Quote for the day

From Don Miller's Through Painted Deserts (pp. 90-91).

I was raised to believe that the quality of a man's life would greatly increase, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart's knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academia, but by his nearness to God. It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple, but this is the gate, the trailhead. Ironing out faithless creases is toilsome labor.
...
Matter and thought are a canvas on which God paints, a painting with tragedy and delivery, with sin and redemption. Life is a dance toward God, I begin to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.

And so with toilsome labor I seek to iron out the faithless creases in my own life.

Food for thought: The Silly War

I’ve recently been re-reading a paper on worship-style battles in churches. Kyle Matthews wrote The Silly War a few years ago. It is kind of long (11 pages single-spaced in 10 point Arial type), so it’s difficult to sum up in just one article. You may find me writing about it in the coming few weeks. Kyle has obviously found himself on the same battlefield as I have been getting hit from both sides in this silly war. His observations and suggestions hit home with me (and encouraged me to keep on striving for peace). Read a little of what he has written about our style battles:

When I was growing up, this issue was considered to be just one of many symptoms of "the generation gap," but it is that no longer. It now more closely resembles a market demographic, a taste preference that runs across all the old categories. In most of the contemporary churches I visit the members of the band are-surprise – all grey-headed! Then I go to formal, liturgical churches that are seeing real growth among 20-something young couples who want to experience "something old for a reason." In the church I now attend, the folks who most strongly disagree over music are often from the same generation, whether they're in their 60s or their 20s. Some of our members threaten to leave us for a church with more contemporary music, but I have also had a church member tell me that if we ever get rid of the pipe organ, he'd be the first to go, saying, "I feel like we're getting away from the heart of worship."

Of course, there was a time not long ago when the newfangled pipe organ was called "offensive." In their own times, both Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther were said to have done more damage with their music than they ever did with their theology. But we can now see those changes in the past as linear progressions affecting the church culture as a whole. Today's conflict is not a linear change, but a splintering: a shift from the corporate culture of "church-member" to the individual church-goer as "customer." The criteria for what binds a people together as "church" will soon be reduced from "shared belief system" to "enjoys the same style of music" unless Christians begin to grapple more seriously with the question: what is the heart of worship?

The telling thing is that while we say the right things about worship (it’s all about Him), we evaluate worship as if it were really all about us and what we like. I said it last Sunday that one of the most important things we do in worship is to rehearse the truths of God to ourselves, to each other, and to God. If we refuse to sing truths about God just because the musical setting is not exactly to our liking – whether too old, or too new, or whatever – we lose and so do others in our community. That’s one of the things that make this war so silly (and frustrating).
That’s enough to think about for now …

Morris

Before the Throne of God Above

Apologies for delaying a week getting this one up. I did write last week, but I didn't get my musings up to the blog. Here's from last week and you'll see this weeks in another entry dated today.

The Shepherding the Staff conference is something Dawn and I look forward to more and more the longer we are connected with it. Dave Bullock’s worship leadership has become a model for inclusiveness for me that I learn from and am encouraged by every year. While I don’t go with the goal of bringing back new worship materials, that is often a byproduct of the conference.
This year, one of the songs used in worship is a beautiful old hymn written by Charitie Bancroft in 1863. I hope to find the music sometime soon so we can use it here.

Before the throne of God above
I have a strong and perfect plea
A great high Priest whose Name is Love
Who ever lives and pleads for me.
My name is graven on His hands,
My name is written on His heart.
I know that while in Heaven He stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart.

When Satan tempts me to despair
And tells me of the guilt within,
Upward I look and see Him there
Who made an end of all my sin.
Because the sinless Savior died
My sinful soul is counted free.
For God the just is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me.

Behold Him there the risen Lamb,
My perfect spotless righteousness,
The great unchangeable I AM,
King of glory and of grace,
One in Himself I cannot die.
My soul is purchased by His blood,
My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ my Savior and my God!

Aren’t you glad that God uses old stuff as well as new? Timeless truth lasts; and I’m sure there’s some stuff being written right now that will be used into the next century and beyond. I love that! I’ll talk about that a little later.
That’s enough to think about for now …

Morris

Blue Like Jazz

Dawn and I did a foolish thing last night. We stayed up to watch to the very end of the Orange Bowl last night. That meant that we didn’t get in bed until 1:00am. We stayed up in part because it was a great football game. I think we also stayed up out of respect for two great men in the college football world, Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden. Dawn was pulling for Penn State and I was pulling for FSU. Was it worth the lost sleep? Who can say? But it was a great game. That it is where I find myself on this Wednesday morning as I write.

I just finished reading Don Miller’s BLUE LIKE JAZZ: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality). Much of the book recounts his experiences in attempting to share the message of Jesus in a culture that is at best ambivalent toward the Gospel if not down-right hostile to it. Other parts are of his own spiritual pilgrimage. It can be a challenging read for one who grew up in established churches in the South, but it forces the reader to deal with our own unspoken presuppositions about others and about ourselves that may not actually be true.

I don’t like everything he says in the book, but I found an awful lot of uncomfortable truth in it. Miller raises some points that the church needs to hear in order to continue to communicate the Gospel in a culture that is growing increasingly hostile to what it thinks the message of the church is. They usually don’t understand us … and it’s not because we’re not speaking loudly enough. Here’s an excerpt:

In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not
consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn’t
do it, and moreover, that I didn’t want to defend the term. He asked me if
I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defend
Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the
term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show
that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have
been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, of
browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them the term Christianity meant
something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I
am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it. Stop ten
people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word
Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I
defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I
told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to
believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me
with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get
lunch together. He told me that he had always wanted to believe Jesus was
the Son of God. (p. 115)

That’s enough to think about for now …