Labore est Adorate

"Work is worship."

It's the often heard (although usually indirectly and generally not in Latin) clarion call of Protestant Evangelicals.  Doing good hard work is simply another way to worship.  Living a good life is worship.  Heck, let's just go ahead and say it, everything is worship.

With all due respect, and in all kindness, and fully mindful of the noble intentions resting behind such idiotic thinking: Hogwash!

Jesus never says that "good deeds" glorify God. In fact, He draws a clear (and, to me, reasonable, distinction). When we do our good deeds before others, one result will be that they will "glorify God." He does not say the aim is that they will also join us in doing good deeds in front of others, who would then also join those doing good deeds in front of others, and so on. The good deeds can lead to, but are not the same as, glorifying God. My atheist relatives also do "good deeds." Muslims do good deeds. Many live admirable and ethical lives. Living ethically, even supremely ethically, is not, in and of itself, worship.

If everything is made worship, however noble to intention, the result is that worship diminishes, fades, and is eventually swallowed in our growing sea of secularity. The person who sleeps in, catches a few minutes of Joel Osteen, and then plays golf without cheating is able to happily tell himself he is spending the Lord's Day in Christian worship. If there is not a categorical and important difference between Texas Roadhouse and Eucharist, we have not just lost the battle, we have refused to admit there was ever a war in the first place.

What about the Babies?

Human lives are marked out and segmented through ceremony and ritual.  This is as true for the non-religious as the faithful.  It is rooted in our shared humanity, which is to say it is rooted in Eden, not Pentecost.

Weddings.  Births.  Deaths.  School graduations.  Joining the military.  These life transitions are marked out by ceremony and celebration in every culture and major religion.

It is as if we are driven by some innate need, as evidenced across a broad swath of human cultures, to mark out the great transitions life through a planned gathering and sharing of certain expected activities, words, or behaviors with family and friends.  These life-marker ceremonies are typically both familial and religious, tied as they are to both identity and time.

Toe Praise

In the early years of the twentieth century, missionaries from the British “Brethren,” came into central and southern Africa.  Here, the Good News of Christ evoked celebration and responses largely unknown to the stalwart and strict English evangelicals.  One of the missionaries, Dan Crawford, (in his book, Thinking Back ) recounted watching an African woman break into exuberant dancing during the church service:  

“The amazing, maddening mix-up of the prayer in the heart, and the prance in the feet! Asked her what it meant at all at all, and she quaintly replied, ‘Oh! it is only the praise getting out at the toes.”

Sometimes you just gotta let it flow.

Racism and Dressing Up for Church

As the title suggests, this post will explore dressing up for Sunday worship and racism. Racism, I need to acknowledge at the outset, may not be exactly the right word, particularly if someone is thinking about a consciously malicious way of looking at people based on ethnicity or skin color. Myopic cultural provincialism would actually have been a better description. But, then again, would you have read the post even this far if I stuck those words in the title? While it may start to sound like I’m writing about proper clothing for Sunday worship, bear with me to the end and you’ll find the point I want to make is considerably more important than clothing for church.

In an undergraduate course on Christian worship, I was concluding the unit examining the history and traditions of African-American worship in the United States. Since the students had seen the videos and pictures, my question was, “So, why do predominately black churches dress up for Sunday worship?”

Does God Care about Ritualistic Worship?

Stephen Lawson* oversees a course in the history of Christian worship for The Consortium for Christian Online Education.  A student recently asked a good question in an online forum that many evangelicals ask.  The question, and Stephen's response, are worth reading.

A student's question:

Does ritualistic worship matter to God?  I realize that it may matter to some men or women, but does God really even care about the ritualistic parts of our worship of Him?

When Worship Leaders Worship: A Call for Comments

Over the next several months I will be involved in conversations with several local worship leaders (whether called worship pastors or ministers or whatever).  A part of the conversation will be to dialogue about our worship needs.  Is the worship they lead on Sundays enough?  If they were able to go to a worship service they had not planned as nothing other than one of the worshipers, what kinds of things would they hope to find in that service?

The Problem with Praise

Amanda was pretty excited to find out her husband, Jack, was reading the new bestselling book in marriage enrichment, A Praise Centered Marriage.  It wasn't that their relationship was bad or anything.  It just wasn't always as good as Amanda had hoped it would be.

Her hopes seemed to all come true  when, that next Tuesday evening, Jack looked at her across the dinner table and said, "You are wonderful.  You are simply the best.  I love everything about you. You fill my life with joy."

What more could a woman want out of a marriage?  At least, that's what Amanda thought six months ago when the process started that would eventually ruin their marriage. 

Dancing in Church

Around the year 1900, Plymouth Brethren missionary Dan Crawford asked a Congolese woman why she got up and started dancing in church,  "Oh! it is only the praise getting out at the toes."

Dancing is a form of art that you do.  And I mean that in an absolute sense.  You dance.  You become the art.  It is not something you do to someone or something else.  People can play a piano, beat a drum, paint a canvas, lead a choir, carve a statue, or write a praise song.  But, for people to dance you do not have to have a piano or a drum or a canvas or pen and paper.  You just need willing and able to move your own body.

The Theory of Relativity

"Lord, listen, if you won't make me skinny, then just make all my friends fatter than me."

We see ourselves through the lens of relativity. Relatively speaking, we are people of faith. Relatively speaking, we are active in church. Relatively speaking, we like to study the Bible. Relatively speaking, we are pretty much the kind of Christian that the Christian people around us pretty much think is the kind of Christian a Christian person pretty much ought to be.

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.   

Crazy Worship

Love sometimes gets a little crazy.

In college, a friend of mine wrote the love of his life a long and deeply romantic letter on an entire roll of toilet paper (you realize this is no small feat if you've tried to write anything on toilet paper). Other people in love have rented out huge billboards or hired advertising blimps. That's just crazy. There's something about love that pushes the boundaries.

In Luke 7.36-50, Jesus is having a nice lunch with a nice group of very nice people. It is a pleasant moment. No one has called him names. The conversation has been civil and respectful. All the proper boundaries have been preserved. Simon, who is hosting the luncheon, has not joined other Pharisees in dismissively attacking Jesus. Simon isn't like that. He has opened his home, his table, his hospitality, and has been decidedly respectful to the less educated Nazarene.

The pleasant lunch abruptly changes when the town's best known whore aggressively shoves her way into the room. Before anyone can stop her, she throws herself at Jesus' feet and starts holding and intensely kissing them over and over. 

Good Bad Worship

"So, you got your wife a diamond ring for your 25th anniversary?"
"I sure did. Two and half carets."
"That's great, Bill. One thing though, I thought you said she wanted a new SUV?"
"She did. But, where was I going to find a fake jeep?"

Accidents and Substance

Gifts of love are wrapped in marvelous subtlety and nuance that dramatically change them. The change is more fundamental than the fabled curse of King Midas, turning ordinary cheap tableware into solid gold with a touch. To employ the Aristotelian language Thomas Aquinas brings to play in his teachings on the Eucharist, we can wholly change the substance of a gift, while leaving the accidents untouched.*

Le Résistance: The Subversive Church

The small speaker crackled with static, and then they heard it.  “Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne blessent mon coeur D'une langueur Monotone.”  The poem by Paul Verlaine was well known.  Many listening had learned it in childhood.  The melancholy words spoke of the long slow weeping of autumn’s violins. 

This time the words held sensus plenior (fuller meaning).  This time they were announcing, somewhere out there in the darkness, ships were plowing their way through the waters of the English Channel  – among them a thousand Higgins boats – the landing craft that would bring soldiers of the Allied Expeditionary Force onto the beaches of Normandy, beginning the liberation of France. 

When No One Showed Up for Church

The two old pastors braved the deep snowfall and made their way to church.  They also shared a similar dilemma.  It had snowed eight more inches that night and both of their congregations had recently started a third, and very early, Sunday morning worship service.  Neither thought it was a great idea.  And, in both congregations, the early service attendance was usually so low only a handful of scattered people were sitting in the sanctuary.

One final thing the two pastors shared in common: On this cold snowy morning, the stood there in front of an empty sanctuary.  No one was there.  Not even the musicians.  It was clear to both of them no one was coming to the worship service.

Listening to God in Worship

Before Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public - Rowan Williams

At first impression, reading certainly seems a higher order of communication than listening.  After all, children listen.  Adults read.  Listening requires no particular skill.  Reading, however, comes as the result of  years of intentional education.  Reading takes focus.  Listening is seemingly easy and natural.

I say seemingly because, just like reading, listening takes effort.  

How to Have the Greatest Worship Ever

For 25 years, I have researched a key question: What makes something the greatest worship experience ever?  

The Survey

Year after year, semester after semester, I have asked students the same thing: Tell me about the greatest worship experience of your life.

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?