Worship Weblog
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Worship in Korea: A Church With 7 Services
CICW student staff member Katie Ritsema visited her native Korea last week, for the first time since her adoption brought her to the United States. She writes of her worship this past Sunday:
Church today was unbelievable. Worship Institute....I wish every single one of you were there this morning. I went to an Assemblies of God church which is the biggest church in Korea. On an average Sunday they have about 200,000 people attending. 7 services starting at 9 a.m and going through until the night. Each service averages anywhere from 20-25,000 people. I didn’t believe it until we got there and there literally was a sea of people. Traffic patrol was attempting to direct people into church. The sanctuary was huge and completely packed. I sat in the “foreigners” section so I could listen to the service in English. I sat back for parts of it and just enjoyed hearing the liturgy in another language. It really strikes me how diverse God really is. He isn’t just the God of the United States and he doesn’t just speak and understand English. He heard their praises the same way he hears ours. Wow...what a good reminder.
The choir was huge and there was a full orchestra as well. Norma....you would have loved the organ. It was amazing. The choir sang the Hallelujah chorus in Korean and I almost cried. I get goosebumps whenever I hear it but to hear it in Korean was incredible. They opened up the service with the doxology in Korean as well as the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. So unique to hear it all in Korean and really absorb the part of the creed that
states we believe in one holy catholic church.
The purpose of Katie’s trip was to learn about her birth parents. Her e-mail report of what she found out is reprinted here with her permission:
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WOWAW 2
This week’s Words of Wisdom About Worship:
Christian worship is fundamentally our participation, through the Holy Spirit, in Jesus Christ’s communion with God the Father. Not only is God present with us in worship; we are present with God within God’s own Trinitarian life.
-Leanne Van Dyk, A More Profound Alleluia, pp. 56-7
• Listen to a reading of this quote(mp3)
by Kristen Verhulst
Earlier: WOWAW 1
Museum of Biblical Art Opens in New York
Also spotted in the Times, and residing in New York City, is the new Museum of Biblical Art, calling itself “the nation’s first scholarly museum devoted to art and the Bible.”
A reprint of the article is available. The piece was noticed by Bill Tammeus of the KC Star, who writes a weblog called Faith Matters. (By the way, thanks to Bill for mentioning CICW’s grants to Presbyterian recipients.)
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Organist Retires; Organ Recovers?
Commenting on the NY Times’ recent tribute to John Weaver, retiring organist of New York City’s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, Martin Marty writes:
… after a couple of decades of decline in the number of organ majors in schools around the country, there are signs now of some recovery. My prejudices, which allow me to hope for some success stories, formed because I am the son of a church organist and the sibling of other organists, and a beneficiary of friendship and tutelage by the likes of Morgan Simmons, Paul Manz, and too many others to mention. My soul is fed even when listening to an organist practice in an empty church on a Saturday afternoon, and I can be stunned and then lifted
up, full of awe, by organs in worship, whether in tiny Iowa town churches or great cathedrals.Today electronic guitars and drums replace organs in many, but not all, megachurches because they make sounds and use rhythms that exactly duplicate what one hears in the rest of the mall. ... many argue that well-done, adaptive, and also contemporary organ music finds its following and enhances worship.
Related: CICW has posted a Nicholas Wolterstorff address on the organ in Reformed liturgy
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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
‘Christ Plays’ p. 11-26
Kathy (who is loath to be cited, but makes contributions that cannot go unmentioned) began by quoting Peterson’s superb line on page 13: “Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.” The line is worth quoting in context:
Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn’t know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out-of-bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
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A Brazilian Church Finds Success in Africa
Paul Freston writes in the current issue of the Journal of Religion in Africa:
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), with its more than 400 congregations in southern Africa, is the first major example in the region of a new phenomenon: a successful church which is of neither First World nor African origin, but is part of the growing transnationalization of Third World evangelical religion. Although other churches of Asian or Latin American origin have arrived in southern Africa (above all, Brazilian groups in the Lusophone countries), none can rival the UCKG in its numerical growth and impact on public awareness. Indeed, it is possible that no Christian denomination founded in the Third World has ever been exported so successfully and rapidly; only 27 years after its establishment in 1977, it has over a thousand churches in some 80 countries around the world, outside its native Brazil. The UCKG in southern Africa represents, therefore, one of the most striking cases of trans-continental Christian missionizing within the Third World.
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Regenerating re:generation quarterly
Much-loved when it was still publishing, and much-missed when it stopped, re:generation quarterly is back—at least in the archives of Christianity Today’s Library (which requires paid subscription). Provocative, intelligent, and creative, the journal’s eight years of articles are well worth a read the second (or first) time around. CT’s Ted Olsen introduces the new holdings.
Here are some excerpts:
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Monday, May 23, 2005
WOWAW 1
That stands for “Words of Wisdom about Worship,” a new and hopefully recurring feature of this weblog. Wisdom about worship can come in the long chapters of eloquent books, or in the choice words of a succinct sentence or two. Both forms are found in Neal Plantinga and Sue Rozeboom’s Discerning the Spirits, from which our first WOWAW is taken:
Remember, worship is going on all the time in heaven, and when we worship we are joining that which is already happening, what has been called the communion of the saints.
-John Wimber, in Worship: Intimacy with God
• Listen to a reading of this quote(mp3) by Nathan Bierma
Another excellent resources for wise words about worship is the Worship Quote of the Week website hosted by Carl Stam.
Dr. Stam’s quote this week is worth passing along here:
The Sacramental Imagination
Newaygo pastor David Wygmans offers this provocative paper on dualism, Calvin, and “the sacramental imagination.” A highlight:
“The church has two (or seven) sacraments that it celebrates by way of living out on a small scale the universal sacramentality of life. Thus, control over the sacraments may be important, but it is not the major issue, nor should it be heavily emphasized. The major issue instead is to celebrate the sacraments in ways that imparts as much as possible a sacramental imagination, giving both vision and permission to those who partake as well as those who stand far off and observe. In this way, the church’s ritual will say, “We celebrate specific promises of God here in these rituals. We use normal, everyday elements because God comes to us in the normal and the everyday. And God’s promises are all encompassing. ‘I will be with you.’ Who can ask for more of the sacred in the everyday than that?”
[Also see Laura Smit’s Developing a Calvinist Sacramental Theology(pdf)]
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Book on Sacraments gets CT Award
Among the 23 books honored in the Christianity Today Book Awards 2005 is Leonard Vander Zee’s Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper: Recovering the Sacraments for Evangelical Worship. The judges commented: “Clear as air and brilliantly organized and written, this book offers sources and insight to pastors of any Christian tradition, including the emergent church.”
Vander Zee was featured last month in our story Rejoicing at the Lord’s Supper.
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Thursday, May 19, 2005
Conference: Christians in the Visual Arts
Announcement via Gideon Strauss (see his version for links):
If any of my readers are in Los Angeles in June, allow me to recommend to you with great enthusiasm the 25th anniversary conference of Christians in the Visual Arts. CIVA has worked steadily to become a solid institution of support to Christian artists, in numerous ways helping them overcome the sense that they are less than welcome in the arts world because of their faith, and less than welcome in the church because of their vocation. I am keen on the development of arts organizations like CIVA, TRANSFORM, Brewing Culture, or the International Arts Movement, because cultural engagement in any sphere of life - the arts, business, politics, raising a family - is not a lone ranger activity, but something that needs to be done in concert with others who share one’s vocation, and hopefully one’s view of the world.
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Wednesday, May 18, 2005
‘Christ Plays’ pp. 1-9
At staff meeting yesterday we began our study of Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson, in preparation for his presentation at Symposium ‘06.
John Witvliet began by drawing attention to Peterson’s opening comment on page 1 about his theme of “spiritual theology”: “It is a protest against theology depersonalized into information about God; it is a protest against theology functionalized into a program of strategic planning for God.”
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Forum Spring ‘05: Worship Space
The new issue (PDF) of the Calvin Seminary Forum is out, and available to read online. The theme of the issue is worship space, and CICW’s John Witvliet and Emily Brink contribute articles. Neal Plantinga introduces the issue:
We can worship God in all sorts of spaces, but the spaces do matter. In our own case at CTS, the atmosphere in chapel has come to life. Scripture tells us that the builders of the temple had the Holy Spirit in their hands. I believe that the Holy Spirit can get into heavy equipment too, and into the men and women who operate it. The same goes for donors, architects, and good colleagues on the Chapel Renovation Committee. The result for us is a gift of grace-a worship space now alive with light and color, and with a kind of noble simplicity that fits inside the school we love.
The issue also includes a brief report from the March conference A House of Prayer for All Nations: Building a Multicultural Congregation.
Our feature on the new seminary chapel was posted earlier this year.
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‘Worship gets us beyond our fatal attraction with self’
A meditation from this month’s Today devotional booklet, written by Dr. Robert Heerspink, pastor of Faith Community Christian Reformed Church in Wyoming, Michigan:
GIVING GOD HIS DUE
“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power . . . .” Revelation 4:11
There’s a tendency among worshipers of every religion to take on the character of their god. Ancient worshipers of heartless Molech become heartless as they cast their children into sacrificial fires. Baal worshipers became sexually promiscuous as they begged their god to make the earth fertile.
As disciples who want to become more like Christ, we make worship a regular spiritual discipline. Worship changes us--and not merely because we hear messages that teach us about the gospel. The very act of worship changes us. Worship transforms us down deep.
Book on Liturgy and Life in the Early Church
Beach reading, from the current issue of the Journal of Theological Studies:
Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, volume 3: Liturgy and Life.
Edited by BRONWEN NEIL, GEOFFREY D. DUNN, and LAWRENCE CROSS. Pp. xþ412. 13 plates. Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls Publications in association with the Centre for Early Christian Studies, 2003. ISBN 0 9577483 6 8. Paper AUS$38.50/$45.LIKE its two predecessors (see JTS, NS 51 [2000], pp. 428–9),
this volume is a substantial and worthwhile set of conference
proceedings. Twenty-four papers are neatly arranged in eight
sections on Jewish influences, homilies, eucharist, baptism,
shaping the liturgy, Augustine, Eastern theology, and
spirituality, and there is an introductory essay on Scripture
and spirituality by Charles Kannengiesser. The first section
focuses on the New Testament and the last catch-all section
contains the longest contribution, on prayer in the Jewish
mystical tradition (Elliot K. Ginsburg), and an essay on
Sufism and Hesychasm (John R. Dupuche), but with these
exceptions all of the essays concern patristic or liturgical
themes. ... Gabriele Winkler supplies a useful
summary of her argument for the Targumic origins of the
eucharistic sanctus—a subject which will no doubt continue to
excite discussion. Six of the essays in total are devoted to
Augustine.
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