Present Struggles with “Ancient-Future” (Essentials Red)

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt.

Ok, let me just get it out there. I am struggling with our text book. I think the author, Robert Webber is a brilliant guy and he has done his homework. But I just can’t buy many of the premises on which he bases his book. I have been open on my blogs about my liturgical style church past and know that I am coming from a perspective that has some negative memories. So I just need to get my thoughts out there. Responses are most welcome.

First of all let me summarize a few of Webber’s thoughts that I agree with.

His distinctions between objective and subjective spirituality were very helpful. He explains them well and so they do not need to be summarized by me. I also really liked the statement: “The world does not know the meaning of its history but the Church does” (p.26). The Scriptures, although by no means summarize the history of the world for all cultures, does give us a perspective and the story of God that makes sense of world — where we have come from and where we are heading.
Webber also summarizes well the incarnational heart and purpose for each of us when he says “The Church, as the extension of Jesus in the world, is called to be an incarnational embodiment of Jesus way of being” (p27). And he does explain well that is only by the work of God that we attain any spirituality and summarizes that by saying “We cannot generate, create or attain spirituality.” (p32)

But in my opinion our author just takes things a little too far or is asking too much of the Christian year. I am struggling with many of his basic premises.

Webber states that “The Holy Spirit …. quickens our will to embrace the disciplines that express our relation to God. Through these disciplines we experience our union with God, a union that God himself has established through the work of Christ and the life-giving power of the Spirit.” (P. 20)

It is this combination of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives and the discipline of practicing the church calendar that is troubling me. He seems to acknowledge the Spirit’s work but then minimizes it and maximizes the role of the calendar…. even to the point of giving the calendar “power” in our lives. He makes this point through statements like this:
“…The spiritual discipline of living in the pattern of Jesus saving life… has the power to call ethical behaviour into conformity with the pattern left by Jesus…. and the power to construct a view of reality that is thoroughly Christian.” (P. 31) and “Through the discipline of the Christian year we can experience the power of Christ within the community of the church, through its worship and in our lives twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.” (P. 23)

I have just read the book of Galatians once again and am so struck by the call for freedom along with the command “So I say, walk in the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” (Gal. 5:16)
It is a challenge to always know how to walk in the spirit or what that really means but I don’t think we necessarily need to add a discipline of church calendar to our lives in order to have our lives transformed. The danger of any good discipline is that we think it becomes the agent of change and power rather than the Holy Spirit Himself. I think Webber might be slipping into this error.

He admits that it is “Christ who lives in me?” but then looks for the metaphor, or image of our union with Jesus? (P. 21) Is he taking the desire for a metaphor image and hoping that this metaphor will actually do the work of spiritual transformation? Has the “helpful tool” become a replacement for the Spirit of God?

Webber does say that the “Christian year is the instrument through which we may be shaped…..and not what “accomplishes our spiritual pilgrimage…”
But then overstates his case once again with “it is Christ who determines the Christian year…” (p.24) and through the practice of the Christian year “…God’s saving action takes up residence within us and transforms us…” (p. 26)

It is Christ who determines the Christian year? How can he make such a bold statement?
Practicing the Christian year can be a helpful tool to help us remember the life and work of Jesus but is Webber just being a little too enthusiastic about this historical practice?

Also, am I just being trite with this observation? Has anyone else noticed that it is not a Christian “year” at all but only a Christian “six months”. It begins in late November with Advent and ends in the spring with Pentecost. So there is six months of extremely meaningful periods and Sundays and then six months of just “working it out…” That is not much of an annual rhythmical pattern to me.

And finally am I just the ultimate “proof texter” by quoting the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans:
“One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord.” (Romans 14:5,6)
If the author sees seasons and days as more sacred, meaningful or powerful to him, he is doing so to the Lord. But to argue that we should all practice this discipline in order to be transformed by God may be taking things a little too far. Many may want to consider “every day alike” and the Scriptures seem to give them that freedom and authority.

Reference: Webber, Robert E. 2004. Ancient-future time: Forming spirituality through the christian year. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.

Short Reflections on Lengthy History (Essentials Red)

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

Dan has assigned us this week to reflect on the media content of his video lectures in the Essentials Red course. Here are some random unconnected thoughts:

First of all, way to go Dan!!! – for bravery. You are summarizing thousands of years of worship history in a number of minutes and doing a great job. (1) One of Dan’s first reflections or summaries was poignant ( I think I know what that means) yet so troubling to me. He mentioned that we began with monotheism but degraded into all sorts of world views. Isn’t that a such a sad but true summary of our human worship legacy? Our loving God who created us to know Him and benefit from His love keeps getting replaced by other “views” or possibilities. What is it about human nature and my own nature that keeps wanting to replace Him with something that seems better? I am just like Adam and Eve hiding from God in the garden and then making woefully inadequate fig leaf outfits to try and cover my shame and give me some kind of new identity.

Secondly, Dan briefly mentioned “imbedded theology” and “deliberate theology” or the theology that we grew up with or learned and the theology that we have chosen. In my own journey I rejected pretty well all my imbedded theology and tried to live as an atheist for about five years in my late teens and early twenties. I reluctantly or nervously returned to Jesus somehow convinced that God was calling me back to Himself. But I was in no way returning to the form or practice of church that was imbedded into me. I was not going back to what Dan in one of his articles describes as “…the “old and dry” church worship experience (that) is the still the antagonist in many of our worship stories…” (2)
So now I find myself taking this course that is highlighting the worship practices of the older saints and encouraging the participants to reflect on how we can learn from them and incorporate them into our contemporary worship times. It’s not so much the theology of my upbringing clashing with my current beliefs but the day to day and corporate practice of it. I love history and find the study of our forefathers very helpful. But I want to learn from them in order to create new practices rather than practices that just repeat what they came up with. Is what was “imbeded” all those years ago finally bearing fruit again or will I “deliberately” choose again a whole new path? This course is really rattling me in a significant way.

Finally, this summarizing of thousands of years of humankind and some of our worship practices also gets me thinking about the struggle between urgency and God’s timing. There is an urgent message connected to the Christian faith – “the sooner we connect with with Jesus the better”, “we don’t know when our time is up”, “our decision to trust Jesus affects our eternal destiny of heaven or hell” etc. Yet God seems to take His time in revealing Himself or the fullness of His message to us. His history of revelation has been a long one including, at least from our vantage points, long periods of silence. How can I learn from worshipers of the past (a major theme in this course), live in the urgency of the moment and be patient with my own journey all at the same time?

1. Wilt, Dan Video: History of Worship – Prehistory to New Testament
2. Wilt, Dan essentials*red ONLINE STUDIES IN WORSHIP HISTORY AND CREATIVE VOCATION

Remembering: Now that’s Essential – Preserving: Now that’s the Question (Essentials Red)

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

I am looking forward to this course but I guess I should be honest and begin with my fears. I grew up in a liturgical style and church calendar style church with not too many good memories. I don’t feel too good about going back to those days. One of my attractions to the vineyard seemed to be a freedom from that style of Christian expression. So much of this course will be a challenge for me, wondering what God has for me and maybe I will discover some fruit that will bear from seeds sown long ago.

At one time I may have thought history was boring, but now I find it fascinating.
History helps us discover what our roots are and whose shoulders we are standing on.
We also discover often that some of our new ideas might not be that new at all and that God has given those ideas to people over and over to act out.

Remembering –Thanks Dan for helping us to reflect on the theme and the importance of remembering. It seems it is a theme that God teaches his people throughout the scripture.
Passover “This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord— a lasting ordinance. (Ex. 12:14)
Stones at the River Jordan – Josh 4
Communion – Luke 22:19 “… do this in remembrance of me…”

But I think this is more a remembering of how great He is and what He does for us than remembering how His people expressed it. Are we to concentrate on remembering Him and His faithfulness to people as His story unfolds or how believers through the ages acted out their remembrance rituals? I understand that each new generation of Christians shouldn’t have to “re-invent the wheel” and so can learn from our spiritual forefathers and mothers as we develop our worship practices.

I think it might be important to discuss the difference between “remembering” and “preserving”. Remembering seems to be a calling from God that we constantly see in the scriptures. But “preserving” is the challenge to keep practicing great ideas and practices from the past. Is this a calling or just a felt responsibility?
You see as long as Jesus delays His coming, this responsibility just keeps getting larger and larger. Because the amount of traditions, songs, liturgies, works of art, buildings and the like just keep growing year after year through the millennia as Christians from a vast array of times, spaces and cultures create their worshiping communities. Remembering turned into preserving just becomes a growing burden for each new generation of believers. What is the balance between putting our present resources of talent, creativity, money and time into preserving the past traditions and putting those resources toward releasing new creativity based on what God is doing in this generation?

