Worship That "Gets it"

Those of you who read this blog know my profound misgivings about so-called “contemporary worship.” Even the phrase I find unsettling suggesting, as it does, that worship that is not sufficiently “up-to-date” or avant guarde is, thereby, suspect. [I love the retort C. S. Lewis gave to a similar criticism of his theology when he published his reappraisal of the Christian doctrine of evil and the devil, The Screwtape Letters. “I know someone will ask me, ‘Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil – hoofs and horns and all?’ Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns, But in other respects, my answer is ‘Yes, I do.’”]

So, as I’ve said before, there are many things that trouble me about the so-called “contemporary worship” movement afoot in our churches. Let me mention a few: (1) As I mentioned above, there is this notion that only the trendy and the avant guarde have value. Anything older than “yesterday” is arcane, out of date, and useless. To those who embrace that I have two words for you: leisure suit. (2) Then, there is the spiritual narcissism, egocentricity, and outright arrogance that reduces all spiritual value to the single criterion of “what speaks to me.” Sometimes called the “tyranny of felt needs,” it seems never to occur to such ones that at any given time in a congregation the “needs” are not only multiple but competitive! To satisfy one’s is to frustrate another’s. (3) Related is the infatuation with the ephemeral so characteristic of contemporary worship that cuts it off from the rich fecundity of 2,000-plus years of Christian liturgy and worship. It’s as though the worshiper exists on a desert island where they’re the first ever to have thought about, practiced, or experienced worship. Never mind that the Church of Jesus Christ got along quite well, thank you very much, without contemporary praise music or Power Point. There is no consciousness that when one worships in the Church of Jesus Christ, one has entered a stream that has been flowing for over 2,000 years and, God willing, will continue to flow long after I’m gone and forgotten. Such insular worship creates ecclesiastical orphans who can’t remember any farther back than their own birth, and what is more, see no need to do so!

But most disturbing is what I fear really drives the contemporary worship movement; namely, desperation and entrepreneurialism. The well-documented numerical decline of mainstream, and even evangelical, churches, particularly among that most desired demographic of 18-39, has led to the supplanting of the biblical mission and mandate of the church to be a community of the kingdom of God by the consumer church where “the customer’s always right” and where “whatever it takes” is the motto. Give the customer what the customer wants, or there’s always a “better show” down the street. To be sure, it’s rationalized by smearing a thin veneer of evangelism over it, but make no mistake about it; it’s driven by the desire for bodies and bucks. Not a hint in those “churches” of any awareness that the biblical mission of the church is enculturation – to enculturate people into the kingdom of God, a culture so utterly alien and peculiar to this world’s dominate culture that it takes a lifetime to “feel at home” in it. Not a clue in those “churches” of any awareness that becoming a Christian means enrolling in a Scripture-informed, Spirit-inspired, counter-cultural community that embraces a counter-value system captured in a counter-story that harbingers a new reality Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” Indeed, one rather suspects that such “churches” are more “club” than “church,” at least in the sense that Jesus meant it. If being baptized and joining the church doesn’t actually make one "Christian," that is, enroll one in this kind of Story and enculturate one in this kind of community, then we're just counting club members. Indeed, it’s more insidious than that. By enrolling new members into our “Christian club” and calling them “Christian” we inoculate them with just enough Christianity to keep them from ever “taking” the real thing.

That’s why I was so heartened this week to have coffee and conversation about church and worship with my friend, Tony Spencer. Tony is minister of music at First Baptist Church of Forest City, North Carolina. Cheryl and I attended there a few weeks ago and were pleasantly surprised at what we found; I told him so. The service was beautifully and meticulously crafted with the intention of being self-consciously theological, biblically faithful, and liturgically integrated so that the worshiper felt both a sense of the mystery and the majesty of the historic Christian faith. To be sure, the music was beautiful and well-presented, but that’s not what got my attention. Worship there wasn’t so much performance as participation in the stream of Christian liturgy that has bound the people of God together since the first Christians huddled in house churches 2,000 years ago. The ancient four-fold pattern was evident: the Gathering, the Word, the Table, the Sending. Moreover, there was an awareness that we had not “invented church” ourselves; rather, in the words of the writer of Hebrews, we were “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses” whom we had joined, with whom we shared faith in Jesus Christ, and from whom we had been entrusted a liturgical legacy and a holy hope. For an hour at least, I was called away and called out from the mundane muddle that is euphemistically called “the real world” into “another world” that can only be glimpsed with the eyes and ears of faith. And I was claimed by something much older, much larger, much deeper than merely “my felt needs” or “good customer service.” It was an experience I had not had in church in a while.

