Worship in a Storied World (p. 2)

I mentioned in the comments on my last post that I had an interesting experience this weekend as well. I attended my parents' church, which is a large Pentecostal church in rural Pennsylvania. For the record, I don't have anything in particular against Pentecostal or Charismatic churches - I consider myself something of a post-charismatic myself, to borrow a term from RobbyMac. And this is a fairly typical evangelical church, from what I can tell - I doubt that what I experienced would be much different from what many folks from any number of traditions experience on any given Sunday. At any rate - as I mentioned late last week, I've been mulling over this question of worship for what's now over a week. I openly admit that it's a bad, bad idea to go into a worship gathering already pondering what the experience will be like - it's distracting, and it makes it darn near impossible to actually participate in the worship gathering yourself. I don't recommend it. Still, it did highlight for me again some of the concerns that I had last week, about getting lost in the whole "personal" aspect of the gospel, while missing the cosmic thrust of the Story.

My friend Kristi suggested the following in the comments on the last post:

yes, modern worship songs are in part a result of the American/Western Evangelical church's focus on a gospel consisting solely of a personal salvation message, but also a result of a postmodern generation in search of relationship. Lasting relationships, that is. Our generation longs for commitment and dependibility, and darn it if "Jesus-as-my-girl/[boy]friend" doesn't resonate with that longing.

I agree with her assessment - I agree that what's attractive about a personal, spiritual, eternal gospel for many, many folks is the prospect of spending eternity in relational bliss, finding meaning and connectedness in a divine relationship that will always endure. And there's nothing wrong with that - that is a good thing. But it's myopic. I wonder, though, if what we're really after isn't relationship at all. Or let's frame it slightly differently - those of us who identify with the emerging church talk a lot about community, and I hear a lot of folks talking about how people are looking for a sense of community and belonging in our current context. But I'm not sure that's really it, on either level. I think what many folks want - to be honest, what I often find myself wanting - are the trappings of community and relationship without all that cumbersome baggage. I want the benefits, but I don't want to pay the dues. I want commitment and dependability - meaning, I want someone (or Someone) to be committed and dependable for me. But don't ask me to commit. That's a pain in the tail.

So I was mentioning the worship gathering at my folks' church on Sunday. It was a fairly typical evangelical-type worship set, lots of songs about how I love Jesus a whole lot, and how He loves me too. Fortunately, no Jesus-is-my-girlfriend songs - there's something to be said for that, I suppose. Then they started singing some songs about how, one day, Jesus is going to come back and take us home to be with Him, and won't it be just swell? And the sermon talked about how God can meet all of our needs, and how miracles don't exhaust God's bank or something like that, and how God wants to give miracles to people today, because He loves them a whole lot. And then folks came up to pray that God would give them the miracle that they need. And then we went to lunch.

And the thing that bugged me about the whole thing wasn't that it was wrong. I mean, I don't think there was a single thing in the whole service with which I'd really take issue, theologically speaking. Even the miracle stuff, even though it sounded a bit hokey, a bit like a televangelist, was ok - I do believe that God still works miracles, and there wasn't any sort of peddling of God's power like you see on TV, so I think that was just a tragedy of language being coopted by snake oil salesmen, so that now when anyone says "miracle" what people hear is something more like "send cash to the address at the bottom of the screen".

What I didn't like about it was that it was...small. The whole gathering felt like the Story wasn't much of a story. It was as if the narrative world of our grand tradition was collapsing in on itself, until it was a sad, pale, hollow shell of a thing. It wasn't the Story of God's redemption of all creation. It wasn't about the triumph of mercy and justice and the restoration of shalom. It wasn't even about God's formation of a new people, a new community in whom His redemptive work can be displayed. It was about how Jesus loves me - which isn't wrong, not at all. But it needs the context of the grand Story of God's redemptive purposes to make it meaningful and beautiful.

Physicists talk about black holes, about massive stars that, at the end, are defeated by gravity, so that they collapse and form an object so dense that not even light can escape. I wonder if that's what we've become - little black holes, all crushed in on ourselves, with no light to be seen because it can't escape the tragic collapse of our narrative world.

