Resources
Vital Worship
Feature Stories ... for inspiration, learning and group discussion
Supplement to Worship in New Churches: Developing a faith vocabulary
Interview with Bruce Gritter
. Listen to an audio clip(mp3) of this interview
Bruce Gritter is pastor at The River Community Church in Edmonton, Alberta. In 2004, The River received a Worship Renewal Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship for a project on Vertical Habits. Gritter spoke with CICW's Nathan Bierma at the 2005 Grants Colloquium at Calvin College.
What is a Vertical Habit?
A Vertical Habit is a discipline, a practice that you enter into that builds your relationship with God and builds a spiritual vocabulary with God. But it doesn't just mean your own personal relationship with God. We're also saying we want to build communal habits and family habits and small group habits. So we're hoping to make Vertical Habits a name in our church for spiritual disciplines that build a deep and abiding relationship with God.
How did you come up with this idea for your series?
At the COLAM conference in Denver, John Witvliet gave a talk about habits that we need to learn to speak to each other in relationships, like, "I love you," "I'm sorry." If I'm going to have a good relationship with my wife, I need to learn how to say those kind of things. I started playing with the idea of habits, thinking that there was a message there. How does the idea of habits help us build a relationship with God? How do I learn how to say "I love you" to God? How do I learn to say "I'm sorry" to God?
I played with the idea of "vertical" and came up with "vertical habits." I thought it was kind of a catchy phrase. Things just snowballed from there and we started generating ideas about how we could do this series. We asked, what if instead of just having a Sunday morning message on vertical habits, we created a whole Bible study for use at home that would connect to what we did on Sunday morning, and would reinforce the habit that we were trying to teach on Sunday morning in the home around the family dinner table?
We tend to think of habits as horizontal, practiced on the ground, so we need to learn to connect the words "vertical" and "habits." Do they belong together naturally to you?
They do. If you want to build a healthy relationship with God, you have to learn those practices. The ancient term for it is spiritual discipline, including things like prayer and fasting. But I think a lot of people, when they hear the words "spiritual discipline," they get scared off a little bit, and think that's just for people in monasteries or something. But you can also talk about a basic habit. You get in the habit of jogging, or you get in the habit of basic hygiene, brushing your teeth and combing your hair. In the same way, you can develop communication habits that really will help you build a good quality relationship with God.
What are some examples of these "communication habits"?
It's the idea of learning to say certain words to God. Every fully dimensional relationship is going to have a certain vocabulary. If I'm going to have a relationship with my wife, for example, I better learn to say "I'm sorry" once in a while, because I'm going to mess up. I better learn to say "Thank you" if there is going to be a polite interaction between us. I better learn to say "How can I help? Use me - do you need me to help with the dishes?" That's the nature of the relationships.
The same thing is true with God. We have to learn to say to God, "God, I love you." For some of us, that's kind of difficult. How do I say, "I love you" to God? Especially for us, because we were doing this in a seeker context. A lot of these people don't have this kind of vocabulary, a way of talking to God. So the project was all designed to help them develop that. We started at square one to become accessible for people at whatever level of spirituality to take their first steps. And for good long-time Christians in our church, it deepened their relationship with God.
Take one of the eight Habits, and take us through a service and the following week. How do you bring this idea out in people's lives during the week?
The second one in the series, for example, was saying "I'm sorry" and learning to confess to God. The ancient word is confession, but for a lot of un-churched people, their first question is, "Why do I need to confess, what's that all about? Why do I need to say 'I'm sorry'?" And so you have to help them understand the whole context of what it means to be sinful.
And so one of the things we did that week was use C.S. Lewis' story in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, of Eustace, who gets transformed into this dragon, and realizes over time that he wants to shed this skin and he doesn't want to be this way anymore. It was a helpful image of what it means to be locked into a certain lifestyle and a certain sinful pattern. There's this wonderful imagery when Eustace starts to shed his skin and he doesn't have to do it just once, but he has to do it a number of times, and in fact it turns out he can't even do it himself, he needs Aslan's help to do it. We used that as a very strong image to help people understand that as much as you want to try to change yourself, typically what you're doing is just peeling back the layers of an onion. You're not really getting at the heart of the problem, and you need Jesus to really help you begin to change.
At the end of the service, we had people come forward and do a very simple hand-washing, with people leading them through it. We would say, for example, "In the same way that I'm washing your hands, God is washing you. God has said that when God washes you, He makes you white as snow." And then we had a chance to lay hands on them and bless them. It was very emotional for people, something that simple but very moving, especially when it was hooked up to a strong image and a strong understanding of what confession is all about.
Then that week, my family did the devotions at the table that were written by Karen [Wilk]. Karen wrote this very brilliantly; she talked about having a dead mouse in your pocket, and that's another strong image, with the idea that it smells in time. It's not like you want to put deodorant on. What you need to do is get rid of it. There's something that you need to lose to make you smell better or make your life go better, so to speak, and so the kids really related to that. The idea is, around the supper table, you want to get families talking about those sort of things. If we can just get a family that's fairly new to Christianity, and even an established church family, if we can take one meal per week and actually talk about, what does it mean to confess? What does it mean to build this habit with God? How do we need to build this ongoing practice of saying "I'm sorry" to God? That's tremendous.
How do you balance this big picture of developing spiritual habits with all the little details of keeping a church and ministry going?
The challenge is to really make sure that everybody does keep their eyes on the big picture of what we're trying to accomplish so that every level, whether it's in music, where it's in AV, whether it's in other areas of ministry, you're all pulling on the same oar, and you're reinforcing the message that you want to send.
The area where a lot of churches make mistakes, I think, is that they're trying to communicate too much. The average person sitting in a pew, especially if they're fairly new to the church, they're not going to take in a pile of information. You have to give them a very small amount of information and say, we want you to come to church, we want you to experience Vertical Habits, and we're going to do this at home. And that's probably as much as you can hope to communicate, and yet that's success.
So the challenge is, don't over-communicate, make sure you're very clear, and everyone's doing that and communicating the same thing, whether it's through children's ministry, whether it's through youth ministry, whether it's through how we do announcements in church, we're all saying the same thing.
If there's one thing we could've done better, I think we could've had one of the families that was doing Vertical Habits talk and do a sort of interview with them during the series, and ask them, "How's this going?" If I were to do that again, I would do that just to reinforce again for people who weren't jumping into Vertical Habits, "Wow, you gotta do this. This is a great thing." Because, remember, habits are not formed or broken very easily. So you're trying to get people, to form a habit in people, you've got to keep at it, keep at it. But if it can be formed, if you can get families into the habit of meeting once a week for, you know, a little roundtable Bible study family discussion, that can bear a lot of good fruit down the road.
Back to New Churches story
Back to Worshiping Communities
Worship as Covenantal Speech
Sample habits in a good relationship and their analogues in worship
John Witvliet
• Love You. // Adoration
• Sorry. // Confession
• Why? // Lament
• I'm listening. // Prayer for Illumination
• Help. // Supplication
• Thank You. // Gratitude
• What Can I Do? // Service
• Bless You. // Praise/Benediction