Worship Weblog
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
WOWAW 30: ‘planners of worship do not make worship meaningful’
This week’s Words Of Wisdom About Worship:
Worshiping God is not simply a good thing to do; it is a necessary thing to do to be human. The most profound statement that can be made about us is that we need to join with others in bowing before God in worshipful acts of devotion, praise, obedience, thanksgiving, and petition. What is more, when all the clutter is cleared away from our lives, we human beings do not merely need to engage in corporate worship; we truly want to worship in communion with others. All of us know somewhere in our hearts that we are not whole without such worship, and we hunger to engage in that practice. Thus, planners of worship do not make worship meaningful; worship is already meaningful. We do not manufacture worship that addresses people’s deepest needs; true worship already meets those needs. Our job, then, is to get the distortions out of the way and to plan worship that is authentic, that does not obscure, indeed that magnifies, those aspects of true worship that draw people yearning to be whole.
- Thomas G. Long, Beyond the Worship Wars: Building Vital and Faithful Worship, p. 17
* Listen to a reading of this quote
by Nathan Bierma
Earlier: WOWAW 29
Leadership • Worshipers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Post-Symposium ‘06 Reflections
From Kent Hendricks, at his personal blog:
This past week, the Calvin Institue of Christian Worship hosted the 19th annual Symposium on Worship. The Institute welcomed around 1700 guests to campus from twenty countries and forty denominations. It was a massive cross-cultural and inter-denominational experience. I’ll post some more thoughtful reflections in the next few days, but for now, just a few notes. ... continued…
Events • Worshipers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Symposium ‘06 7
Symposium update from Betty Grit:
Heard Around the Table at the High School Lunch:
After talking about sessions that had been especially meaningful for us, the three high school students, two college students, a youth pastor and I drifted in our conversation to questions about engagement with the Word when Scripture is read in worship. The students asked, “Why does my mind wander when God’s Word is being spoken?” “It is a conscious decision? Must I work harder to engage in this most important part of worship?”
Symposium ‘06 6
Dr. Mariano Avila gave an illuminating presentation this afternoon entitled “Ephesians: A Model of Integral (Holistic) Worship”; resources from this session will be available online soon. His introduction:
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians demonstrates that worship is an excellent way of expressing the deepest theological teachings and also of integrating them to everyday life. Actually, Ephesians shows that life is an act of worship. This session will open up this compelling book not only for preachers and teachers, but for all who long for a deeper biblical perspective on worship.
Events • Worshipers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Symposium ‘06 5
Mid-40s and rain on a January day in West Michigan! Just another way in which Symposium ‘06 will be memorable.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Symposium ‘06 4
After a stirring sermon by Rev. Thomas Long at morning worship, four presenters gave a “plenary sampler” session—each were given 8 minutes to express a primary consideration of worship renewal from their viewpoint. A brief outline, including quotes supplied by Kent Hendricks:
Carolyn Brown—The church needs participation in all aspects of worship by all worshipers, “age 5 to 95.” Too often we “bowl down the middle,” leading and gearing worship towards the middle aged, hoping to “hit” the middle, less worried about the outsides.
Tod Bolsinger—The worship leaders are not the performers for us; we are all performers for God. “Before there were choirs, organs, or liturgies, there was an offering. You take your best, bring it to God, put it on the altar, and then you kill it.”
Albert Aymer—The profession of historic creeds is essential to worship in all traditions, to add theological depth to worship, remind us of the core tenets of our belief, invoke biblical authority, safeguard against being led astray by false doctrine, link us to the church of past and future, and enfold us into the body of Christ. Aymer said:
In the liturgy we speak of joining angels and archangels and the company of heaven. I can hear my mother, my grandmother. So when you sing, you should hear voices other than those beside and around you. Worship is not of just this generation and this time, we have a sense of God’s past and God’s future, and already we worship with those yet to come, and we’re anticipating the worship at the heavenly banquet. …There’s something of eschatology in every service of worship. The end time has been breaking into the present moment, God’s future is now.
Jane Vann—Questions to ask: “How do we make worship the central most participatory act of the Christian life?” “How do we make reflection on that encounter with God a natural part and defining feature of congregational life?
