Category Archives: Church and ministry

The importance of beauty in Christian ministry

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Frederica Mathewes-Green has a blog post up on that subject titled “A Golden Bell and a Pomegranate: Beauty and Apologetics,” which I think deserves careful reading and reflection. A lot of it is on the specific importance of beauty in worship; she has a distinct Orthodox slant to this, which is only to be expected, but I think her basic point is right.

In worship, it’s about God, and all signs must point in His direction. An atmosphere of beauty teaches wordlessly about the nature of God. It teaches that He is not just a concept to be endlessly discussed; that at some point our capacity to grasp him intellectually fails, and we fall before him in worship. Beyond all we know and cannot know about God, he reigns in beauty. Beauty opens our hearts, and stirs us to hunger for more, to hunger for the piercing sweetness of the presence of God.

As she notes, however, this applies beyond just Christians to the ability of non-Christian visitors to perceive the reality of our worship, and thus to be drawn by it; as such, she argues (rightly, I think) that beauty is actually important in evangelism as well:

What does it take to be a missionary? You need to know your stuff, and you need to have a tender heart toward the people you are trying to reach. But there is one more thing that Orthodox Christianity would contribute to the ministry of evangelism: beauty.

Again, I don’t think this is purely an Orthodox contribution; I’ll grant, though, that they’ve continued to make beauty, according to their particular approach, a priority where too much of the Western church no longer does. As such, I do think those of us in Protestant churches, especially, could stand to learn from Orthodoxy in this respect. After all, the poet had a point when he wrote,“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”If we don’t show forth the beauty of God, we aren’t being faithful to his truth.