Another thing to ponder is just whose Christian cultural practices are we remembering? The course so far has given examples mainly from Europe, the near east and Palestine. This is especially meaningful to those of us from Europe, North American and Australia. But what of the Christian cultural heritage of Africa, Latin America, Asia and Indigenous peoples? They might not have 2000 years of Christian heritage like Italy, Greece and Israel but still have some. Are we in the west remembering their contributions?

Will the western church and scholars push for Asian and African traditions to be practiced in the west? Are the churches in those cultures expected to carry on traditions that were developed in Western culture? Much of the missionary effort to these cultures in the past seemed to be a teaching of these rituals over the teaching of God’s story.
Who chooses what gets practiced and what is forgotten? It all can’t get “preserved”.
I believe that we in the west must be diligent not to confuse “remembering” with imposing our cultural expressions and historical rituals on to other cultures.

As we welcome the composers, poets, musicians, artists, designers and architects to use their magnificent gifts to create tools for worship, stories, and space for worship we need to not burden them with an over responsibility to preserve. I think we need to help them create in such a way that helps us remember God and His greatness, so each new generation can put their faith in Him and walk with him. Would this be the remembrance/faith theme of Hebrews 11 that leads us to the great picture of the “…great cloud of witnesses…” that is surrounding us – the present day runners? (Heb. 12:1)

This leads us to Dan’s final point of application – leaving a legacy. Will our legacy be future generations of passionate and creative believers who keep worshiping God for what He has done in the past and in their lives? Or will our legacy be a charge to the next generation just to preserve the songs, works of art and buildings that we have created?

FaceBlogging through the Space Time Continuum (Essentials Red)

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

Wow, nothing gets the philosophic juices flowing like reading about time and space. Time itself is a mind boggling concept. I think time is a creation of God. He lives in eternity which is “time…less” and outside of time. So I guess He created time as a dimension for us to live inside and a place for our story to unfold. Since He kept summarizing His creation with the adjectives of “Good” and “Very “Good”, then time, as part of His creation itself is good, or sacred as one of the authors stated.

He also created three dimensional space and put us as three dimensional objects inside that space to live alongside all the other physical stuff that He made. We and all that stuff were declared “very good”.

Within a short period of time Adam and Eve disobeyed and sinned. This somehow stained us and all of God’s creation. BUT…. He did not say that we or any of the stuff He created was now (or at any point in time) “Not Good”. So are we actually still good, but “fallen”, or “broken” or in need of redemption?

Our Triune God still demonstrated his commitment to us as fallen, time bound folks by continuing to enter time (burning bush, Mt. Sinai etc), becoming physical (“became flesh and dwelt among us”) and actually living inside of Christians’ physical body (Eph 2:22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit).

I think that as good but stained creatures we stain everything that we touch and everything that we create. All the elements that are at our creative disposal (art, music, dance, architecture, media) has certainly been stained by humans. So in the time space of the last few thousand years God worshipers and Christians have sometimes embraced these elements in order to worship Him and display our own creativity and sometimes rejected these elements ( eg. dancing is bad, rock n roll is bad) because of the stain.

But God’s story is a redemptive story. He takes fallen, broken and stained things, demonstrates His love toward them, cleans the stains and redeems them. His story and our story in this dimension called time is one of redeeming His good but fallen creation. He does it over and over again, all through time, and so can we.

So is worship just re-enacting that process? With our good – but fallen – then redeemed selves we creatively use our time and all the objects of the fallen but good creation. We use them as elements to worship Him. He is such a good God to accept that.

What is ironic for me is that I have avoided Facebook and blogging as a huge “Waste of Time”. Great tools of the created order stained by people who have nothing better to do than ramble mindlessly and read other peoples ramblings. I’ve repeated the same mistake Christians have committed over the millennia: that is to reject the stained rather than see it as good but fallen.

It has taken a lot of time to join the Facebook sites, set up a blog, download the lessons and now write and post responses. My story, entwined with His story is being redeemed. Together we bring redemption story to the Facebook and Blogging world.

God is indeed a God worth worshiping!!!!

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