Events • Interdisciplinary Application • Worshipers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Symposium ‘06 3
From Kent Hendricks, cross-posted with his personal blog:
Some snippets from Mary Hulst’s session this morning at Symposium on preaching…
“Bring the stuff from the week into the pulpit. If you don’t, you’re not connecting your pastoring with your preaching. We can all preach sermons and we preach them as guests and we preach them at Symposium, but your congregation needs something that’s written for them, not something you can use at any church at any time you want. They need to hear that you’ve got their hearts and lives and minds in your heart and life and mind.”
“[Preaching] takes humility, it takes vulnerability, and these are things we preachers are not good at. We went into this profession knowing we would stand in front of hundreds of people who had to listen what we had to say. Humility is not our strength. We need to learn how to go to people and ask, How can I be a better preacher? Can you help me?”
“Pray about and for your parishoners during the sermon writing process. What do they need to hear? Think about seventh graders, think about young moms, think about the people in your office in the last few weeks. Be in prayer for them.”
“Weave the images of I-pods and Nintendo’s with AARP and aching joints so that everybody knows that this sermon is for them.”
Events • Interdisciplinary Application • Preaching • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Symposium ‘06 2
We’re grateful for a gorgeous sunny January day in West Michigan that is helping us welcome our Symposium guests from around the world. Last night we had a special dinner and reception for our guests from overseas, including a simultaneous singing of a setting of Psalm 100 in seven languages. We had vibrant worship this morning (at 8:30 a.m.!) with several hundred attendees of our day-long seminars. Much more to follow on all of this, but what I’m immediately struck by is the ecumenical spirit of this gathering—the sincere grace and peace extended between and among guests of very different backgrounds and traditions who are eager to worship and learn together.
Publications • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Symposium 06’ Update 1
Overheard in the morning section of “The Last Thirty Years: What We’ve Learned along the Way”, hosted by John Witvliet and including panelists Albert Aymer, Nancy Beach, Brian McLaren, Eugene Peterson, Larry Sibley, Joyce Zimmerman.
“There’s something about mystery in the sacraments. I know we want to make everything intelligible and clear and plain, but we forget that in the sacraments, there’s a whole lot of mystery. You try to explain why – what’s the difference between sipping a bit of wine… and eating a dry piece of wafer instead of sitting at home with a glass of wine and some cheese. What makes one sacrament and the other not? That’s something of a mystery. It’s something I do by faith.”
-Albert Aymer
“People come home from church enough Sundays thinking why did I go, and they stop going, and they gain their spiritual experience the same way they gain everything else.”
-Brian McLaren
“Every time I read the Gospel, [it says] Take and eat. It’s my body. This is my blood. This element of awesomeness and mystery to this great celebration is something we need to recapture and we’re recapturing, and I celebrate that.”
-Albert Aymer
“I never had a big picture. I was a pastor. I was trying to teach the congregation how to worship and I had, as it turned out, the best congregation to do that with…. I had to listen to them, listen to their stories. Even though I thought I didn’t know much about worship, I knew it had to involve the participation of people… their lives, their stories, their experiences. I was learning a lot, I was learning how central this act of worship was and how formative it was.”
-Eugene Peterson
“The reality of hugs and tears and coats happens in actual reality, not virtual reality.”
-Brian McLaren
“…we are part of the vast host of saints of those of who have gone before, and even now as we worship God, we worship in the presence of that vast company of unseen believers who surround us and are clapping their hands as we sing the praises of God. Church celestial and Church terrestrial. And there’s nowhere in Christian expression where that sense strikes me more forcibly than Christian worship, when you begin to celebrate God with the hosts of angels and all the company of heaven.”
-Albert Aymer
“If we don’t have a solid devotional prayer life that leads to and from liturgy, we force liturgy to do what it’s not supposed to do.”
-Joyce Zimmerman
Events • Interdisciplinary Application • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Eugene Peterson: “Eat This Book”
We were blessed to hear Eugene Peterson’s address to the January Series yesterday (audio is available) and meet with him as a Worship Institute staff this morning, in preparation for his multiple presentations to Symposium in the coming days.
Yesterday, Rev. Peterson began by reading from the introduction to his new book, Eat This Book, where he summarizes his theme:
In order to read the Scriptures adequately and accurately, it is necessary at the same time to live them. Not to live them as a prerequisite to reading them, and not to live them in consequence of reading them, but to live them as we read them, the living and reading reciprocal, body language and spoken words, the back-and-forthness assimilating the reading to the living, the living to the reading. Reading the Scriptures is not an activity discrete from living the gospel but one integral to it. It means letting Another have a say in everything we are saying and doing. It is as easy as that. And as hard.
Later in the book, Peterson writes about “liturgical reading,” in his attempt to “recontextualize our reading of Scripture, our eating of this book, into a huge holy community of others who are also reading it. There is a millennia-deep and globe-encircling community of others who are also at the table eating this book.”
Events • Interdisciplinary Application • Preaching • Reading • Worshipers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
News article on congregations and disability
In addition to some direct responses we’ve received from readers about our Vital Worship feature story entitled “All God’s Children Have Gifts: Disability and worship,” CICW also had the opportunity to speak to the [Riverside, CA] Press-Enterprise for this article:
Pinky Feringa knows precisely why she goes to church every Sunday.
“I like to learn about God,” said Feringa, 35, a member of the Turtles class at First Baptist Church of Corona.
About two dozen members of the class for developmentally disabled adults meet every week at First Baptist for Bible study, worship and prayer.
The class, which started about 30 years ago, is a rarity in the Inland area, where only a handful of congregations offer programs for people with cognitive disabilities.
It also is a rarity among congregations nationwide. But awareness of people with developmental disabilities is gaining momentum through various efforts. They include the National Organization on Disability’s targeting of congregations and the creation last year of the National Association of Christians in Special Education by a California Baptist University professor.
News • Worshipers • Worshipping Communities • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
WOWAW 29: ‘The Eucharist ... puts us in our place’
This week’s Words Of Wisdom About Worship:
The Eucharist is the definitive action practiced in the Christian community that keeps Jesus Christ before us as the Savior of the world and our Savior, and ourselves as sinners in need of being saved. The Eucharist is the sacramental act that pulls us into actual material participation with Christ (eating and drinking bread and wine) as he gives his very life “for us and for our salvation” (Nicene Creed). Without the Eucharist as focal practice, it is very easy to drift off into imagining Jesus as our Great Example whom we will imitate, or our Great Teacher from whom we will learn, or our Great Hero by whom we will be inspired. And without the Eucharist it is very easy to drift off into a spirituality that is dominated by ideas about Jesus instead of receiving life from Jesus. The Eucharist says a plain ‘no’ to all that. The Eucharist puts Jesus in his place: dying on the cross and giving us that sacrificed life. And it puts us in our place: opening our hands and receiving the remission of our sins, which is our salvation.
- Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 203
* Listen to a reading of this quote by Howard Vanderwell
Earlier: WOWAW 28
Interdisciplinary Application • Reading • Worshipers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Monday, January 23, 2006
Daily Updates from Symposium Begin Wednesday
Daily weblog updates from Symposium 2006 will begin on Wednesday.
Until then, listen to this week’s podcast that looks ahead to Symposium, and view a prayer guide for Symposium.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Calvin Seerveld: Cultural Guidelines for Artists
The strategy of giving away gifts: cultural guidelines for artists
January 2006 - V. 25 I. 10
by Calvin SeerveldThe historical reality we inhabit is complex. The scriptural direction is singularly clear: give back to the Lord and to your neighbour the gifts the Lord has given you, in a ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5: 17-19), joyously redeeming the time despite the tears (Colossians 4: 5, 6). ...
First, for those who want to be christian artists, that is, musicians, painters, poets, novelists, graphic designers, dramatists, cinematographers, distinguished in their artistry by the holy spirit of compassionate judgment proclaiming the Rule of Jesus Christ:
(1) Become filled with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.
Also see: Voicing God’s Psalms by Calvin Seerveld
Interdisciplinary Application • Liturgical Arts • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Preparing to Pray at Symposium 2006
God says to us, Remember, I am with you always.
Our hope is in God, our ever-present help.
Let the peace of God rule in you
for which we are called to be one body (Col. 3:15)
Our God orders our place in his world.
When we dwell in his law, we live with him and he with us.
He brings us forward to new life.
He is with us; we need not be afraid.
- Litany read during worship on July 14, 2005 at the Reformed Ecumenical Council assembly in Utrecht, the Netherlands
Events • Interdisciplinary Application • World • Worshipers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink