Worship Weblog
Friday, April 28, 2006
Maps of U.S. Religious Membership
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Richard Lischer on the Christian memoir
Many of the sessions I attended at the FFW this year addressed the topic of memoir—even when they weren’t billed as such. Some of this was fallout from the Jim Frey scandal of earlier this year. Even sessions not specifically on memoir talked here and there about how to write truthfully and Gary Schmidt’s talk even gave me some fodder for my dissertation (which is on preaching and virtue, for those of you who’ve forgotten).
But it was Richard Lischer’s session on memoir that really placed the genre squarely within this particular writing conference: “There is something about the Judeo-Christian tradition that necessitates the telling of lives.” Augustine, Lischer said, deconstructed the traditional life. His was the first biography addressed to God and he viewed all of life as liturgical action; as an act of worship to God.
Why do Christians tell our lives? Lischer had seven thoughts on this.
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Debunking ‘Da Vinci’
From Westminster Theological Seminary:
The truth about Da Vinci On Good Friday, Westminster launched www.thetruthaboutdavinci.com, a response website to the best-selling novel by Dan Brown and forthcoming movie The Da Vinci Code. “We have been struck by the great number of people whose faith has been shaken by the mixture of fact and fiction portrayed in this tale,” says Dr. William Edgar, professor of apologetics and faculty coordinator of the project. “We want to help them as they confront this phenomenon. While a number of ‘rebuttal sites’ exist, ours is meant to combine responses to distorted facts with our understanding of the spiritual and presuppositional issues that inform them.”
Among the resources provided on the website are articles, audio, videos, and book recommendations that set the record straight and commend the historic Christian faith. Additional features will be added soon.
More information about the purpose of the project is available at www.wts.edu.
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Bookshelf: ‘Augustine and Postmodernism’
Caputo, John D., et al., ed. Augustine and Postmodernism: Confession and Circumfession (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) (Indiana U Press, 2005). [P-A-toc]
Situated at a point still very early in the formation of the tradition of metaphysical theology and more than a millennium before the formation of modernist systems of onto-theologic, Augustine’s search for God is at once philosophical and scriptural, Neoplatonic and personal, metaphysical and anchored deeply in the dynamics of pre-philosophical experience. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pages of the Confessions, which are astir with the passion of his search for God, or of God’s search for him, so that his confessions are the records, the “acts” (acta), more of God’s doings than his. It is little wonder that it is the Confessions that have drawn the attention of Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard. The enduring timeliness of Augustine is in no small part a function of his passionate phenomenology avant la lettre of the temporality of the heart’s restless love of God. Intro
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Bookshelf: ‘The ‘Empty’ Church Revisited’
Gill, Robin. The ‘Empty’ Church Revisited (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral, and Empirical Theology) (Ashgate, 2nd ed., 2003). [P-A-toc]
Where do empty churches come from? Or, perhaps more accurately, when did British churches and chapels start to appear more empty than full, and why did this happen? I am going to struggle with these seemingly naïve questions throughout this book. I have deliberately chosen the empty church as a focus, rather than some broad concept of church decline or (worse still) religious decline. There is an obvious physicality about the empty church that avoids the usual wrangles about what does or does not constitute `religion’ and whether largely invisible features of Christianity still permeate British society. I do not intend to decry the latter. Rather, I believe that too little scholarly attention has been paid to churches in all their religious physicality. In contrast to an immense literature on the architecture of churches, and a growing literature on church furnishings, it is a rare book that sets out to study the social history of church buildings as places of worship. Intro ...
It is time to take stock. This is a book about the empty church, and it is also a book about some deeply ingrained myths. At the outset I listed ten widely held propositions that seem to explain why British churches are now empty However, given the welter of data presented in the last three chapters, these propositions now seem highly questionable. Their mythological status should be apparent to all. The first proposition held that before the First World War a majority of churches in Britain were full. ... p.135
Related Book:
Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (Blackwell, 1994). [P-A-G-toc]
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Festival of FW: Don Miller
Mary Hulst‘s introduction of Don Miller at Festival, and Kent Hendricks‘ partial transcript.
