last year why they don't write their own indigenous liturgies and why they follow only the BCP (17th century vernacular English), I was told that this is what the missionaries brought with them. Christianity was synonymous with the trappings: BCP language and liturgy, English Victorian hymns, English vestments and robes, etc. To ditch (or 'move on from') any of these would be synonymous with changing the faith itself or moving on from (or 'changing') the Gospel itself.

I find that I have two reactions to this. First, it is increasingly clear to me that one of the largest challenges we have is that the Gospel message that was communicated via English missionaries (interwoven with the English culture of the time) has been so locked into place as the one and only unchanging Gospel that it is clearly difficult, if not impossible, for there to be any "new revelation" or "new interpretation" even considered. It would be like dishonoring your father or your mother. Second, I know that that we have some of the same things at work here in The Episcopal Church. How many people left the church when "the new prayer book" (i.e., Book of Common Prayer 1979) was adopted because they were so used to the forms of th 1928 BCP that they couldn't imagine worshiping God in any other way?

For me, I find that I need to be both compassionate and discerning in my response to this. Clearly, God is timeless and so is the Gospel. Yet, to the extent that we serve an incarnational God in Jesus Christ, someone rooted in a place and time, our expressions of worship will necessarily reflect our own place and time. More likely, they will reflect the place and time in which we were raised. Short of a cataclysmic "Damascus Road" experience, it is extremely difficult to transcend our own cultural upbringing and inheritance and embrace something new without a substantial spiritual grounding. Perhaps as we lament what we consider the limited wordview of our Anglican brothers and sisters in the developing world, we should realize that our view, too, is limited, just in different ways.

Tour Bus or Roller Coaster?

I recently ran across this post on Irenic Thoughts, the blog of Prince of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland, Georgia. I'd run across it before somewhere, but it says something about how such a spiritually charged event often is presented and experienced as the same old thing, week after week.

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?...Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

—Annie Dillard, (1945 - ) from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Perhaps it is not God who is asleep but we who worship God, lulled into receiving God as a normal, regular, benign part of life who would not dare disrupt our carefully planned lives. I wonder what God could do with us if we woke up?