So thanks, Tony. I’m glad to know that someone out there still “gets it.”

"By Their Creator"

During this election cycle President Obama cited the Declaration of Independence in a political speech and quoted it incorrectly. In speaking of his belief that all humans have certain “inalienable rights,” the president cited the Declaration as his authority for the assertion. That’s fine. But he quotes the Declaration as saying: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that each of us are (sic) endowed with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Remarks by the President at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Dinner in Rockville, MD). But that’s not what the Declaration of Independence says. It says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” My first thought was to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the president was merely trying to capture the essence of the Declaration and not necessarily quote it precisely. But then I checked the text of the White House press release. The phrasing was in the text of the president's speech. The omission is both telling and significant. Let me explain.

Christians believe that all life is sacred, and human life is specially so, precisely because human beings are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). Christians believe that God’s image, like an image on a coin, has been stamped on human life, and that fact gives humans their special worth and value. Our value is not “inherent” or sui generis; it is not an “entitlement.” It is bestowed by God and endowed by the Creator.

The practical implications of that belief were brought home to me in something Phillip Yancey tells. Yancey, who is a supporter of Amnesty International, points out the internal inconsistency of an organization like Amnesty International believing in something called “human rights” when they don’t believe in a Creator who has endowed humans with those self-same rights. It came to a head in a meeting of a local AI chapter where Yancey was in attendance. He says: “There I met good people, serious people: students and executives and professionals who gather together because they find it intolerable blithely to go on with life while other people are being tortured and killed.” He points out that they engaged in their activities in support of keeping people alive with all the passion and fervor of religious zealots. But at their meetings, no one prayed, no one intoned God’s name in support of their “mission” because no one believed in God. Though originally founded on Christian principles, today AI is officially non-theological. And so Yancey, who rarely demurs, weighed in and asked: “Why do you believe that it is wrong to kill human beings and right to fight to keep them alive?” He said the response he got from the group resembled the reaction a heretic would receive from true believers. The answer took the form of axiom: “Life is good; death is bad.” But when Yancey pointed out that not all life comes under that axiom, even for AI members (not all are vegetarians!), and that to people like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, and all terrorists death can be a useful tool to accomplish political purposes, they looked horrified…and mystified. And then Yancey let the other shoe drop. He said: “Don’t get me wrong. I know why I believe that torture and murder are wrong and that it is good to keep people alive, I just don’t know why you do!” Yancey went on to say that he believed that keeping people alive is right and good because they were created in the image of God. In the words of the Declaration, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” “But is it possible,” Yancey asks, “to honor the image of God in a human being if there is no God in Whose image the person has been created?” Or turn it a round, and as the nihilist, Ivan Karamazov, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, puts it: “If there is not God, everything is permitted.”

When our son was small, I offered him two coins – a dime and a nickel. He chose the nickel. When I asked him why, he answered: “Because it’s bigger.” But when I told him that the dime was worth twice as much as the nickel, always of good mind, he inquired, “But why?” Good question. I was stumped. Why would the smaller of two coins be worth twice as much as the larger? And then it hit me. Because the Creator says so.

A Resurrection Story

As did most of you, I watched the rescue of the 33 miners in Chile some yesterday. Truly amazing!

Last night on Bret Baier's newscast, he asked his "All Star Panel," Mara Liasson (NPR) and Charles Krauthammer (op-ed columnist for The Washington Post), for their "take" on the rescue. Two very different ways of telling the "story" of the rescue emerged. Krauthammer cited the now-famous comment from one of the miners (that he was caught in the middle of a battle between God and the Devil, and that God had won!) and said that the story here was more one of the transcendent and the spiritual than anything else: thirty-three miners in the bowels of the earth, dead and buried, as it were, for 70 days (a number of "biblical proportion"), and then, miraculously brought up from the grave in this amazing (what shall we call it?)…deliverance from death. It was at bottom, he said, "a resurrection story." But when Mara Liasson was asked to comment, she said that the story here was more one of the triumph of technology and the human spirit. I guess that's what you have left when you take God out of the story.

It makes a difference how you tell your story! Personally, I'll go with Krauthammer. I know that story. It's called "gospel."

In Search of the Sermon (Part Two)

As I indicated in the previous post, my homiletic consists of three simple principles and four easy moves. Last time I talked about the three principles that govern biblical preaching; namely, interpret the text contextually, theologically, and experientially. But how to you get from principle to pulpit? I do it in four easy moves.