Technorati Tags: worship, narrative, story

Worship in a Storied World

One of my more interesting experiences at the retreat I attended last weekend was unexpected. It was actually a small thing, in a sense, but I haven't stopped thinking about it. The format of the retreat centered on several group sessions that were comprised of a lecture preceded by a short time of singing. One of the sessions included the song Draw Me Close, which is practically a classic among some branches of evangelicalism (for what that's worth). I've heard this song probably hundreds of times now and, while I don't find it particularly worshipful, I've never really been bothered by it until this weekend. What happened? About a minute into the song, something clicked in my brain, something entirely unexpected and completely irreversible. I heard the words being sung by Peter Cetera, backed by mid-eighties era Chicago. It was profoundly disturbing on so many levels, not least because it was completely plausible.

So what to do with such a disturbing image? I've been pondering the question of worship all week - what it is, what it isn't, and what makes something a good example of it. And I'm fairly certain that Jesus-is-my-girlfriend sort of worship isn't really cutting it. Lots of folks have offered better and more nuanced critiques of current worship than I, so I won't dwell on this point. But I think it's fair to ask what else we should expect when the gospel is reduced to a spiritual, personal, otherworldly sort of message. What other form would it take? Doctrinal statements set to music, perhaps? Equally bad, I'd suggest. Neither engages the sort of worship that we find pictured for us in the biblical narrative.

For context, let's consider Exodus 13, which tells of the institution of the Passover tradition among the people of Israel. God in this text tells of the purpose of the celebration, and in the process I think gives us a picture of what it is that worship does for us as a community:

On that day tell your son, `I do this because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.' This observance will be for you like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead that the law of the LORD is to be on your lips. For the LORD brought you out of Egypt with his mighty hand. You must keep this ordinance at the appointed time year after year.

Take note here of what is happening. This is a fascinating description of the worship tradition of the people of Israel, centered on their most important feast of the year. The Passover experience was absolutely not about a personal experience or encounter with the divine - although it would certainly engage each individual who participated in it. It was also absolutely not about articulating abstract doctrinal statements - although it certainly formed the basis for much of the belief system of the Israelites. So, in other words, while those two elements are in play, they're not the primary purpose. The worship tradition here is much more about serving as the memory of the community. It's about telling the story of what God has done, of how He has acted on behalf of His people within the pages of history. It also, by extension, calls attention to how He will continue to act in the present and future. In fact, the Psalms often present this in the framework of, "Remember your people, Lord, whom you brought out of Egypt."

Worship, then, is story telling. It is about shaping our imaginations by continuing to tell the Story of God, about calling each other to remember it and inhabit it, and encouraging us to find our collective place within that Story. It's about learning to trust what God will do because of what He has already done, and about remembering and telling that Story together as a community.

Technorati Tags: worship, narrative, story

Raising Ebenezers

I spent the weekend on retreat with my cohort from Biblical. This was our last retreat together - we've been on the same journey for nearly three years, and soon it will be time to part ways. We graduated a few weeks ago. I didn't mention it at the time because it's something of a formality - we have another class or two to complete and a missions trip that we'll be taking together next month, so we haven't actually received our degrees yet. Still, in roughly six weeks or so this chapter of my life will have written its conclusion. I'm not, honestly, certain of what that means. I have a lot of stuff floating around in my head at the moment, and little in the way of outlets for it.

It's an odd sort of a thing, I think, to be granted a Master of Divinity. I don't know if the person who came up with the label was intentionally trying to be humorous. If not, it was an extraordinary case of naiveté or hubris, or perhaps some combination of the two. I suspect that, if your approach to theology is largely through definitions and categories, then the label is perhaps tragically appropriate, although I wonder what exactly it will be that you've mastered. Personally, I think it's a poor label. In the time I've been in school, I've realized two things: first, I will never master the Divine; and second, what I actually need is to be mastered by the Divine instead. And, third, I suppose I've come to realize, at least in part, how far I am from either.

Still, it's been a worthwhile pursuit. I've grown immensely in some ways, been stretched nearly as far as I was able to be stretched, and kept my faith intact - no mean feat given some of what has taken place over the past few years, but that's another tale. I've rethought nearly everything that's been available to rethink. In fact, this blog itself was itself a result of seminary; I began blogging two and a half years ago at the promptings of a fellow cohort member. It's served me well - my own collection of Ebenezers, in some sense, bearing witness to the work of the Spirit in my life. Now, I raise another, marking the passage between the chapter that has been and one that is yet to be written.