Church as a missional community

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One of the things that holds the church back in this culture, I believe, is that we think of it as a place. We have the idea that we go to church, we have church, and then we leave church and go back into the “real world”; which, however common it is, is completely unbiblical. We may talk about the important truth that we are the body of Christ, the covenant people of God, but we haven’t really grasped that fact until we realize it’s just as true on Monday afternoon as on Sunday morning. The church is not a place; the building’s just something the church has to enable it to do certain things, most notably to gather to worship God. The church is all of us together, and we are every bit as much the church when we’re out buying, selling, working, playing, and the like as when we’re standing together on Sunday morning singing. Together, we carry out the central part of our mission, worshiping God, but we also prepare for the rest of it—which happens out in the world at large. That’s part of really being the church, that we are as much the church when we’re apart as when we’re gathered together.The problem is, we lose that when we let our walls define us. “Oh, those walls? That’s the Presbyterian church. And those walls over there, that’s the Free Methodists. And those walls down the road, that’s the First Church of the Brethren.” And those walls define out—everyone not within them doesn’t belong there. But Jesus didn’t define the church by walls, he defined us by our mission in this world—by, as you might say, the form which our daily lives are to take as the expression and outworking of our worship of him. It’s a mission which (like so many things) has three parts, which we can see in his farewell to his disciples in Matthew 28:16-20 and Acts 1:6-8.First, go into the world. The church is not defined as a group of people who all like to worship in the same way, though you wouldn’t always know it from the way we do things; nor is it defined as a group of people with the same cultural expectations, though if you look at the way so many churches tend to segregate by age, you might come to think otherwise; nor is it defined as a group of people who all believe the same things, though our longstanding denominational boundaries could give you that view. The church is defined as a group of people who have obeyed Jesus’ call to go. For some people, that means packing up and moving across the world; for more of us, it means sending and supporting those people, while at the same time remembering that we too are missionaries when we go down the street to buy milk. Wherever God leads us, whether Outer Mongolia or here in northern Indiana, that’s our mission field; wherever we are, we’re his missionaries. That’s what defines us as the church—not the details of our beliefs, not the details of how we do church, but the fact that we are a people on the way, following Christ in mission on the road to his kingdom. That’s why my other denomination, the RCA, defines its mission this way: “Our task is to equip congregations for ministry—a thousand churches in a million ways doing one thing—following Christ in mission, in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s the church: a community of people, a community of communities, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Go.”Next, he says, “Be.” Specifically, he says, “You will be my witnesses.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “You will do witnessing”; he says, “You will be my witnesses.” We’re not just called to “save souls,” we’re called to share the life Jesus has given us with the people around us—and not just with our words, but by the way we live our lives. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” That’s not an easy standard; our lives are to be sermons on the word of God, backed up by the things we say. Our call as disciples of Christ is to go out into the world and live in it as he did—talking with others about our Father in heaven, and just as importantly, showing his love to those around us in every way we can think of. We are called to do the work he did: to feed the hungry; to care for the sick; to welcome the outsider; to defend the oppressed; to lift up the downtrodden; to love the unlovable; to break down the barriers between race and class and gender; and to speak the truth so clearly and unflinchingly, when the opportunity arises, that people want to kill us for it.After all, what’s a witness? Look at the justice system, which depends on witnesses—on people who have seen something important and are willing to tell others what they saw. That’s what we’re called to be. We too have seen something important—we have seen the work of Jesus Christ in our lives and the lives of others, through the power of the Holy Spirit—and we too are called to testify to what we’ve seen. In our case, though, our testimony is to be not only the things we say, but everything we do, the way we live our lives, because our lives must provide credibility for our words; a witness who isn’t credible convinces no one. To be witnesses, to bear witness to Jesus with our lives, means that at every point, our lives are to reflect the love and testify to the truth of Jesus Christ.Which is impossible, for us; but what is impossible for us is possible with God. That’s why Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” and then says, “and you will be my witnesses.” Unfortunately, though, when the Holy Spirit fills us with the love and the grace and the power of God, we don’t stay filled; as the great evangelist D. L. Moody put it, we leak, and so we need to be constantly filled and refilled by the Spirit. That’s one reason we’re called to gather together each week to worship: when we spend time focusing on God, both by ourselves and together as a church, we open ourselves up for his Spirit to change our hearts and our lives, so that more and more we will be the people, and the church, he calls us to be.So, Jesus says, “Go”; he says, “Be”; and he says, “Do.” Specifically, he calls us to do his work: as his disciples, to make more disciples. Our mission as the church is to go out into the world, not to hide behind our four walls—to live, in full view of the world, lives powered and guided and changed and being changed by the Spirit of God—so that people will be attracted by our example and thus be drawn to follow Christ as we follow him. We are God’s light in the window, calling home those who have wandered far from him, giving direction to people lost in the darkness; but when people come, it isn’t enough just to get them in the door. It’s our call at that point to nur­ture them as we nurture ourselves, to give them a place by the fire and feed them, body and soul, to share our life with them, and to disciple them so that they, too, can take up the call in their turn.Now, this isn’t just a matter of teaching people to believe true things; by itself, that’s not discipleship. Discipling people is a matter of teaching them true things so that they will go out and live true lives. Our call and our purpose as disciples of Christ is to become like him: to think with his mind, to love the world around us as he loves it, and thus to act as he would act, to follow him in his mission in this lost and broken world so loved by God; and to do that, we need to place ourselves under the authority of his word, to obey his commandments and learn from his example. That’s why preaching and teaching are central to our life as the church, not just because we learn things, but because God builds what we learn into our lives, using it to form and shape us as his disciples.Finally, Jesus says, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” This is, of course, a promise, but it’s also a framework and goal for our mission. We remember that Jesus is always with us by his Spirit, that we are never alone, without comfort, guidance, protection, or care; but we also remember that there is an end to this age, and that we don’t know when it will be. We remember that Jesus is with us to comfort us, yes, but also to challenge us; he’s with us not only for our sake, but for others’ sake and his own, to enable and empower us to be Jesus to the people around us. We remember that his purpose is in part to prepare us for the end of the age, when he will come again, and to use us to prepare others. We remember that he is with us, not to make us comfortable inside our four walls, but to take us beyond them to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted and comfort those who mourn, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to declare the year of the Lord’s favor—and to warn of the day when his judgment will come—so that when we come home to his kingdom at last, we will hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the rest I prepared for you from before the foundation of the world.”