First a word of homiletical context. Preaching today is divided into two broad categories: the so-called “old homiletic” and the so-called “new homiletic.” The chief difference between the two is the sermon’s objective. The old homiletic understands the purpose of the sermon as being to inform, while the new homiletic understands the objective of the sermon as being to move. The old homiletic focuses on the cognitive domain, the new homiletic on the affective. The model for the sermon in the old homiletic is the essay or the lecture; in the new homiletic the model is story. The old homiletic aims chiefly for the head, the new homiletic for the heart. The old homiletic derives its methodology from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the new homiletic from Aristotle’s Poetics.

An example of the importance of this last statement can be illustrated with modern movies. I sometimes hear people say that movies are so predictable. There’s a predictable pattern to every plot: hero/heroine is introduced; hero has weakness; an unexpected turn of events occurs; launches a quest (the bulk of the movie) for something or someone to satisfy the weakness/need; hero hits rock bottom; a showdown occurs; happy (or at least satisfying) ending. “Why can’t Hollywood come up with something new?” they ask. Hollywood doesn’t come up with something new because you’re “hardwired” to expect this pattern, paradigm, plot in every story you hear. It goes all the way back to the ancient Greek theatre and the three-act play (setup, confrontation, resolution). Aristotle recognized the structure over 2,350 years ago in his Poetics and no one has improved on it since. It’s why we go to movies, watch stories on television, read novels…and listen to sermons that utilize this age-old paradigm. It's why, when Jesus wants to tell his audience about the destructiveness of greed and avarice, he doesn't say: "I want to talk to you today about greed, and I have three things to say about it, all beginning with the letter 'G.'" Rather, he says: "Watch out for greed!" And he told them a story (sometimes called "parable"), saying, "Once upon a time, the land of a rich man brought forth bountifully..." (Luke 12:13ff.). And so, when I say “new homiletic,” that’s what I mean. It is sermon as story rather than sermon as lecture; a sermon that utilizes this in-grained, “hardwired” structure in order to drive home the message of the Gospel.

I don’t have time (or space) to tease this all out here, but if you’re interested, see my article titled “Glimpses of Glory,” in Review & Expositor, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Winter 2002), 71-87. In it, I have a section on “The Old Homiletic and the New Homiletic.” I also include a new homiletic sermon that illustrates and employs the three simple principles and four easy moves I’ve talked about in these two blogs. A professor of preaching at one of the CBF-related seminaries emailed me some time ago to say that he had never understood the “new homiletic” until he read the article. Apparently, it’s helpful. Check it out.

And so, utilizing the new homiletic and this hard-wired plot structure, my take on the new homiletic involves what I call “Four Easy Moves.”

Move 1: The Gathering Move. The average listener will give you no more than five minutes to “gather” them to the text and the sermon. In that five minutes, you have to call their names; give them a reason to listen; or as Fred Craddock puts it, get them to buy a ticket on the train. Once they “buy the ticket,” they’ll take the trip. The preacher’s task, therefore, is to create either a point of contact or a point of conflict with the listener so that s/he will either think: “I’ve thought that myself!” or “Wait a minute! Not so fast! That’s not right!” Either way, you’ve got them. You’ve generated a “gotta know” in the congregation that will keep them “turning the page” in the sermon.

Move 2: The Biblical Move. If done well, Move 1 will not only have gathered and captured the audience, but will have created some cognitive dissonance, some dramatic tension, a “gotta know” that launches the sermon (and the congregation) on a quest to surface and satisfy the tension. And, of course, in a sermon, the primary place one goes to satisfy that tension is the Word of God, the Scripture. The distance between the 21^st century (your audience’s context) and the 1^st century (the New Testament’s context) is quickly overcome by the commonality of the human. After surfacing some issue, some problem, some crisis that affects everyone in the audience so that they have “boarded the train” with me, the “first stop” I make is the text: “You know, Jesus was faced with something similar when he….” And you’re off and running in the sermon. “All aboard!”

Move 3: The Theological Move. Because every sermon…every sermon…is first and finally about God (else it’s not a sermon, just a little “self-help talk” or something), the primary freight the sermonic “train” carries is theological. I usually try to capture it in as few words as possible and write them large on the top of the page on which I’m working on the sermon. Big, large, grand, God-words like “grace,” “judgment,” “forgiveness,” “hope,” “salvation,” etc. Everything in the sermon serves that central, governing theological idea. That’s the “point” of the sermon, if you’re used to thinking in terms of “points.” I don’t think in terms of “points.” My sermons don’t have “points;” they have a plot. But my sermons do make a “point;” and it is always a singular point, and it is always a theological point. I call this the sermon’s Governing Theological Theme or “GTT.” It’s the “gatekeeper” that determines what gets into the sermon (every story, every illustration, every bit of information) and what doesn’t. If it doesn’t serve the sermon’s GTT, then it’s out. Period.