The LORD bless you
and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine upon you
and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you
and give you peace.

On Retreat

Once again, life catches up with me, and I'm behind in posting. Ah, well - nothing to be done about it now. I'm away on retreat for the next few days. I'll respond to emails and comments when I return.

A Taxonomy of Emergence: A Damaging Outcome

In my final post on Stetzer's categories for emerging churches, I want to comment on the end result of this framework. Ultimately, what bothers me about the framework is the end to which the categories are applied. In the few months since the article was published, a pattern has begun to emerge. Instead of being used for positive engagement, Stetzer's categories are being employed for dismissal, rejection, and worse on the part of critics of the emerging church.

Now, I want to be cautious here. I don't want to say that Stetzer's purpose in writing the article was to dismiss the thoughts of those with whom he disagrees. I certainly don't want to say that he is attempting to exclude those he terms Revisionists from the body of Christ. As I read the article, Stetzer seems to be attempting to draw lines of engagement and not disengagement. He's attempting to say that there are some writers, thinkers, and practitioners in the emerging church with whom he disagrees substantively, and he's attempting to identify some of those areas of disagreement for the purposes of defining the issues. This, in and of itself, is not unhelpful - in fact, clarifying the points of disagreement can serve to advance discussion between folks, if done from an initial position of respect and embrace (which I take Stetzer's to be).

However, Stetzer's stance (assuming that I'm reading him correctly) is not that of all critics. Instead, there seems to be a growing trend towards using the categories as a means of disengagement and dismissal. "Revisionist", in this approach, is the new "liberal" - a label that represents judgment of a person. Labels are convenient things, really. They simplify matters immensely. All I need to do is apply the label, and my difficulties go away. I don't need to engage with ideas or discuss differences or even embrace another as a brother or sister in Christ. All I need is that label. In one word - Revisionist - a person's entire belief system is ostensibly summarized, critiqued, dismissed, and discarded. There is no opportunity for growth, for the proverbial sharpening of iron on iron that comes from substantive discussion of weighty things. There is only the comfort of familiar ideas and safe thoughts, and the damaging testimony of an ever greater fracturing of the unity of the body of Christ.

Ultimately, though, the failure of such an approach is that it leads to stagnation and decay. Even while critics believe that they hold to an unchanging message and divinely inspired forms, the context in which the message and the forms are both heard and experienced continues to change. The unchanging message changes simply by virtue of standing still as culture passes by. Like some odd form of Doppler effect, distortion creeps into the message and, eventually, it is unrecognizable. Only through active engagement and conscious recontextualization can we hope to continue to bear witness to the Kingdom in a changing world. Dismissal of those who are pursuing this task is unhelpful and, ultimately, damaging - it serves none, not even the one practicing the dismissal.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer

More from Stetzer

I've been taking one of Ed Stetzer's articles to task over the last few posts, so I wanted to also highlight some really great thoughts that he presented at the recent Reform and Resurge conference. A great quote: "Preaching against culture is like preaching against somebody's house. It's just where they live." Also this: "The stumbling block of the cross has too often been replaced by the stumbling block of the church." Excellent thoughts here. Read more at Reformissionary. I've had Stetzer's new book on my wishlist - this confirms that it's one I'll want to read.

Quick Update

I took something of a blog fast this weekend. I didn't realize how badly I needed a weekend of just vegetating - it was wonderful. I have a few things on my plate for this week. I want to finish my thoughts on Stetzer's categories - the last post should go up tonight. I also have several books on my stack that I've been wanting to blog about, so I think the next week or two will be dedicated to finishing those thoughts. I'm also hoping to get a few surprises in there as well - we'll see if that materializes (it's looking good, but I'll not say more at this point).

A Taxonomy of Emergence: A Flawed Premise

The second issue that confronts Stetzer's categories is that the categories themselves are based upon what I believe to be an unsustainable premise. Stetzer states in the article:

I believe that some are taking the same Gospel in the historic form of church but seeking to make it understandable to emerging culture; some are taking the same Gospel but questioning and reconstructing much of the form of church; some are questioning and revising the Gospel and the church.

To paraphrase, then, Stetzer seems to be saying that the desired outcome of contextual ministry is that the message remains the same, while the form can change (within scriptural bounds). It is this separation of content from form that I think is largely flawed. Is it possible to change the form while leaving intact the message?

One of the books on my (ever-growing, it seems) stack is The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture by Shane Hipps. This is an excellent book - in fact, I intend to blog more extensively on it in the next few weeks. The basic premise follows Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, "The medium is the message." While I don't want to enter an extended discussion of the book itself at this point, I am going to agree with Hipps' conclusions - form and content are inextricably linked.

Take, for example, the shift in understanding of the gospel that was brought about by the Reformation. There are very good reasons why the Protestant Reformation happened after the invention of Gutenberg's printing press and not before. Sola scriptura is a premise that is only sustainable in a literate society. To encounter God in the written scriptures in the Middle Ages was simply not possible for the vast majority of Christians - even if they were able to read, the expense of books would have prevented all but the most affluent from ever owning one. The introduction of the printing press, combined with translations of the scriptures into the vernacular languages of Europe, placed the scriptural text into the hands of the laity in a way that hadn't been possible before. The medium - in this case, the printed text - transformed the message into a gospel for individuals, shifting the course of church history.

Is it any wonder, then, that we encounter a shift in the understanding of the gospel now, at the beginnings of the twenty first century, when the last hundred years have brought about incredible transformations in the way that we store, transmit, access, understand, and use information? Hipps discusses, for one, the return of images as a conveyor of meaning. Images surround us - sitting here at my computer, I am struck by the number of images within my field of view that are attempting to communicate something to me, from the corporate logo on my laptop to the news feeds flickering on the television screen. Practically speaking, this represents a shift from sequential, linear, abstract thought to holistic, concrete, and intuitive thought. The media have shaped the way we process information - in other words, the messages we receive.

To Stetzer's categories, then, it's reductionistic to suggest that we can present the gospel using different media and not in some sense shift the way in which the message is heard. A change in form represents a change in message, even if that's only a shift in emphasis. Even for those communities that are in Stetzer's "Relevants" category - I'd assume he's thinking here of what I've heard called "candles and couches" - something changes with the form. This shouldn't be surprising upon reflection - if the form doesn't communicate anything, why change it? At the least, the use of visual media, with their inherent ambiguity of meaning, introduces the element of mystery and metaphor. Even if, at its worst, the form only suggests, "Jesus is cool and hip," the meaning has changed.

All of this, then, only points to an underlying reality - there is no such thing as an acontextual gospel. The gospel only exists as inculturated, incarnated truth - it's never an abstract concept floating in nowhereland for us to apprehend and import into our context. Stetzer's categories fail in assuming this acontextual state, resulting in a framework that is structurally unsound.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer

A Taxonomy of Emergence: The Challenge of Categories

In my last post I mentioned that I wanted to spend a few posts discussing why I think Stetzer's categories for emerging churches are unhelpful and, in some sense, foundationally flawed. I have three primary criticisms of the framework that Stetzer has proposed: first, his criteria for assigning a person or group to a given category are suspect; second, the categories themselves are based on a flawed premise; and third, the use to which the categories are put is ultimately damaging (which may, in fairness, go beyond Stetzer's original intent). I do want to say at the outset that, of anyone that I would expect to be able to provide a helpful and friendly criticism of emerging churches, it would be Stetzer. His own work has much in common with emerging churches - although I've never heard him described as "emerging" (for whatever that's worth), he writes extensively on missional engagement with culture. His books, no doubt, would be found on many of the bookshelves of those of us who identify with the emerging church. In other words, this is a critic to whom we should pay heed - he knows his stuff. On the other hand, this also contributes somewhat to my own disappointment with what has been offered thus far.

My primary disappointment, then, is Stetzer's stated criteria for categorizing a person or group. It's self-evident that his categories are intended to move on a reactionary scale from benign to cautious to alarmed, with the Relevants being the first and the Revisionists being the last. But it's interesting what it is that causes Stetzer to move along that continuum. It's fairly clear that, at the end of the day, he's looking for consistency in content. This, in and of itself, isn't bad - if, for example, we were looking for consistency with the Apostles' Creed, then we would quite naturally be concerned with deviation from or denial of its claims. But Stetzer's field of vision here starts to narrow rather quickly. What causes alarm in his framework? Forms of church governance, egalitarianism, and atonement models, for a start. I'm not going to delve into exegesis here, because that's not my point. Suffice to say, though, that on each of these particular questions, the arguments that are being advanced on all sides are being done so primarily on the basis of Scripture. Many of us are reading the text and coming to different conclusions than those which have been handed down to us. So when Stetzer says that those who he identifies as Reconstructionists - on the basis of things like what I've mentioned above - "fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God", I have to cry foul. This isn't a simple matter of selective proof-texting on the part of emerging churches. This is a matter of being actively engaged with the biblical text and coming away from that encounter with a different understanding of those issues.