In defense of the church, part III: Doctrine

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There’s a strong anti-doctrinal spirit in parts of the church these days, as the impulse in this direction of oldline Protestant liberalism is being reinforced by Emergent types who are assiduously reinventing Walter Rauschenbusch; it’s a spirit that’s captured quite well in this video from Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.

[10/23/15: The video is no longer available, as far as I can tell.]

I’m struck, in that video, by the blithe confidence with which people look into the camera and assert that their church has no doctrinal statement that anyone has to believe because everyone has their different opinions and they’re all valid, and that upholding anything as unchanging truth is a waste of time because Scripture is evolving, as if a) they’re obviously true, and b) doctrine is obviously a bad thing. The problem is, these statements don’t hold.

They don’t hold for three reasons. The first is that if you want Scripture to mean anything at all, it can’t mean that. You will not find “everyone has ideas and they’re all valid” in the Word of God. What you will find instead is Jesus declaring, “I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6); what you’ll find is Paul telling Timothy, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:14-17). What you’ll find, in other words, is a strong concern through all Scripture that the church know and believe and uphold the truth, which in fact does not change, because truth is of God and God doesn’t change. If we actually want to follow Christ, that necessarily means that we need to be concerned to know and believe and proclaim the truth—and that in turn means that we do need doctrine, and an understanding of at least the most basic beliefs that we need to hold if we’re to follow where he’s actually going (as opposed to where we want to believe he’s going).

The second reason is that, as John Hatton has noted in a brilliant post on Confessing Evangelical, doctrine is necessary as the “constitution for a community.” He pulls this phrase from Columbia law professor Eben Moglen, the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation who helped draft (and enforce) the GNU General Public License; according to Moglen, that’s the primary purpose of free software licenses, not that they provide a platform for enforcement, but that they constitute (which is to say, create and give form to) a community with a given identity and purpose. Without that constitution,

groups arise within the community who, being ignorant of the principles on which the community is constituted, start to reject and work against those principles. They do not mean to undermine the community—quite the opposite; they consider they are strengthening it—but by undermining that community’s constitution it is inevitable that they will end up damaging the community itself.

This is a phenomenon with which the church is all too familiar, and it shows why there is a need to teach people the faith. Not because people need to know doctrine inside-out in order to be good Christians; not because it is a useful technique that is effective in building up individuals and the church; but because poorly-taught Christians may find themselves inadvertently undermining the constitution on which the church is built, by coming to reject doctrines they have never even known or understood in the first place. . . .

In addition, the free software movement and the church are both faced by numerous external opponents (variously, the world, the flesh, the devil, and Microsoft 😉 ), and ignorance of the constitution on which each community is founded makes it easier for those external opponents to damage that community and the individuals within it.

The key here is that those who reject doctrine (or conceive themselves to be doing so, anyway) do so because they misconstrue it as primarily regulatory in purpose, as if the main reason we have doctrines is so we can punish those who disagree. As Hatton, applying Moglen, shows, that’s wrong: the primary purpose of doctrine is formative, creating us as the people of God, as the kind of community God wants us to be. Set it aside, and you may be fine for a while, but ultimately you’ll find “poorly-taught Christians . . . inadvertently undermining the constitution on which the church is built, by coming to reject doctrines they have never even known or understood in the first place.” Who we are and how we live begins with and flows out of what we believe; we cannot be a unified community in Christ, we cannot serve God together as his people, in any faithful way for any length of time without holding at least our most important beliefs in common (such as who this God is we’re worshiping, and who this Jesus is we’re following, and why we’re doing this at all). As Rich Mullins summed up the matter in his song “Creed,”

I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am;
I did not make it—no, it is making me;
It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man.

The third reason the statements I referenced above don’t hold is that they fail the Francis Schaeffer test: “Can you live them out?” You can’t; Solomon’s Porch can’t, and their video shows it. In the snippets from Doug Pagitt’s sermon (at least, I assume it’s Doug Pagitt preaching), he makes such statements as, “Ultimately, community that’s Christian means to be a community of love.” That’s a doctrinal statement. It makes no sense whatsoever without a complete doctrinal context that provides definitions (so that we know what words like “community,” “Christian,” and “love” mean; they aren’t self-evident) and goals (so that we know, for instance, why we value community, and why we want a community that’s Christian as opposed to some other kind), and it asserts something that we must believe: a Christian community is a community of love. On the basis of what they say, the folks at Solomon’s Porch ought to be completely happy if someone stood up at that point and said, “You’re wrong; that might have been true once, but it isn’t now”—but they wouldn’t. They might say, “all those ideas are important and valued,” but if someone tried to interrupt the message to insist that a Christian community is not a community of love, they would find out exactly how important and valued that idea isn’t.

And that is necessarily so. It has to be; because if they really believed their own sweeping statements and tried to live accordingly, they would find that the rejection of doctrine is a universal acid that dissolves community. And so, even as the folks in that video insist that all beliefs are welcome, they also say, “If Jesus were alive today, what would he be concerned about? Well, he’d be concerned about what I’m concerned about” (and therefore, by clear implication, you ought to be concerned about that, too). They’re not rejecting doctrine as such; they can’t, because they wouldn’t have a coherent community if they did. What they’re rejecting is any doctrinal authority except themselves—which ultimately ends in rejecting the authority and primacy of Jesus, and building a church that’s all about us and how wonderful we are.

This is, I believe, where the attack on doctrine comes from. People may say they’re attacking the church because it insists on believing specific things, but their overt complaint is in fact incoherent, and merely a mask for the real complaint: that the church is telling them things they don’t want to hear. That’s not all bad, nor is it necessarily unreasonable, since no church has all its doctrines right, and too many churches teach things which are harmful, or proclaim things in harmful ways; but the problem comes when we start to think that the church should only tell us what we want to hear, and only ask us to believe what we want to believe. That’s not the model we have from Jesus. Jesus spent a lot of time telling people things they didn’t want to hear, because it was what they needed to hear; if we as the church are to be faithful to his call, we must go and do likewise.

(NB: the last paragraph has been edited to more clearly and accurately express my point.)

 

Thinking with the fishes

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Just a quick post tonight, because I’m dead tired—most of my neurons are sitting in corners sulking, refusing to talk to each other. I have several posts I’ve been hoping to get done, but . . . well, maybe tomorrow . . . maybe Monday.Anyway, if you’re not familiar with The Porpoise-Diving Life, check out the May issue on the website. I’m more than a little biased here, since my wife contributed a piece, and the editor is Erin Word, whom I like quite well, but I do think there’s some good material up. (Sara’s, btw, is the last one in the list, “The Mythical Good Christian Is Just a Piece of Topiary.”) Reading through a few of the pieces set me in mind, for some reason, of a certain theme that pops up a few times in Paul’s letters:“For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision,
but keeping the commandments of God.”—1 Corinthians 7:19 (ESV)“For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything,
but only faith working through love.”—Galatians 5:5-6 (ESV)“But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts
for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”—Galatians 6:14-15 (ESV)Of course, the issue these days isn’t circumcision; the new legalism has its own equivalents. Let’s just be careful that in throwing off legalism, we don’t make a fetish of its opposite. As Paul is at pains to tell us, circumcision is nothing, but neither is uncircumcision . . .

Distortion

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The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has a column up on WorldNetDaily on the racism that infects some black churches. His analysis makes a certain amount of sense, and he may well be right that “since the exodus of men, black preachers have retooled their message to play to women’s egos”; certainly, one hears enough of that sort of complaint aimed at the white church. Where the Rev. Peterson goes wrong is in the next paragraph:

Bishop T.D. Jakes, for instance, has built an empire by targeting the emotional needs of women. His popular books include “Loose That Man & Let Him Go” and “The Lady, Her Lover, Her Lord.”

There are two main problems here, which are (predictably) interrelated. The first is that this is a gross oversimplification of Bishop Jakes’ ministry. Rev. Peterson’s statements would lead one to expect that Bishop Jakes has written a flood of books “targeting the emotional needs of women,” when even a cursory look will show the contrary. Second, Rev. Peterson writes so as to imply from context that Loose That Man & Let Him Go! is a book addressed to women encouraging them to dump the men in their lives, when nothing could be farther from the truth. In actual fact, the book is one of a number which Bishop Jakes has addressed to men urging men “to let Jesus take hold of their limitations and bondages and to come forth into the light of all God has planned for them”—a message I remember him preaching at Promise Keepers—and he’s been doing that rather longer than he’s been writing to women; the first of his books addressed to women, Woman, Thou Art Loosed!, wasn’t published until 1994. (Loose That Man & Let Him Go! came out in 1991; the title, incidentally, is addressed not to women but to the Devil.)All of which is to say that the Rev. Peterson appears to have an agenda, which he makes clear in the following paragraph:

Worse, Jakes has empowered women to assume leadership positions within the church, despite clear biblical admonitions against it.

It’s all well and good to speak of “clear biblical admonitions”; those of us who disagree with the Rev. Peterson’s school of interpretation on the role of women in the church don’t see anything of the sort, but it’s as appropriate for him to use such language as it is for me in return to say that his reading of the Bible is shallow, simplistic, and culturally bound. That’s well within the bounds of normal academic rhetoric. What isn’t, and what in fact is flat-out inappropriate, is to prop up his agenda by misrepresenting the facts. Whatever his faults and flaws (and no doubt he has many, just like all the rest of us), Bishop Jakes deserves better than that.

This is the ending of a beautiful friendship

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and from the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s perspective, Barack Obama started it; Barack Obama betrayed him first. That piece in the New York Post has to make Sen. Obama, David Axelrod, and the rest of the folks in that campaign break out in a cold sweat for what the Rev. Dr. Wright might say or do next. I criticized the Rev. Dr. Wright yesterday for betraying Sen. Obama’s friendship and the good of his country, and I still think his willingness to hurt this country in order to take down Sen. Obama is despicable; but what I wasn’t thinking about yesterday is, as a pastor, how would I feel if I were in his shoes? How would I react to being dumped, downplayed and disavowed by someone whom I’d pastored for twenty years, whom I’d mentored and supported and encouraged and poured my life into, and whom I considered a friend? I’ve seen that sort of thing happen to colleagues (admittedly for much lower stakes than a presidential race, and for much less provocation than the Rev. Dr. Wright has given), and I’ve seen how it devastated them; now that I’ve thought about it, I have a much easier time understanding where he’s coming from. I still think he’s in the wrong; I still think he should follow Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek (and that his tendency to preach that to white folk and not to himself and his own congregation captures much of what’s wrong with his understanding of Christianity); but his behavior makes more sense to me now. There but for the grace of God . . .

In the meantime, though, it’s interesting what this whole episode has revealed about Sen. Obama (and, as Hugh Hewitt notes, to wonder what more it might yet reveal; if someone sits down with the Rev. Dr. Wright to ask him a couple hours’ worth of questions about his twenty-year friendship with Sen. Obama, he may very well answer them fully). As more than a few people have noted, the Rev. Dr. Wright didn’t say anything about HIV, or 9/11, or Louis Farrakhan, that we hadn’t heard before—the only new material he had was aimed squarely at Sen. Obama; it was only when the Rev. Dr. Wright came after him that he felt the need to denounce his “former pastor.” Thus Anna Marie Cox asked on Time‘s blog,

Is it overly cynical of me to think that Wright diminishing Obama as a mere politician was the true tipping point? Because that seems to be one of the few new arguments (ideas? rants? conspiracy theories?) that Wright made. Sadly for Obama, it may also be the only correct one.

Perhaps even more telling is Scott Johnson’s comment on Power Line:

In Obama’s eyes, the most serious wrongdoing in Wright’s statements is their disrespect of Obama. From the revered father figure who could not be disowned, Wright has become the the father from whom separation must be achieved in favor of his own identity, or the boorish relative who cannot be tolerated. The adolescent grandiosity and adolescent pettiness of Obama’s remarks are perhaps the most shocking revelations of this entire episode.

The further Sen. Obama goes, the smaller he gets (and with him, his poll numbers). He’s even managing to make Hillary Clinton look good by comparison.

The relevance of liturgy

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I argued yesterday that rather than trying to stop being alien to the world and start looking normal on its terms, we need to be forthright about our alienness; rather than trying to tame the strange language of Christian faith, we need to actively teach it to those who don’t know it. This afternoon, I sat down to read Mark Galli’s article in the latest Christianity Today, “A Deeper Relevance,” and found this:

A closer look suggests that something more profound and paradoxical is going on in liturgy than the search for contemporary relevance. “The liturgy begins . . . as a real separation from the world,” writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. He continues by saying that in the attempt to “make Christianity understandable to this mythical ‘modern’ man on the street,” we have forgotten this necessary separation.It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they’ve come. The world the liturgy reveals does not seem relevant at first glance, but it turns out that the world it reveals is more real than the one we inhabit day by day. . . .In what’s now an old essay, F. H. Brabant put it this way: “All liturgical acts . . . have a double function: one directed Godwards, expressing in outward form the thoughts and feelings of the worshippers, the other directed manwards, teaching worshippers how they ought to think and feel by setting before them the Church’s standard of worship.”We have to pay attention to cultural context, no question. The history of liturgy has been in part about finding words and ritual that help people in a given culture express their thoughts and feelings to God in ways that make sense. The liturgy has always had freedom and variety within its basic structure.But it has steadfastly refused to let the culture determine its shape or meaning. Liturgical churches know that as profound a reality as is the surrounding culture, there is an even more profound reality waiting to be discovered. The liturgy gently and calmly gets us to open our eyes to the new reality, showing us the “necessary separation” from the old. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we find our gaze directed away from ourselves and toward God and his kingdom. When we return to our homes, we are never the same.

That’s thick stuff, and profoundly important for the health of the church. I look forward to the article going up; what’s more, I look forward to reading the book from which the article was adapted, Beyond Smells & Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy. This is a message the American church needs to hear—and not only the “contemporary” churches that have stripped their liturgy down to the bare minimum, but also those churches being told they have to abandon their liturgy to be “relevant.” Relevance is not about coming to the world on its own terms; to the contrary, we are most relevant when we tell the world what it needs to know and does not, and when we give it what it needs to have and does not. May we have the courage to stick to that mission.

The best and worst of the Presbyterian Church (USA)

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In a couple days’ time, the denominational press managed to show me both the best and the worst of the PC(USA). On the one hand, there was a deeply inspiring story from Flint, MI about three congregations—from different parts of the city and different backgrounds; two were predominantly white, one mostly black—that voted to merge and build a new church together. What they’re doing isn’t easy; it involves a lot of sacrifice and a lot of time and a lot of unselfish hard work to set aside your comfort zones and your old identity and culture and come together to grow a new identity and culture. The fact that they’re doing it, and committed to doing it, for the sake of the gospel is a truly beautiful thing.

On the other hand, I also saw a depressing story of the institutional greed that drives too many of the decisions of this denomination: the Synod of the Sun voted to establish an Administrative Commission to take away some of the responsibilities of the Presbytery of South Louisiana. Specifically, they’re taking away the presbytery’s right to make decisions regarding the property of its congregations. Why? Because the presbytery was showing too much grace to congregations which wanted to leave, and too much concern for the welfare of the church of God as a whole, and not enough two-fisted insistence on keeping everything of value it could possibly lay a claim on. As Bob Davis wrote in his post today, “If ever there was a statement of institutional distrust, this would be it. Presbyteries are not to be trusted with the decisions the constitution specifically entrusts to presbyteries.” And why are they not to be trusted? Because they follow their own best judgment, not the diktat of the party apparatchiki.

(Update: according to a letter to Presbyweb from Greg Coulter of Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery, on the request of the presbytery council of the Presbytery of South Louisiana, the Administrative Commission was not given the authority to assume original jurisdiction. This is good to know, though I don’t think it ameliorates the picture as much as Mr. Coulter thinks it does. He categorizes this as “one governing body invit[ing] another governing body to partner with them”; but given that the presbytery had, potentially, a gun to its head, and knew it, it seems to me that categorizing their letter as an invitation is dubious.)

This sort of thing is the reason why, as Davis also writes in that post, the effort to make the PC(USA) more missional by revising our polity is completely wrongheaded and doomed not merely to failure but to actively worsening the problem: it’s an effort to use structure to fix a behavior problem. As someone has said, no constitution can withstand those charged to administer it; changing our constitution without changing the hearts of those in positions of authority may change their justifications for their actions, but it will not change those actions. To quote Davis, “polity reflects behavior. Polity does not initiate behavior.”

In the end, it all comes back to that quote from David Ruis: “The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace.” The mission to which God calls us flows out of the worship to which he calls us. Until those who govern the PC(USA) are willing to abandon their own agendas for his, trusting in his sovereign power and unlimited grace—as those folks in Flint did, to their eternal credit—they will never be agents of his mission, no matter what else they do; and until that changes, the part of God’s church for which they are responsible will never prosper.

HT: Presbyweb

An unexpected gleam of light

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I don’t know anything more about it than this link—the show isn’t my cup of tea—but apparently Desperate Housewives decided to encourage the church to evangelism. Or something. One of the main characters, by the sound of things a woman who’s never given the church a serious thought in her life, decides to go to church; predictably (both for Hollywood and, let’s admit, for real life), the doing is harder than the saying, but despite that, she carries through. It sounds like a serious treatment of Christian faith, taken all in all, and an episode that was unafraid to point out something important: there are questions that we as human beings need answered that we aren’t capable of answering.It also sounds like a salutary reminder to Christians of just how alien the church is to those who stand outside its walls. That’s something that’s always been true, really, but in our culture it’s much more obviously so than it used to be; which isn’t entirely bad, but it means that if we’re going to be serious about evangelism—which we need to be, because there are a lot of folks out there who need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ—we’ll have to take that alienness into account, and be willing to answer questions seriously and respectfully. We can’t assume people will understand us and how we talk and how we do things, because all too often, they won’t.Which doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that we need to stop being alien; I think by now we’ve pretty well demonstrated that that sort of approach doesn’t work. The truth is, as Charlie Peacock pointed out, ours is a strange language; but it’s strange for the same reason it’s powerful, because “it’s haunted by an even stranger truth.” We can’t assume people understand it, but we can’t set it aside, either; instead, we need to take the time and effort to teach it, because there are folks out there who need to learn it.HT: grains of truth

Worship as orientation

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“The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace. It is from this heart posture that true liturgy flows, that music and arts find their highest calling and that the light of a worshipping community shines as a beacon of hope to a suffering and searching world.”—David RuisMy thanks to Jared for posting this quote from one of my favorite worship leaders (and also for the excellent post in which the quote is contained). This is why any worship service, whether “traditional” or “contemporary” (two labels which usually bear little or no resemblance to descriptions of reality), should begin with a call to worship: we gather to worship because God summons us. The initiative is his, not ours. Failure to remember that fact and take it seriously is, I’m convinced, the root of most of our squabbles over “worship style.” We fall into the trap of thinking that worship is all about music and how we do things and other matters of style and preference, and forget that all those things, while not incidental, are secondary. Worship, at its core, is an orientation: specifically, toward God, flat on our faces. The rest should develop accordingly, as Ruis says.This is, I think, the most important thing to remember for those of us whom God has called to lead his people in worship; what we are about is to lead people in precisely this. It’s the reason I believe in liturgy, whatever specific content we may put in it (such as whether the songs were written three centuries ago or three weeks ago), because the ancient form of the Christian service was designed to serve this purpose; but at the same time, if we begin to value the form for its own sake, we make an idol of it and thus defeat that purpose. What matters is that we teach people to trust God’s “sovereign power and unlimited grace” enough that they will be willing to abandon their agendas for his—that we teach them to come to worship out of that attitude, as an expression of that trust—and that we lead them in that by living and worshiping that way ourselves. Put simply, the most important qualification for a worship leader isn’t skill or talent or charisma: it’s a heart and life oriented in this way to the worship of God.