Move 4: The Homiletical Move. Just as Aristotle in his Poetics aimed more for the heart than the head, more to move than to inform, so also does this final move in the sermon aim to drive the GTT home to the heart. As Fred Craddock says: “The longest journey anyone ever makes is the journey from the head to the heart.” And so in the final movement of the sermon I use story that gathers up and draws in and drives home the message to the congregation’s hearts. I intentionally try to create an experience that moves the sermon from mere “idea” to existential reality. If the GTT is about, say, “grace,” I don’t want them to “understand” grace; I want them to experience grace. I want them to leave “graced.” Most of the stories I use in Move 4 are my own (rather than stock stories) simply because only that which has happened to me will likely happen through me. I keep a journal and computer catalogue of such stories (hundreds after 40 years of preaching) so that finding just the right story is always within reach. Of course, you can always lie and tell someone else’s story as though it happened to you (see my blog “May I Drop a Footnote”), but I don’t recommend it.

Well, there it is. “Preaching: Three Simple Principles; Four Easy Steps.” If you find it helpful, I shall be grateful. If when I come to hear you preach, you preach like this, I shall be back!

In Search of the Sermon

I concluded my intentional interim a few months ago, and now my wife and I are faced with a dilemma: Where do we go to church on Sundays when I'm not preaching? I recognize that for most people, this is not such a dilemma. They either attend the church nearest them (because that’s where their friends go) or they attend the church across town (because they like the show there better, or because they like the people there better). But I don’t go to church for either of those reasons (the “show” or the camaraderie). Let me be frank: I go for the sermon. I get up on Sundays and get dressed and drive, sometimes considerable distance, in the desperate hope that I will hear today a word from God which the preacher discovered in, and delivered through, the Holy Scriptures. To paraphrase Bill Clinton in the presidential campaign of a few years back, “It’s the sermon, stupid!”

But alas, the sermon has fallen on hard times. I don’t mean by that that preachers aren’t preaching; I just mean that it’s not a sermon. I used to tell my homiletical students: The difference between a sermon and a speech is the text. Without a serious engagement with the Scripture, it’s just a speech. And I’ve heard a lot of speeches masquerading as sermons lately! There was the one about…well, I shouldn’t go there lest the preacher be reading this. It’s a rare thing these days to hear a sermon that actually engages the Scripture in the service of the sermon. Most preachers begin not with a text but with a topic, and then pillage the Scripture for a text with which to prop up and support what they’ve already decided they’re going to say; in which case the text is not the basis for the sermon, it’s merely the excuse for it. It’s too bad, really, because most preachers spend as much time on their topical “speeches” as they would a sermon had they actually developed one. It’s not a matter of time; it’s a matter of location. Start with the text! Let me explain.

When I teach preaching, I teach a homiletic that was hammered out not in the classroom but in the congregation. It’s not some “preaching project” or research paper done for a homiletics class and then immediately forgotten. It’s what I did, and do, each week when I preach. I call it Preaching: 3 Simple Principles; 4 Easy Moves.

The principles are these:

(1) Interpret the text contextually (both historical and literary contexts). The underlying assumptions for this are that the author’s meaning of the text is the meaning; the preacher’s task is to score the same point with your audience that the original writer scored with his; and how a writer says something is as important as what he says (pay attention to the text’s genre).

(2) Interpret the text theologically. At the end of the day the text is finally (and always) about God. A sermon is not a little “pep talk” or “self-help session.” It’s a word about God, and if it isn’t, they why am I listening? Find the theological “freight” the text is carrying and make it the “freight” of your sermon. I call this the sermon’s “Governing Theological Theme” or GTT.

(3) Interpret the text experientially. A sermon should take the congregation somewhere, not just give them a few little “talking points” to remember. A sermon is an experience, not a lecture. It happens in the heart as much as the head. (For those who have studied preaching, the first half of the sermon’s history was dominated by Aristotle’s Rhetoric; this new kind of preaching, sometimes called the “New Homiletic,” grows more out of Aristotle’s other major work, Poetics.). To achieve this, the preacher should think more in terms of plot rather than points. The sermon identifies some “plot tension” (issue, problem, question) that exists either explicitly or implicitly in the text and then launches a quest to surface and satisfy that dramatic tension.

The moves are…well, I’ll talk about those next week.