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Friday, April 21, 2006
Festival of FW ‘06: Michael Card on “Worship in the Wilderness”
This morning Michael Card gave an impassioned presentation on the lost language of lament in worship, based on his book A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament.
Lament comprises the largest number of Psalms—"the worship book of the Bible"—Card pointed out. And yet, too often our worship has the spirit of “a picnic on a green lawn.”
The presence of lament in the Psalms is uplifting, Card said. “I struggle with disappointments, anger, and frustrations. When I read the Psalms, I see that that’s what God wants me to give [in worship],” Card said. Psalm 51 calls for a broken, contrite spirit.
“This is another way of looking at worship that we don’t have in American Christianity, that is so thoroughly biblical,” Card said.
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Festival of Faith and Writing ‘06: Luci Shaw
Yesterday poet Luci Shaw gave the opening keynote address at the Festival of Faith and Writing here at Calvin. She spoke of the importance of beauty.
“Beauty was one of the Platonic ideals,” along with truth and goodness, Shaw pointed out. C.S. Lewis referred to beauty as “patches of God-light” that shine into our lives.
But today, the church is stronger on doctrine and ethics than on thinking about and valuing beauty, Shaw said. “Sometimes, the pursuit of beauty is seen as a seduction” in the church. (And beauty can be, she added.) But we need to recover our language for beauty and our capacity for wonder.
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Thursday, April 20, 2006
Worship and The Emmaus Road
Speaking of worship that gains rather than loses momentum after Easter, the latest featured resource from CICW is a section on The Emmaus Road. It includes a special Emmaus theme issue of Christianity and the Arts and a sermon by John Witvliet on Luke 24.
Arguably no narrative in all of Scripture is as rich in imaginative possibilities for its use in worship—and also for helping us reconsider the significance of worship—than the Emmaus road narrative in Luke 24. Here a despairing lament turns into Easter joy. Here those who thought they had died with Christ realize they can also rise with Christ. Here we sense the power of Scripture to reframe our understanding of reality. Here we sense how eating and drinking with the risen Christ can reveal what is ultimately true and right. This section explores how this narrative shapes our worship and our hope in the risen Christ. continued...
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What letdown? Worship after Easter
This week in staff meeting we prayed for all the worship leaders who poured their heart and soul into worship during Lent, Holy Week, and Easter Sunday, and may enter the Eastertide season with weariness. We pray for their strength and focus as they prepare for vibrant and meaningful worship in the wake of Easter.
It’s true that Easter is seen by some as the peak or climax of the liturgical year, and in some ways it is. And yet the sustained celebration of Christ’s victory, and the anticipation of commemorating Christ’ ascension and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, gives us cause for prayer, song, proclamation and praise that is as fervent as ever.
This comes through in “Alleluia! Jesus Is Risen” from Sing! A New Creation, which we sang to start our staff meeting this week, and with whose words we led our latest web highlighter:
Walking the way,
Christ in the center
telling the story to open our eyes;
breaking our bread,
giving us glory:
Jesus our blessing, our constant surprise.Jesus is risen and we shall arise:
Give God the glory! Alleluia!
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Thursday, April 13, 2006
Holy Week Worship at Unity Christian High School
From Betty Grit:
It was 8:00 on Wednesday morning and there was not an empty parking place nearby. Inside Unity Christian High School in Hudsonville, Michigan, students and teachers were in classrooms writing papers, talking, listening, or working at computers. In the gym seven students and two teachers were preparing for chapel. The sounds of cellos, flute, violin and voices prepared to lead students in worship.
Soon more than nine hundred students and faculty came into the gymnasium, filling the folding chairs that were set in rows for worship. The strains of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” played on cellos by two young women quieted the talking and prepared our hearts. Words from Isaiah and Luke along with the joyful notes of a flute playing “Joy to the World” and a violin playing “Silent Night” reminded us of Christ’s coming to earth. A few students smiled and whispered to each other. This isn’t Christmas!
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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Classic Reflections on Holy Week
Reflections
Holy Week
Quotations to stir heart and mind.
Compiled by Richard A. Kauffman
JESUS WENT TO JERUSALEM to announce the Good News to the people of that city. And Jesus knew that he was going to put a choice before them: Will you be my disciple, or will you be my executioner? There is no middle ground here. Jesus went to Jerusalem to put people in a situation where they had to say yes or no. That is the great drama of Jesus’ passion: He had to wait upon how people were going to respond.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, “A Spirituality of Waiting,” The Weavings ReaderI’D ALWAYS KNOWN, in one place in my throat, how Jesus must have cried in the garden—crying not to die, because there was no fear of death, and not to leave his friends, because he walked alone, and not to suffer, because the blood and bruises and thorns were part of his perfection—but crying because he could not find his Father’s face, because when he would suffer all that he could bear, the pain of every person, living and dead, in that dark moment, there was really nobody there.
Paul Shepherd, More Like Not Running Away: A NovelHE DIED, but he vanquished death; in himself, he put an end to what we feared; he took it upon himself, and he vanquished it; as a mighty hunter, he captured and slew the lion.
Where is death? Seek it in Christ, for it exists no longer; but it did exist, and now it is dead. O life, O death of death! Be of good heart; it will die in us also. What has taken place in our head will take place in his members; death will die in us also. But when? At the end of the world, at the resurrection of the dead in which we believe and concerning which we do not doubt.
Augustine, Sermon 233THERE IS WONDERFUL POWER in the Cross of Christ. It has power to wake the dullest conscience and melt the hardest heart, to cleanse the unclean, to reconcile him who is afar off and restore him to fellowship with God, to redeem the prisoner from his bondage and lift the pauper from the dunghill, to break down the barriers which divide [people] from one another, to transform our wayward characters into the image of Christ and finally make us fit to stand in white robes before the throne of God.
John Stott, The Preacher’s Portrait...
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Tuesday, April 04, 2006
‘Image’ special issue on ‘The Matter of Devotion’
CICW was delighted to co-sponsor a conference with the journal Image last fall entitled ”The Matter of Devotion: Art, Liturgy, and the Stuff of Worship.” A series of presentations from that conference have just been published in the current issue of Image (#49). The essays are not available online, but this issue can be purchased from Image‘s website.
The opening editorial statement by Image editor Gregory Wolfe can be read online. Wolfe writes, “The artist’s calling is not in the wind, earthquake, and fire of human activity, but in the still, small voice that speaks through our human experience. That voice may be quiet, but it is insistent, and while it places burdens upon us, it also liberates.”
Related Article from CICW:
Visual Arts in Worship: From either/or to both/and
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CH Newsletter on Augustine’s legacy
In an article for Christian History Newsletter written to recommend Phillip Cary’s audio lecture series on Augustine, CH’s Chris Armstrong writes:
For Augustine is even more to the modern West than its seminal theologian. Cary shows us how, whether we are Christian or not, Westerners’ very understanding of ourselves as human beings comes directly from Augustine. (For the full-blown, scholarly version of this argument, read Cary’s 2003 book, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist.) When we think of ourselves as having deep, inner psychological depths, we are speaking Augustine-ese. And there is much more than this to our Augustine-ness. Cary illuminates the ways in which our understandings of such central matters as God’s grace, the nature of evil and sin, and the relationship between religion and happiness have all been deeply formed by this seminal philosopher-saint.
As this list implies, the “saint” (or more accurately, “Church Father") side of Augustine’s person and legacy is also carefully and artfully presented in this short course. Even as Cary clears pathways for us through some of the deeper thickets of the prolific North African’s philosophical thought, he never lets us lose sight of Augustine’s role as Church Father—interpreter of the Bible and teacher of Christian doctrine. We get to meet Augustine as conservator and explicator of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, elaborator of a distinctly new Christian understanding of love, and progenitor of understandings of church, sacraments, and church-state relations that have persisted as pillars of Western Christian thought until today.
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