Worship Weblog
Thursday, January 26, 2006
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
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