And nowhere could this be more evident than the question of the nature of the gospel - another issue which Stetzer sees as dangerous. Is it fair to ask questions about the nature of the gospel? I believe - and quite strongly - that it is not only fair, but it is also imperative. We absolutely should be asking questions about the gospel. Is the gospel primarily about how to get to heaven when we die, or is it about something more? Is the gospel primarily about my personal relationship with Jesus, or is it about his formation of a new people who together learn to love God and love each other? Is the gospel primarily good news about the future, or is it the revelation that God's Kingdom has broken into the present? Is it about escaping this world to live in a spiritual state of bliss, or is it about the restoration of this world to its original God-shaped purposes?

At its core, then, the framework that Stetzer proposes begs the question of the role of theology. Is theology only about restating the lessons of the past, or is it about entering the biblical narrative to find answers to the questions that a new context brings? To go further, are the lessons of the past deemed off-limits to further questions, and if so, which ones? And how would this framework have functioned in other eras of church history? The Reformation also raised many of these same questions - and for those of us indebted to a Protestant heritage, we would do well to remember that returning to scripture to reframe our understanding of what it is, exactly, that we believe is a hallmark of precisely that heritage.

Personally, I would rather see matters of historical orthodoxy - those answered in the great creeds, for example - be elevated to this status as the demarcation between faithfulness and heresy. This, then, is the first area where Stetzer's framework falls short. It fails to identify appropriately the ways in which emerging churches are wrestling with scripture and, instead, imposes bounds that are more restrictive than those required of historical orthodoxy.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer

Error Messages

I think a side project I'm working on broke something on the server, because I'm getting error messages when I try to post comments. But the comments are still getting posted - they're just not being published. So if you try to post a comment and it errors out, I can probably recover it from the database. Apologies for the inconvenience; it should be sorted out soon.

Ed Stetzer's Emerging Church Categories

Ed Stetzer's article on the emerging church caused some ripples a few months ago when it was first released. If you haven't read it, the main thrust of the article is an attempt to categorize emerging churches and practitioners into three categories, which he terms Relevants, Reconstructionists, and Revisionists. At the time, I thought it was an interesting, if somewhat narrowly defined, attempt to both commend and critique different facets of the emerging church. I think there's something to be said for his approach, and I think he correctly identifies the diversity present among those who would self-identify as being emerging, but I was unhappy with his definition of categories then, and I'm becoming less so as his framework begins to become adopted by the critics of the emerging church in what seems to me a weak attempt at fending off objections that the critics are painting with too broad a brush.

Stetzer's categories are as follows:

• Relevants are those who are "just trying to make their worship, music and outreach more contextual to emerging culture."
• Reconstructionists "think that the current form of church is frequently irrelevant and the structure is unhelpful." He seems to use this category to refer to churches that don't follow the standard institutional pattern, such as house churches.
• Revisionists are the third category. Stetzer writes, "They are not [evangelical] -- at least according to our evangelical understanding of Scripture. We significantly differ from them regarding what the Bible is, what it teaches and how we should live it in our churches."

But Stetzer goes beyond this to state the following:

Revisionists are questioning (and in some cases denying) issues like the nature of the substitutionary atonement, the reality of hell, the complementarian nature of gender, and the nature of the Gospel itself. This is not new -- some mainline theologians quietly abandoned these doctrines a generation ago. The revisionist emerging church leaders should be treated, appreciated and read as we read mainline theologians -- they often have good descriptions, but their prescriptions fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God...Every group that left these basics has ended up walking away from the faith and then, in a great twist of irony, is soon seen as irrelevant to the world they tried to reach.

My next post is going to be a full engagement with Stetzer's categories. First, though, I'm interested in getting some feedback. What do you folks think? Do Stetzer's categories clarify the discussion or do they fall short?

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer