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The Last Thirty Years: What We've Learned along the Way
Seminar at the Calvin Symposium on Worship
January 26, 2006
Host: John D. Witvliet
with Albert Aymer, Nancy Beach, Brian McLaren, Eugene Peterson, Larry Sibley, Joyce Zimmerman
Afternoon: The Next Thirty Years: Audio / Transcript
Speakers:
John Witvliet (at 0:00)
Nancy Beach (at 4:07)
Larry Sibley (at 9:34)
Albert Aymer (at 20:44)
Brian McLaren (at 50:51)
Joyce Zimmerman (at 59:40)
John Witvliet: In this last session, we turn to look towards the future. The question is: As we prepare for the next thirty years, what virtues or attitudes, theological convictions, countercultural, cross-cultural insight, resources would you lift up and recommend? That's a way in which each of our panelists can take this in a very different direction. A way to kind of crystallize the thinking and reflection that they've offered as a way of helping us wrap up our day together. Hopefully, the work that we've done in exploring these other themes, certainly not comprehensively, but can give all of us the resources to do something similar, whether it's introspectively by ourselves, or even better, with other people from our own congregations. One of the things we'd like to recommend out of today would be a simple council session, board meeting, worship committee, interested people from a congregation, informal conversation, what have you learned along the way, and what theological reflection would you give to your practices.
So now we turn to the future, and Nancy, could I put you on the spot again to start us off, and we'll head back in this direction.
Nancy Beach: If it's okay, I want to work backwards, these four questions, and I'll be as brief as I can. Just on the resource side, if you work with a lot of artists, and I use that term quite broadly, people with any kind of artistic gift, one of the greatest tools I can recommend is one that my colleague Rory Noland wrote that some of you may be familiar with. Actually, he's got two books that really get at some of the most common sin and character issues that Christian artists wrestle with. One is called The Heart of the Artist, and the other one is called Thriving as an Artist in the Church. Rory told me he really wanted to call that one Surviving as an Artist in the Church but the publisher wouldn't let him, so it's Thriving as an Artist in the Church on the positive side. Another book most of you are probably familiar with, one of my all time favorites is Window of the Soul by Ken Gire, which really gets at a lot of the different ways we communicate and receive truth. I really love that book. An interesting book from a secular writer that I don't know how current it is now, but a few years ago just really challenged me to think about creative people in particular is called The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida, and how people tend to work these days. Communities around the United States that are the most conducive to artistic and creative activities. It's a real interesting and provocative book. And I have to tell you that if you're wrestling with the values that you want to build your Sunday morning service on, no matter what methods you use, no matter what kind of audience you're communicating to, I would encourage you to go through the book that I wrote a couple of years ago with a team. It's best if you go through it with a team. It's called An Hour on Sunday, and it really just explores the ten core values that I think need to be true. I think they're timeless. I wrote it for my daughters fifty years from now if they're in a church somewhere, I would hope they would measure the effectiveness of their Sunday morning experience based on those core values.
The third question had to do with countercultural or cross-cultural insight that I might stress. I'm not an expert here at all, but I think we have a lot to learn about celebration from some other cultures and joyful expression. I've done some travel, but not a lot, but I'm usually quite sobered by the contrast and just what we could learn when it comes to other cultures when it comes to celebration. I think our people desperately need hope these days, and if they're not walking out of Sunday morning with some kind of hope, I don't think we've done our job. So anything we can do to learn from other cultures to that regard. Also the learnings of other cultures regarding the disciplines of meditation, silence, and how we can more effectively incorporate those into corporate worship. Obviously, those can be individual disciplines, but how can we, for some of us who don't come from traditions that honor meditation and silence and reflection as much, I think we have something to learn there.
The second question I've already touched on. I just think we have to be careful to stress the sovereign majesty and wisdom of our God. Also, worship is a way of life, it's not a time of music, it's not a song time. It bugs me a little bit when people say, “Now we're going to worship together.” Like it's just this one thing when we sing. I think it's much, much more inclusive than that.
Something else that is my heartbeat that I've heard here today from some of my colleagues that believers enter into worship to bring a gift, and not to be a consumer. I think that's something that we're going to have to fight for a long, long time in our culture. Not just sitting there evaluating it, more evaluating their own heart and attitude and what they're bringing to it.
And finally, what virtues and attitudes are especially critical for us as we head into the next thirty years? I can't say enough about this kind of gathering because I think one of the most important virtues, that if all of us could walk out of here with a commitment to, it would be humility and grace towards one another. I see to many Christians shooting their own and I don't understand that. You know, the kingdom of God is broad and big and diverse, and it should be, and we're all doing the best we can. I've been part of a church that's been criticized a lot for thirty years, and mostly by Christians. So I just want to say whenever I do that to another ministry it's wrong. When we make judgments about something we don't know enough about, and I just want to say that we need to believe the best about each other.
Larry Sibley: Some of these I've said before but they work in the summary also, and the things that are worth saying more than once. But virtues and attitudes, another way to put what I've been trying to communicate is to learn to think liturgically and sacramentally before we, and kind of as a context for thinking and acting instructionally and decisionally. In other words, decisions do get made and truths do get taught, but the primary things are the liturgy, the work that the people do that God does in the people as they gather in His presence, and particularly the focal practice of the sacraments, of the washing and the eating. And then out of those actions come truth and come transformation and decisions, theological convictions, the transcendence of God, which is often obscured as we've been saying, but then the move to incarnation. The capstone of the whole process of accommodation when God becomes a human person. That's a move of grace and mercy as God comes to us and then draws us up into heaven by the Spirit so that the people are in God's presence not only in this room but also somehow mysteriously brought into the heavens. When people leave the service, they should somehow know, if only in their bones, that they've been to heaven, that something has happened and the presence of Christ, the means of grace, things like that.
Cross-cultural and countercultural insights are habits of mind. The critique of technology as a cultural force, what I shared with you from Albert Borgmann, and then the appreciation of how the central things of the Word and the Table and the bath, and the prayers, are countercultural forces, practices. The way Borgmann puts that is the device syndrome of technology countered by the focal practices, the practices that engage us so fully in the action. And then an awareness of our own enculturation, how we are enculturated and without knowing it, that we are among the nations to put it in terms of one comment from this table earlier today. That is as a first move towards welcoming all the cultures to the Word and sacraments, a self-awareness of how we are already encultured, how our understanding of the Gospel is an understanding in terms of a culture.
And resources, I wonder, John, if we couldn't get our lists put on that website. Just a few things. Of course, John Calvin. His catechism for the church in Geneva was written for children. Crystal clear, simple writing whether you read it in French or English, it's clear. But the theological points he makes with much more sophistication in some of his other writing are there just as clear as can be. A simple thing like asking a child if you were baptized and hearing the Word, do you have Christ, and the child's answer as she speaks back to the teacher is, “Although I have Him in baptism and the Word, if I don't have Him in the meal, I do not have Christ whole.” A baptized person hearing a lot of reading and preaching without the meal is not receiving all of Christ. They're all appointed means, but that's put so clearly. And the form of church prayers, the liturgy. Although it's not published with it, he wrote an epistle to the reader that was attached to it when it was put out originally in French. Somehow they've become separated since and I've not found an edition, but there is a place where you can find it, but how he explains what he's about in promoting this liturgy. And then of course, The Institutes, and then The Short Treatise of the Lord's Supper. Some of those are online, you can just download them, and we'll indicate that on the list for you.
And then Marva Dawn's classic, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down. She puts her finger on this problem of human-centered worship rather than God-centered worship in a marvelous way with cultural sophistication. If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about.
Gordon Lathrop's books, Holy People, Holy Things, and Holy Ground. In one sense, saying the same thing three times, but with different focus in each case on the liturgical theological, on ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, and then on cosmology. Hughes O. Old's book, Worship: Reformed According to Scripture. The best introduction to Calvinistic worship that was published in the last fifty years. It's a basic textbook but it's not only a textbook, just great reading for anyone. Anything else by Scotty Old of course is also good, but that's especially important and foundational. And then Frank Senn's Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical. I think it's about 700 pages, but it's a history of the worship of the church. Although Frank is Lutheran, so he does especially well with that, it's comprehensive. Somewhere in your kit bag you need that historical perspective as we've been trying to give you today just so you can situate what you're doing.
And then, a set of questions. This also will be put on the web site, so you don't really need to get it all down. I'd like you to think about this. We use these in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Liturgical Institute, which is an ecumenical venture based at the Episcopal cathedral. A group of us go in teams of three from three different traditions to any congregation that will invite us to observe and reflect on the way they practice the liturgy and to give them some feedback and response and then go and offer mentoring all in the interest in making the central things strong. This is a set of over-arching questions that we give them in the process that I think could be used anywhere. Over-arching questions that all congregations serious about liturgical renewal will want to ask themselves about the gathering. Has the congregation come to recognize itself as the gathered body of Christ? Has it prepared itself to hear the Word of God? Are they ready? About the Word: Is the Word of God central and clear? Is there opportunity for receiving the Word deeply and then responding in prayer and praise in the local dialect of this community? About the meal: Is this clearly the banquet of the Lamb? The feast of the resurrection celebrating God's victory over sin and death and the work of Jesus Christ? Is the sacrament of baptism linked in a meaningful way with the Eucharist? The sending: Is the assembly sent gracefully, joyfully, and energetically into the world for service and thanksgiving as the body of Christ? The gathered body, and then the body sent and dispersed. Throughout the worship, is the center of the worship clearly strongly Jesus Christ and the Trinity revealed in word and sacrament? Do all of the liturgical acts, signs, and symbols point to the center? Are outsiders welcomed as Christ? Do insiders consider themselves beggars before God? You will find those on the web site. I think they're marvelous. I encountered them in my participation on one of the visiting teams and promptly assigned them to my students when I sent them off to observe worship as a grid through which to look at worship in another congregation.
This venture in Philadelphia by the way is funded by a grant from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. John not only knows how to raise money, he knows how to give it away. So thank you.
Albert Aymer: Thank you, Larry. Let me begin by making one disclaimer and emphasizing one acknowledgment. The disclaimer is, I'm not a professor of worship or liturgy. My terminal degree is in New Testament studies, and I'm still trying to read the New Testament. My particular interest where I did my dissertation is in the central figure of the New Testament. Every time I say this I have to smile because folk are ready to kill me, and I'm referring to Paul. I hear sort of an uneasiness among you. That is simply because, and I usually do this to provoke students, that is because Paul is responsible for the writing of more of the New Testament books than any other person, whether we like him or not. It is interesting that there is not one book in the New Testament that can be attributed to the writing of our Lord. As a matter of fact, the Gospels, I think all of you who have been to seminary by now know, were written, the earliest one was probably written thirty-something years after the resurrection. And in the Gospel, so often what we hear is the voice of the risen Christ, not always the Jesus of history. Be that as it may, I want to make that clear. I wanted to make that clear because the last question about books, I sent to John some three books or so that I recommend. Don't ask me to tell you what they are because I don't know. One of them I used years ago in a course in worship, sort of a rather thick volume that was written by a number of scholars, lots of whom were on the other side of the pond, as you may well imagine, and I still think that's one of the best books of worship I have ever read. I think John will post those on the web site, so I'm not going to waste your time to talk about that.
The other thing I needed to start off by acknowledging is that my last sharing with you, I did say I'm indebted to a person who works in my seminary, I told you, who teaches hymnology and some worship, not all the worship courses but some worship, and she's an ordained deacon in the new order of deacons in the United Methodist Church, but I don't think I said her name. I need to say her name because I want her to get the credit for everything, though the six points I gave you last time were my own formulations, but I still need to acknowledge that a considerable portion of the inspiration for coming up with these six points came from a sermon she preached at chapel. Her name is Karen a Lucas. She is a graduate of Hood. She couldn't have graduated from a nicer place. No wonder she's as erudite as she is.
And now the few things I want to share with you. You can put them in whatever order you wish. I'm not as wonderfully systematic as my dear friend Nancy, from whose side Larry has pushed me away. I don't know if you noticed what he did there. Larry, if you thought you got away with that, you are wrong. I was enjoying Nancy's company and then when I came from lunch, I came a little late and he pushed me here, but I can still look across and see Nancy.
Let me just say a few things about, you know, where we want to go. One other thing I need to say. I probably will say it if I take my time and go through what I want to say, but I want to say it up front. I think it's this morning I mentioned the 7-11s. Am I right? I didn't intend to do this pejoratively. I hope you hear me say that. I think, you call them praise songs, am I right? Praise hymns, praise songs? You know what I mean by the 7-11s. I think they have their place. All I'm hoping is that we don't throw out the richness of the hymnody we have edited in place of these praise songs that have come to mean so much to many of our brothers and sisters today. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say. Don't throw out, please, don't throw away the richness of our hymnody. I'll say more about that, I think, in just a minute.
One of the pleas I would make is, we live in a country in which a prevailing culture is entertainment. I don't know of any other country in the world that places entertainment on a higher pinnacle than we do in the United States of America. Hollywood is here. Broadway is in New York. I used to love when I lived in New Jersey to slip away every Wednesday afternoon and go and watch a matinee show on Broadway. I miss that living in North Carolina, even though we have theaters there and we sometimes bring some Broadway plays down. We are entertainment oriented, and there's a certain way in which as one who was born out of this culture and coming into this culture, where we don't have royalty per se, our royal personages are our entertainers and to some extent some of our politicians.
We are entertainment oriented. What I would plead with you is that we try to resist the temptation of making worship entertainment. We see this in the “gimmickeries”, and thank God that you folk in the Reformed Church don't use gimmickry in your worship. One person described it as the razzle-dazzle. The problem with gimmickry and razzle-dazzle is that today's novelty is tomorrow's commonplace. And what may be novel today becomes commonplace tomorrow, so you have to invent another gimmick or another razzle-dazzle. There's a lot to be said, and I've come to respect so much my brothers and sisters in the Anglican, the Lutheran, the Roman Catholic tradition that have preferred their I want to call it set liturgy, it's not set in that it doesn't have flexibilities, but they know where they're going to in their liturgy Sunday after Sunday and nobody has to sit down in a study somewhere and say, now how do I keep these people entertained? And I would say to you, I would rather encourage you as another believer in the faith, as one with you, I would strongly encourage you, try not to make, those of you who are responsible for ordering worship, try to avoid the temptation of attracting people by the spectacular, the entertaining, the razzle-dazzle, the “gimmickeries”, because they really have no depth and they don't last.
A similar concern I have is how do we order worship? In our free churches where the ordering of the worship, and by the way, if you want to see me get a little bit irate, you let someone come and tell me, “Here is the program for the service this morning.” I find that terribly offensive. What we do in the worship service on Sunday morning is not a concert, so don't give me a program. You give me an order of service, an order of worship. It's the order we're going to follow in giving God that of which God alone is worthy. And there's such a thing I learned years ago in my own Methodist tradition that there is an order in worship. By that I don't mean yes you behave yourself. That's not the kind of order I'm talking about. What element of worship logically follows another one. And it's not just putting stuff together so that this morning we're going to start off with a confession of faith and then next time we start off with something else. How do you see an ordered progression in how we approach God? I was told years ago, it was pointed out years ago, there is a pattern in Isaiah 6 that is just so wonderful. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, etc. You understand what I am saying. There is a praise and an adoration, which leads us to understand how unworthy we are to sing God's praise, so we prostrate ourselves and say, “Woe is me, for I am undone.” And God in God's graciousness stoops down and cleanses our lips. There is an order. Again, coming back to the whole biblical perfection and worship: How do we worship? I think we need to give attention in our free churches where the ordering of service remains with the preacher, with the pastor leader. How do we order that in a way in which we move people along in the kind of moods that lead us, and we come to the proclamation of the Word? I like the Zion Church after the proclamation of the Word, we give people a chance to respond, whatever that response is going to be, you give them a chance to respond. I would rather want to encourage that.
The third thing I would say, I am all for contemporizing worship. We have to make worship contemporary. That is, we are worshiping now. But not contemporizing it to the extent that we lose the historical underpinnings and the historical connectedness. How do we remain historically connected while at the same time we remain contemporarily relevant? I would, pastors, fellow pastors, because I'm a pastor too, in my job, I see my position as that of a pastor, we have our work cut out for us. Pulling those two things together is usually no easy task, but yet it's our task. I think that's the task to which God calls us as pastor-leaders. And constantly, we need to be applying ourselves and asking ourselves, are we accomplishing this? What do we need to do to make this more effective?
A fourth thing or fifth thing, I've lost count now, that I hope we don't lose especially in our free churches, is letting someone else sing for us. I had the privilege of pastoring for a short while and leading a United Methodist Church in New Jersey, a large congregation. Large, with lots of endowed money and a choir with lots of paid personnel. It prided itself in its music. And the temptation there was on Sunday mornings to have the choir sing a million anthems and the congregation just sit down and enjoy the concert. You know what I found so thrilling this morning? It reminded me of my young days growing up at home, is the amount of times the congregation sang in the worship services for me. It doesn't prevent a choir from singing a selection, but there's something about blending our voices together saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.” You know how good it is to stand up in a congregation and your voice? In fact, the young lady who was beside me, and a couple of hymns started going in a descant. I have already one eye that is inclined to weep. Every now and again you see me pulling at this eye because I had something called Bell's palsy. There's a remnant of it which makes the right side a little weak, so the right lid doesn't lubricate the eye fast enough. So when I want people to think I'm so empathetic with their concerns…Oh, I shouldn't tell you that. Gosh, you folk were thinking I was crying. It was just so good. She just jumped off into a descant standing beside me this morning. And I just stopped singing and listened to it all and just felt so lifted and so blessed. The hymnody of our church, you know. The congregational singing, it is so important, so very important it seems to me.
Well, let me say a few other things that I wanted to say and you're going to have to blame John for this because he told me to get it to you somehow. What can I lift up? I hope I'm lifting up these other things. Let me say three or so of the things, or four or so of the things. I think I've only said two so far. Well, who's counting?
One of the burning concerns I have, and you can understand after I told you my academic background and my whole nurturing, but one of my concerns I have is when I go to worship any place and we spend time with the choir singing, and we spend time with congregational singing, we spend time doing lots of other things, the thing we don't spend much time doing is reading the Scriptures. It has become for me a very sad occasion that I go to church and all that may be read from the Scripture in that service that morning may be a verse or two or three from some of the writings of the Bible. Yet we seem to forget that God also speaks to us through the read word. If that word is read well, if the people who are reading the word understand that word, sometimes that's where God's Word comes to many of the hearers, many of the congregants. And I think, and I may be an old bogey and you have to forgive me because I'm old. The other day I went and took my daughter and son-in-law to a restaurant, they came to visit me in Salisbury, and as I got up to pay the bill, the clerk at counter and said, “One senior citizen?” And I said, “Oh yes, very senior.” You have to forgive me, but you see, there was a time and I grew up this way, when in every service of worship, at least two—we called them lessons—two lessons were read. One from the Hebrew Bible, and one from the New Testament. And on those Sundays we had communion, which was every first Sunday in the month, two lessons were read, one from the epistle, one from the Gospel. When I pastored a church, I used to read three lessons, and in this order. One from the Hebrew Bible, one from the epistle, and one from the Gospel. Doesn't matter where I'm preaching from. Allow God to speak to the congregants through the Word of Scripture. I don't know about you. I grew up in a tradition, and the Methodist tradition which says we believe the Scripture contains all things sufficient for our congregation. And if we believe that, it seems to me we ought to be reading that in our public worship and really reading that in a way in which people can hear God speak to us. I kind of like these days when people read the Scriptures, they say, “The Word of the Lord.” It never used to be said when I was growing up, they'd say, “Now endeth…”. I hate when people say, “Now endeth the reading of Scripture.” You know those rubrics we do? Now endeth the reading of Scripture. And I want to stand up and say, “And God forbid!”
One of my big concerns, this may be the next to final thing. Oh, the final thing is coming. But one of my big concerns in our worship today, especially in our free churches, I have to speak about our free churches in this regard, is the recapturing of the value of liturgy to the neglect of the importance of biblical prophetic preaching. I don't know if you understand what I mean. I think somebody spoke about church architecture this morning. I don't know a lot about church architecture, but the one thing I know is, in many of our free churches, like the Presbyterian Church and the Methodist Church, we never had a divided chancel because in Methodism, Presbyterianism, and free churches, we don't have an altar. We have a communion table. When we celebrate the sacrament, we're not reenacting an act of sacrifice. This is a theological thing. Are we allowed to go theological here? Is this okay? What we had in our free churches was a communion table that represented the Upper Room, and a pulpit. What was also interesting in the arrangement was the pulpit was on one side, and the communion table somewhere at the back. The pulpit and the communion table were in the center, symbolizing for us in the free churches the centrality of the Word and the sacrament. Now, that was just symbolizing it. We don't really have to put them there to symbolize it, but we need to reemphasize it. What I find fascinating in recent years when I go to Roman Catholic worship service, is that the priest no longer goes up to the altar with his back to the people. That used to happen. Am I right, Joyce? You go to a Roman Catholic church today and the priest is saying Mass, the table is down, he's standing behind the table, he's facing the people, and yet in some of our Protestant churches, we have the table back there. It's interesting how we've reversed that. And the concern I have is, we can't afford to give up the place of biblical prophetic preaching.
Well, what do I mean by that? Biblical? Prophetic? Think about the prophets. A lonely, dangerous business. They were not messengers of comfort. They were people to dared to say to kings and to
people, ko amar adonai, “Thus saith the Lord.” And what they said was usually words of judgment. You know, there's so much taking place in our country. In our country today, and in our world today, and I go to church Sunday after Sunday and I'm not hearing a prophetic word about any of it. You know why? Because we're too chicken to say, ko amar adonai. Because we're afraid if we say that, some congregants may say, we're being politically partisan. And in that way, in our worship, we're losing—I remember in my culture growing up, the preacher would get up and preach a sermon that challenged the core of the government's policy. Prophetic preaching, a prophetic word. Not pussyfooting around the situation. Calling people to justice. Calling people to mercy. Calling a nation to responsibility to how it uses its resources and how it spends the lives of its young people. We don't do that anymore. We pussyfoot around. Hide ourselves behind the flag. We cower by those who say, if you say anything contrary to the war, you're not supporting our troops. Sometimes you support people best by calling a word of judgment on those who send them forth. You don't hear me. Some of you may not speak to me after this, but what can I say? That's the role of the prophet. And we can't afford to lose that. If our worship is going to be biblically centered, we've got to remember that our role as pastors, those of you that are pastors, is a prophetic role. God didn't call you to a life of comfort and ease. Oh this is so funny, this is ever so funny. I learned that a long time ago.
Now, finally. That would have to come from a Drew graduate. After all the good things I said about him this morning, what liberty he takes. Wesley used to encourage the early Methodists to attend regularly on the means of grace. And one of the principle means of grace is the corporate worship of the believers. For people who think they can be Christians by staying at home and just reading their Bibles and saying their prayers, or watching the service on television, they're so mistaken. The means of grace. It's as if we worship God. I don't know about you. This is a story, and I love this story. When I was in Barbados, I worked in Barbados some years. And there was an old lady, she must've been in her eighties. She came to church every Sunday morning. Every Sunday morning her grandson drove his car, picked up his grandmother, brought her to church, and every Sunday morning when the service was finished, he came back for his grandmother, took her home. And one Sunday morning on his way home he said, “Grandma, what did the reverend preach about this morning?” Straight from church. And she said, “To tell you the truth, my son, I don't remember what he preached about.” And he laughed and he said, “Grandma, why do you go to church if you can't remember what the reverend preached about?” And she said, and she was telling me this, she said, “Son, it's like this. If you take an old leaky bucket to the well to fetch water, and you lower it down in the well and it fills up with water, and then you pull it up out the well, you know, by the time you get it up to the top of the well, all the water runs out. But you know, son, every time you bring it up, it's a little cleaner than when it went down.” Wesley reminded us all that corporate worship is a means of grace, and I know that means of grace. My week is not the same if I don't go to church, because God knows I can't live without that means of grace. What a wonderful awesome responsibility God has entrusted to us.
Brian McLaren: I imagine that Joyce and I feel the same. That's a good place to stop. Good words. I'll offer just a couple of things, first by way of resources. I wrote an article called, “An Open Letter to Songwriters” that some of you might find helpful. It's at my web site, www.anewkindofchristian.com. Another resource I would recommend for all of us involved with songs and music is just to read good poetry to remind us what language can do. This last year I got Garrison Keillor's book, Good Poems and just read a poem every night. It was a great discipline, just to remember what good poetry can do. I'll let Joyce mention this, but I was complaining earlier about the lack of songs relating to justice, and I shouldn't have been surprised that with the great Catholic social teaching they would have some good songs in this regard, so maybe Joyce will mention that resource. It's called RitualSongs and it's published by GIA and it might even be available here. She said there are some great songs there under the category of social concerns.
A couple of countercultural things. One of the categories was countercultural. I'll just mention four very quickly. I hope that counterculturally, we can help people slow down. I believe Nancy mentioned this earlier. Everybody is in such a hurry, and for us to help people slow down and experience contemplation, is a tremendously important thing. I often think it would be good for us to spend a lot of time thinking about the sixty or seventy-five or however many minutes we have of public worship as an exercise in group spiritual formation of centering on God, so that to me is a helpful thing.
Secondly, I think it would be very countercultural to find ways to involve children and youth in public worship in greater ways than we have. You know, human beings sexually mature at the age of 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and it used to be that people got married around that time through most of history. We've created this extended adolescence now that I was just talking to a human development person and they said now they say that adolescence goes to the age of thirty, and people are acting like that more and more. But I wonder what would happen if the Church was the place that expected you to grow up faster than anyplace else, as in Judaism with a bar mitzvah, by the time you were twelve or thirteen, we're inviting you to participate as an adult member of the congregation, we're inviting you to read the Scriptures, we're inviting you to be involved in public worship. I wonder if that would be a countercultural thing for us to do that would help our churches to be more intergenerational and I think might help solve a number of other problems too, but I just think it would be healthy.
Third countercultural thing would be to find ways to increase the amount of storytelling that happens. Larry was speaking, I think, very powerfully about this before. How can we help our churches make room for storytelling? This is something a lot of the old Baptist churches and Pentecostal churches know a lot about, about the testimony meaning, but letting people tell their stories about what God has done in their lives I think is an important thing.
And one other countercultural thing, is for us to find ways to reinvigorate and add seriously to the confession of sin. It seems to me it's a stunning thing we do when as a group we admit we're sinners. This hit me a few months ago because I live right near Washington, D.C., and a man came to faith at our church a little over two years ago. He's a high-level person in government who lived just a few doors from our church, and it turns out he had an addiction to child pornography on the Internet, and on a Friday afternoon the FBI showed up at his house and confiscated all of his computers, and on Saturday morning he was going to commit suicide. We were the nearest church and he had no church connection and so they called me, and I'll just never forget sitting with this man as he just wept and his entire life was crumbled and he was facing the very high possibility of going to jail. Over the coming months, they began attending church and they opened their hearts to Christ and they grew in faith, and there's a confession of sin. I don't know where we got it, some of you may use this, but it's a confession of sin that has a line in it like this: “We confess to you our sins that are too painful for us to name and too heavy for us to bear.” And I happen to be just sitting a few seats away from this man and he said those words, this was some months after the initial thing came to light and as he said those words, he just melted. It was an incredibly redemptive moment, because in that way in the company of the church, he got to say the truth in a way. He got to say the truth in public. When you think of all our arrogance, and with Nancy's very eloquent tears a few minutes ago about our criticism and judgment of one another, the fact that we say a confession of sin and we admit that we're all miserable sinners together, if we actually could find a way to mean that, it would shut us up when we judge one another. I think that could be very, very powerful but we so often say a confession as if it's just a routine part of a mindless recitation.
And I'll just throw out a couple of attitudes and virtues that I think would be great for us. They're countercultural as well, but one is to continue something we've learned in the last thirty years, and that is the importance of welcoming the seeker and the skeptic. This, of course, all of us are grateful to Willow Creek and the example they set for us. In 2000, I read an article that said that 51% of churches claim to be seeker sensitive. Now, I'm sure they're lying. I'm sure that's not true, but the fact that 51% at least think it's something they ought to be is a pretty miraculous thing, because many of us have not understood the importance of welcoming the seeker and making room for the skeptic and I hope that's something we'll continue in the next thirty years. Related to that, it requires us to have honesty in our churches about pain and about doubt and about struggle. I think in the last thirty years we've learned a lot about celebration, but one of the over-compensations we have for celebration is that we've forgotten how to have lament. There's a song a lady in our church wrote that says, it's based on those words from Matthew 11, and one verse of the song says, “If you come to me, all you who are weary I will give you rest. If you trust in me, I will be there. If you come to me, there's always love to surround you.” That's one verse. The next verse changes one word. It says, “If you doubt in me, I'll still be there.” And whenever people sing that and they get to say the word “doubt” in church, you can just feel something rise up in them and say, “Oh thank God I can be honest about my doubts.” We have the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. We have the book of Job in the Bible. We've got an awful lot of pain in the Bible and the honesty about pain, we desperately need. I hope that's something we can make progress in over the next thirty years without over-compensating and becoming all depressing.
A third thing I hope in terms of attitudes and virtues is, as we've already said, that we could sort of bring back that beautiful balance from the prophet Micah that justice, mercy, and humility will be virtues that we celebrate more in our services, and that we'll see God as a God of justice and mercy and we'll celebrate those things and we'll do it with humility.
And finally, really what we've been able to, I hope, experience and share today that in the next thirty years, I hope there will be increased conversation across denominations and confessions about what worship is. I think we'll learn so much as we continue conversing and sharing and learning from one another. That's a value that all of us appreciate about being part of this today.
Joyce Zimmerman: If you turn to page 17, please. I've outlined there, kind of, my final remarks. You can read them, I'm not going to go through them. I would want to point out that on the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship website, I have a brief article on silence and one on participation, kind of a recap of the words I spoke earlier, so you might want to look at that. I've already talked to John and Nathan that I will put my Paschal Mystery material in an article up there, so those will be some resources for you.
A couple of other resources I would like to mention. If you don't know the documents of Vatican II, even though they are Roman Catholic internal documents, they're very public documents. I think all of them make good reading, certainly the Constitution on the Church, as well as the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, and I might turn your attention to several others, the Decree on Ecumenism, the Decree on the Laity. There are just a number of things, and the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. There's a great deal of reading, even though it was written a good number of years ago, I think it's quite applicable today.
I do a resource annually with a team. I'm smart enough to know that I'm not smart enough to do this every year. But I put out this resource called “Living Liturgy” annually published by Liturgical Press. I got a team and myself as liturgist, my colleague at my institute, Sister Kathy Harmon, as liturgical musician, Father Tom Leclerc as a Scripture scholar, and Father Tom Greisen as a spiritual director. We're all four very strong personalities. We have team meetings to write this book, and it's a clash of interests, I might say. And out of that comes this resource. Those of you who are in lectionary-based liturgies will find this very helpful. I think those of you who are not lectionary-based, John's got this year's if you want to take a look at it.
I also am a founding editor of Liturgical Ministry, also published now by Liturgical Press. It's a quarterly thematic periodical that includes both scholarly and pastoral articles. You can find this information on the publication button on my web site on your worksheets here, or else go to www.litpress.org. The information is there. You might want to take a look at that.
For those of you working with parish liturgy committees and are interested in the nuts and bolts of running a parish liturgy program, I have this binder which has been updated this year, added about thirty pages. I'll leave this one also with John, so it will be in the resource center here, but you might want to take a look at that.
Thank you very much.
John Witvliet: Please join me in thanking our panel for all their wisdom and contributions and insights today.
As we've gone through this last session, I've been thinking about how the Lord's Prayer gathers up the themes of this day. We may not say this now with perfect unity, but even our attempt to say it together will be a symbol of our unity in Jesus Christ, and so may I please ask you to stand, and may we pray together to gather up our day.