How Charles Finney Ruined Worship Part 3: Worship and Church Growth

In this final post on the subject, I will explain how the changes introduced into Sunday worship by Charles Finney will ultimately damage both worship and evangelism in many American churches.

By 1850, Charles Finney had fully incorporated his three-stage revival structure into the Sunday worship of the First Congregational Church in Oberlin, Ohio. His "new measures" for revivals were already widely known through his writings. Most American churches had no set structure or liturgy for Sunday worship. Merging Sunday night revivals into Sunday morning worship was an idea whose time had come.

How Charles Finney Ruined Worship 2: Reviving Worship

No man will change American evangelical worship as thoroughly or as radically as Charles Finney.  How widespread and thorough are these changes?  So thorough, in fact, that what many Christians today expect and would defend as biblical worship rooted in the first century is, at a fundamental level, unbiblical worship rooted in the nineteenth century.

How Charles Finney Ruined Worship 1: Sola Scriptura

In order to understand how it is that Charles Finney ruined worship, we need to look at what happened at First Congregational Church in Oberlin, Ohio in the 1840s and 1850s.

But, for us to understand how Finney changed worship, we need to first understand what the Sunday worship of ordinary Americans would have been like before Finney changed it.

Introducing: "How Charles Finney Ruined Worship"

There are some instances when things we learn from history can clarify or even revolutionize fundamental assumptions. In these times, history is less about old facts than current faith. It is discovering the lenses through which we have been seeing everything are distorted. Distorted lenses change how the world looks. Sometimes these distortions don't matter much. Other times, they matter a great deal.

In three upcoming posts on adorate.org, I am going to examine how events in the early 1840s in a church in Oberlin Ohio will fundamentally change how millions of Christians practice Sunday worship.   

Facing the Ugly Truth about Jesus

People will not let the reality of the Jesus they encounter in scripture see the full light of day.  For many, it is plain ignorance.  For others, including those deeply committed to biblical truth and regular Bible readers, it is surprising that they also join in remaking Jesus of Nazareth into the Jesus of Hollywood.  They learn to take scripture quite seriously and ignore some of it all at the same time.

My Church Looks Like a Bar

When people walked into First Christian Church on a Sunday morning not long ago, most of them were not prepared to see the newest fad in popular worship music sitting in the front of the sanctuary.  Some of them had enough musical background to know they were looking at a percussion instrument.  For a lot of people, the one thing they knew was it made their church look like a bar.  

Underwater Prayers

A room used for baptisms.
The main gathering room is larger,
but the wall art did not survive.

In the barren Syrian desert, near the Euphrates, are the ruins of a once-thriving Roman settlement: Dura-Europos.  The town was destroyed by Persians in the middle of the third century, never to be rebuilt.   Around the year 235 the houses along the inside of the western wall were vacated and incorporated into widening and strengthening the city wall.  Ironically, it was this very act that means several of these houses, complete with wall art, were buried under rubble and preserved for 1800 years.  A few of the houses have been painstakingly restored.

Juicy Communion

Did you ever find yourself wondering, when you are in a church communion service: Why grape juice and not wine?  Why all the little cups?

Yeah, this post is hardly revolutionary or inspirational.  But, since the questions do come up from time to time, a little lesson in recent (by church history standards) events will answer our two questions.

A Watchman's Confession

"Son of dust,
I have appointed you
as a watchman for Israel." 
Ezekiel 3:17

The old man thought for a moment, and then continued to write out his sermon for Sunday:

A watchman always stands on something high, so that he can see off in the distance whatever might be coming.  It’s hard to preach this.  My own words come back to judge me.  I cannot preach that well.  But, when I do, I still face the fact that I do not live up to what I’m saying…

Modern Medieval Worship

Sometimes, 
good advice comes 
from unexpected places.

      The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were an era of tremendous achievements in art throughout Europe.  Nowhere was this more evident than in Italy.  Paintings, frescoes, and sculptures from that time still stand today as unsurpassed examples of beauty formed by the hand of man.  People of that time grew up in a world where visual art, including complex symbolism and representations, were widely understood.  A carving of a torch on the wall of the church was the Garden of Gethsemane.  The stylized lily of the fleur-de-lis was as much in honor of the Holy Trinity as it was the French monarchy.
       In Sunday worship, also, there was a great deal of emphasis on the beauty of the visual arts.  Church buildings were adorned in so many obvious and subtle depictions, in both painting and stonework, that a modern observer needs a very knowledgeable guide to see the rich complexity.  As Kieckhefer points out, it is literally a "theology in stone."
       Knowing this may help us understand one of the great oddities of Christian worship in that era.  Ordinary laypeople did not seem to do much of anything at all during worship.  

Nobody Does My Traditional

Missionary Baptist Church, Rawhide, Virginia

       "Why don't you play some worship music I like?"
       This normally should be translated to mean, "Why don't you play some worship music I grew up with."
       That's understandable.  Most people will always have a special affection for the worship music of their childhood.  A melody, even a style of music, can transport anyone to different places in the story of their own faith journey.  This is what Randy Garris has called our musical heart language. 
       So, everybody likes music from their childhood.  So, what will be it?  The 1970s?  Hey, let's do something by the Gaithers.  Or, maybe the 1950s?  Let's see, maybe something by George Beverly Shea.  The 1930s?  Wow, that's really getting back there, grandpa.  
       But, what if your "traditional" is a style and sound you're pretty sure no one in the church but him had ever heard?  

The More Things Change: Worship from 1850 to 2010

This post is not poetic, reflective, or inspiring.  It is, to me at least, interesting.  We all know that worship has changed over the years.  We often think of those changes as if it went from the Latin Mass to Protestant hymn singing to contemporary praise worship.  The changes are both more subtle and more radical than that.  It is also interesting that worship is often changed by completely unrelated things, such as the coming of electrical wiring or the invention of the radio.

Every generation wants to believe they are unique.  A "watershed" moment in human history.  More change today than ever before.  No one before us has seen anything like this.  This, at least, is what we tell ourselves. A better informed understanding of history, however, often challenges this somewhat self-serving confidence.

Preaching in Black and White

This post is about a mystery and what I found that solved it.

Here’s how it began…
In my first year in college, I went with several other students to visit the worship service of an African-American church.  This was my first experience with traditional black worship and one of those amazing moments that fostered my lifelong passion to explore the many forms and styles of Christian worship throughout history.

Can You Stand It?

I confess to a secret dream.  I have imagined beginning a forty-minute sermon by looking over at the members of the praise team and saying, "Listen, why don't you guys all stand up.  Right.  Now, stay standing.  I think this sermon will be a lot more meaningful to you that way."

Escaping Zurich: Why Evangelicals Get Communion Wrong

Escaping Zurich: Why (many) Evangelicals Get Communion Wrong

The language we use when talking about Communion has a great deal more to do with our history than our Bibles. 

[note: Although written primarily for churches of the Stone-Campbell Movement that practice weekly communion with an assumed Zwinglian theology, the following is also broadly applicable to most American Protestants]

A quick review of any English Bible will demonstrate words like memorial or emblematic or symbolic are not actually found in any of the passages about Communion.  So, where do they come from and why do we hear them so often?  The flip side of that question might be: why are there a number of biblical phrases and teachings about the Lord’s Supper we rarely hear?