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FARMStrong on Vacation till Tuesday, 7.1.08
posted by John David Walt | at 6/26/2008 05:30:00 AM
| 1 comments
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Best Worship Orients us inside Scripture's Story
In order to be faithful to the biblical story in our corporate worship life, I find it helpful to take more of a Google Earth approach. There's nothing like surfing the globe and seeing the whole North American continent and then zooming down, down, down onto my good old home town of Dumas, Arkansas.
Much of the worship, not to mention the discipleship and Bible study I've experienced has tended to take more of a "pixel" approach, beginning with a verse of Scripture or a particular story or chapter or book. It's a quite pragmatic approach and somewhat easy to extract some helpful meaning or relevant application and then build a nice theme around it. However, when you start on the ground with a tiny pixel it's hard to have a good sense of where you are. The problem with this approach is it tends to situate the biblical text inside of some other story-- like the story of Western progress and prosperity, or the story of self actualization. In other words, it's quite easy to trade in the big story for the pressing needs of some other story, most notably our own, or our church's. The best worship reorients us week after week after week inside of the big true Story of the Triune God and the World.
But before we get to actual worship design and how this works, we must become students of the Story. The Story itself must become the OSX (operating system) of our mind. We must learn to think in its frameworks and categories, dream in its imagery, pray in its metaphor, and speak in its linguistic codes (not to be confused with "Christian-ese")
This is one of the things I like about Goheen and Bartholomew's book, "The Drama of Scripture: Finding our Place in the Biblical Story." Borrowing from N.T. Wright's idea of the biblical story as a five act play, the book improvises and enhances the approach. Here is the table of contents for the book.
Prologue: The Bible as a Grand Story
Act 2 Rebellion in the Kingdom: Fall
Act 3 The King Chooses Israel: Redemption Initiated
Scene 1 A People for the King
Scene 2 A Land for His People
Interlude A Kingdom Story Waiting for an Ending: The Intertestamental Period
Act 4 The Coming of the King: Redemption Accomplished
Act 5 Spreading the News of the King: The Mission of the Church
Scene 1 From Jerusalem to Rome
Scene 2 And into All the World
Act 6 The Return of the King: Redemption Completed
Labels: story
posted by John David Walt | at 6/24/2008 08:47:00 PM | 4 comments
Monday, June 23, 2008
This morning I got a good tip from Drew about an article over at The Ooze about worship. After reading the article, I find it incisive on a number of points despite the "ranting" tone of the writing. Here are a couple of excerpts that capture for me the main idea.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Learning the Story of Scripture
As you may have picked up, three primary ideas capture my theology of Christian Worship: Story, Trinity, and World. People regularly ask me about helpful resources to further study these ideas. When it comes to the Story, the obvious resource is the Bible. However, when we have been reading the Bible a certain way for so long, it is hard to see it from any other perspective. For example, much of our discipleship has taught us to read Scripture from what I call an "extraction" paradigm. In other words, we go into the Bible to find something relevant to extract for our own life situation or need. I'm not calling that a wrong way of reading; though I would challenge us to develop a larger framework. I advocate for what I call an "immersion" paradigm. How can we read the Bible as Story and further, how do we read it such that we orient ourselves inside of the Story or immersed in it. More on that to come here.
In addition to whatever way we primarily read the Bible, we must learn to read it as a Story. Certainly many people are thinking and writing and speaking about this. I want to recommend a particular book I have found helpful in this regard. "The Drama of Scripture: Finding our Place in the Biblical Story," by Bartholomew and Goheen. I'll try and offer a representative quote or two and perhaps the Table of Contents later this week to give you more of a feel for the book.
Labels: story
posted by John David Walt | at 6/22/2008 09:17:00 PM | 4 comments
Friday, June 20, 2008
Whose Story?
One of the crucial questions we need to be asking about our worship design work is, "Whose story is being told through the service?"
Robert Jensen, in his essay entitled, How the World Lost its Story, offers this admonition.
The story is not your story or my story or 'his-story' or 'her-story' or some neat story someone read or made up. The story of the sermon and of the hymns and of the processions and of the sacramental acts and of the readings is to be God's story, the story of the Bible. . . . . . What is said and enacted in the church must be with the greatest exactitude and faithfulness and exclusivity the story of creation and redemption by the God of Israel and Father of the risen Christ. As we used to say: Period.I find that most worship services are designed around the "theme" of the sermon or sermon series. The "theme" of the sermon is often motivated by the needs (stories) of the people or the needs (stories) of the particular Church. Appropriate or relevant Scripture texts are chosen to serve these ends. The worship service, therefore, becomes sermon-centric or theme-centric and if we are theming around the felt needs of people or the felt needs of the church then we get a worship service constructed primarily around people or movements. My question: How do we design our worship "with the greatest exactitude and faithfulness and exclusivity [around] the story of creation and redemption by the God of Israel and Father of the risen Christ?"
The late Robert Webber offers an incisive word as to why this is so essential:
Me-oriented worship is the result of a culturally driven worship. When worship is situated in the culture and not in the story of God, worship becomes focused on the self. It becomes narcissistic. . . . Much of our worship has shifted from a focus on God and God’s story to a focus on me and my story.
Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 231. posted by John David Walt | at 6/20/2008 11:40:00 PM | 4 comments
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
a P.S. from Marcus Green on Sacrifice & Worship
You really should get Marcus Green's book-- Salvation's Song.
He posted a gracious comment to close out his guest-blog of a week or so ago. I include the following excerpt from that comment below with hopes it will open yet another conversation. I like where he's going with this.
I was kind of hoping someone would see that the principle of sacrifice and the meal Jesus gave his disciples the night before as the way of celebrating that sacrifice is supposed to have practical "worship service" connotations, not just "worship living" ones. There is a reason why for most of The Church's history, Communion has been the central act of worship.
How you define worship affects how you design worship.
But in our modern, song-driven culture (& I'm a part of this) we don't get why Communion matters because we have lost sight of why sacrifice is at the heart of our gatherings.
The cross is the fundamental act of worship in the universe - I wonder if that should affect both lives and worship gatherings (whatever we call them!) more than is often the case.
Marcus-- fill in any gaps here with a comment or two.
I'm curious to get others input on his assertion concerning the song driven culture of worship and how "we don't get why Communion matters."
Let me close by adding an instructive word from Robert Jensen from his essay published some time ago entitled, "How the World Lost its Story."
"For the ancient church, the walls of the place of Eucharist, whether these were the walls of a basement or of Hagia Sophia or of an imaginary circle in the desert, enclosed a world. And the great drama of the Eucharist was the narrative life of that world. Nor was this a fictive world, for its drama is precisely the "real" presence of all reality's true author, elsewhere denied."
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
14 Stations of . . . . . .
This blog is devoted to stimulating thought and conversations about the best Christian worship practices. From time to time I like to share the other 14 stations of the internet I am enjoying. Here's the latest:
2. What the internet is doing to our brains. Is Google making us Stoopid? (a thoughtful article from Atlantic Monthly's latest issue)
3. A fascinating film festival being run by subversive Christians to evangelize the secular world of filmmakers and being backed by a big fat hedge-fund. Top prize = $100K. I spent a few hours with these guys this past weekend at ichthus.
4. MOMFB-- translated: "Making Other Mommies Feel Better," a fun blog-post lowering the bar in the insanely challenging task of motherhood (or parenthood for that matter).
5. Another "comfort" for parents from Sojourners Magazine entitled, "The Heresy of the Perfect Parent."
6. Could this be my next car? Interesting Atlantic Monthly essay on General Motor's big wager-- the Chevy Volt.
7. More on what I want for my children's schools. "Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track." And while you are at it, check out this creative website "Change This Manifesto Site." Also see the book by these same guys which I am about to read.
9. My colleague, Alan Hirsch, recommends his friend, Michael Frost's new, innovative missional training resource, Exilio. Check it out. These two co-authored a fantastic survey text on mission in post-modernity called, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church.
10. I've enjoyed following the imaginative and ambitious Passion World Tour. They recently completed the first leg of the journey. Get a feel for the scope of the project here.
11. A stellar reading list on the Church emerging in the World today-- compiled by Andrew Jones (who may be the top Christian blogger in the World)
12. A Survey of the new breed of adjective describing what is happening in the Church today: Emerging, Emergent, and Missional. . . . . . . . . .Emerging, Missional, Mosaic, Monastic . . . . . . . . . . . . Does this shed any light on your question Guy?
13. Chad, the Team Leader of our new Worship Design Team, features a fun way of sharing music on a blog. Do it yourself here.
14. An unbelievable home movie of a 2 year old named Lilly giving the world a geography lesson.
Worship and the Crisis of Attention Courtney E. Martin in an online column for The American Prospect magazine, offers an challenging essay entitled, "A Crisis of Attention and Intention," about the distracted state of college students in today's classrooms. A couple of representative quotes:
Professor Dennis Dalton began his lecture on Mahatma Gandhi's mass civil-disobedience campaign following the Amritsar massacre, focusing on the Indian activists' persistence in staying attuned to their own inner morals despite the crush of British imperialism. The students flipped open their laptops and started clicking away. A few solely took notes, but many flipped back and forth between multiple windows: shopping on Amazon, cruising Facebook, checking out The New York Times Style section, reorganizing their social calendars, e-mailing, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia. Josh kept a list because he was in such disbelief......
Everyone is vying for our precious attention—political candidates, Victoria's Secret, tech manufacturers, restaurant chains, YouTube, cleaning product companies, media outlets, children, The Gap, parents, blogs, friends, JetBlue, even pets. The average adult sees 1,000 advertisements a day. Internet users spend 32.7 hours per week online and about half as much time watching television (16.4 hours). Teens, not surprisingly, are most likely to participate in what tech experts call "concurrent media exposure"—using various media simultaneously. Among this crush, how well are we staying attuned to our own inner morals? How intentional are we about whom we let sap our energy, at what times, and in what ways?
I'm interested in how today's average attention span impacts our worship gatherings. Worship demands attention of mind and intention of heart. (i.e. One thing I ask of the Lord, one thing I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to seek him in his temple. Psalm 27:4.)
My concern is the way so many worship services these days seem to accommodate what Martin writes about. I recently attended a worship gathering where I counted 8 different screens all featuring different potential distractions. (i.e. nature scenes, visualizer light shows, l.e.d. displays and so forth). How can worship cultivate attention when so much worship design seems to create distraction? I even find myself texting during worship services from time to time. Am I overreacting or am I onto something?
posted by John David Walt | at 6/17/2008 07:25:00 AM
| 7 comments
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Worship Quote of the Week
Here's another one from James B. Torrance found in his short book "Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace."
“At the center of the New Testament stands not our religious experience, not our faith or repentance or decision, however important these are, but a unique relationship between Jesus and the Father. Christ is presented to us as the Son living a life of union and communion with the Father in the Spirit, presenting himself in our humanity through the eternal Spirit to the Father on behalf of humankind. By his Spirit he draws men and women to participate both in his life of worship and communion with the Father and in his mission from the Father to the world.” (pp.30-31)
How would you agree? How would you push back on these thoughts? What practical difference does it make for our weekly worship gatherings?
posted by John David Walt | at 6/15/2008 10:21:00 PM
| 0 comments
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Ichthus 08 About a half mile behind our back yard, the 39th Ichthus Festival continues its weather plagued trend despite relocating the date from April to June. Keep up with developments here. and here. posted by John David Walt | at 6/14/2008 09:58:00 AM | 0 comments
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Internet Monk on Jesus and Worship Music
What would Jesus think of our worship services? I'm not sure what to make of this idea below, but it's worth pondering a bit. It's certainly a provocative challenge to the status quo.
This is from the internet monk who is writing a new blog called Jesus Shaped Spirituality.
"When Jesus was incarnate on earth, he didn’t produce disciples by large group musical events or music dominated worship. If he showed up today and looked most evangelical churches as outposts of his movement, he’d ask why we are spending so much time getting high on tunes.
Every piece of evidence we have is that Jesus participated in music as an aspect of worship pretty much like any first century observant Jewish person. He didn’t say anything opposing music, and I wouldn’t suggest he opposes what evangelicals are doing per se.
Now don’t hate on me. I’m just telling you that if you spent three years with Jesus, went through the passion, the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, you wouldn’t have said, “It’s really important that we sing songs for a couple of hours a week. That’s how we’ll produce the disciples Jesus commanded us to make.”
The Jesus shaped material for the evangelical music fetish isn’t there. It’s just not. The theological foundation for human beings as artistic creatures, and for the use of music in worship is there, but nothing like the contemporary evangelical approach to musical worship is coming out of the ministry of Jesus.
It’s not in the Gospels. It’s not in the epistles. It’s not in Paul or Acts. It’s not in the later New testament. There’s one passage- one- in Colossians that shows the use of music as ministry within the church to Christians.
see Michael respond to one of his commentators here
So what do you think? Are we over-relying on music in our worship gatherings?
posted by John David Walt | at 6/12/2008 10:50:00 PM | 12 comments
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Worship Central's long awaited American Tour
I am taking part in the leadership of a teaching and training conference sponsored by Worship Central. My London friends, Tim Hughes and Al Gordon, are hosting the event. Brenton Brown will also give leadership to the day. It's one day-- Saturday, June 21, in Chicago. The price is right. I'd love to see you there. You can get the total rundown on the gathering via this flyer and more from the Worship Central website.
posted by John David Walt | at 6/11/2008 11:11:00 PM
| 2 comments
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Marcus Green weighs in on "Defining Worship"
My friend, Marcus Green, Vicar of St. Catherine's in Pontypridd, England, and author of the brilliant book on worship, Salvation's Song, sent me a thoughtful email this week in response to the recent "Defining Worship" blogpost. With his permission, I print his reply below in an attempt to further stir and shape the conversation. Let us know what you think.
I have read the thoughts and comments and correctives, and you know – it all
seems a bit New Testament to me, which I think is a problem. I mean, I
stuggle to have a theology of anything which I don’t think Jesus would
have had, and I don’t think Jesus would have walked around with some of
these very NT definitions of worship I am reading.
Wouldn’t his have been rather more Jewish? Rather more shaped by the
Temple? And before we dismiss that stuff as not applying to us, I think
that the defining act of worship in the universe is the cross, and if
Jesus’ understanding of his own worship there is shaped by the Law, the
Prophets and (you better believe it) by the Temple, then I wonder if our
definitions of worship could do with five minutes of his thinking?
If it is reasonable to place the concept of sacrifice at the heart of
Temple worship, I’m not finding this concept in very many of the writings
I am reading on your blog. This is for me the main omission. There are so
many understandings of what was going on in Temple sacrifices, so let’s
start with a taking of the best of creation and lifting it up to the
Creator as a free offering being a reversal of the sin of the world (where
people simply take anything from creation and worship that). Let’s add the
cost question: you give God the most precious thing you own, and when we
say “give”, we mean give completely – kill, give its life. You cannot have
it back. Yet amazingly the sacrifice is usually cause for celebration and
results in restored relationship between God and his people, not in loss
and grief.
To make a sacrifice is an honour and a joy, not a burden; to abuse the
honour is to curse God and defile his people.
Forgive my poor attempt to get where I am going – but clearly I am going
two places.
The cross as the fulfilment of temple sacrifice is something I think both
Romans and Hebrews argue for. It’s a familiar story. My point is that in
Jesus’ world, Temple sacrifice is the pinnacle of public worship. So
Jesus’ definition of public worship is shaped by Temple sacrifice to the
point where he fulfils it. And if he does that, then our worship ought to
go there, point there, never leave there, always make us remember. And do
so in language that isn’t just cosy “Jesus is our friend” but using
something that Jesus would recognise: sacrifice. It cost. It hurt. It was
precious. That’s a cause for celebration not grief, joy not lament –
unless you are abusing it, taking it for granted, using it for your own
ends.
And then, of course the second place is this: of course, Jesus’ sacrifice
for the sins of the world was a one-off. But we are called to follow him.
To do what he did. To live as he lived. Or, as Paul puts it in Romans 12,
“the only worship that makes any sense is to offer yourselves as living
sacrifices to God”. (My paraphrase.)
So I get the questions about Trinity and so forth that are going around;
goodness knows I think they are good and hard – and that actually being a
practical Trinitarian (worshipping Father, Son and Holy Spirit often and
in those words) somehow deals with many of those issues. But deeper: where
is the sacrifice? The cost? And the awareness that with it comes great,
great joy?
My definition? The only soundbite one I offer is this, and then only given
that its entire context be taken into account: “Not my will, but yours be
done.” posted by John David Walt | at 6/10/2008 02:54:00 PM | 8 comments
What really happens in Christian Worship?
Here's a good worship quote for the week:"It is he who leads our worship, bears our sorrows on his heart and intercedes for us, presenting us to the Father in himself as God's dear children, and uniting us with himself in his life in the Spirit. To reduce worship to this two-dimensional thing--God and ourselves, today--is to imply that God throws us back upon ourselves to make our response. It ignores the fact that God has already provided for us that response which alone is acceptable to him--the offering made for the whole human race in the life, obedience and passion of Jesus Christ. . . . Whatever else our faith is, it is a response to a response already made for us and continually being made for us in Christ, the pioneer of our faith." (James Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace. pp.29-30)
What's missing here?
posted by John David Walt | at 6/10/2008 07:50:00 AM
| 2 comments
Saturday, June 07, 2008
14 Stations of . . . . . Check out
6. Best practice parenting: Performance goals. vs. Learning goals. The nutshell:
Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine—and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor. Students with learning goals, on the other hand, take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn. Dweck’s insight launched a new field of educational psychology—achievement goal theory.
Friday, June 06, 2008
This is your Brain in Worship
Jennifer George, author of the blog-- lifemuncher, recently began doing some contributing blogging over at a productivity site I enjoy reading called Getting Things Done. (GTD). she's writing in the area of cognitive sciences and human productivity. Here's an excerpt from a recent post of hers over on the GTD site.
According to Gary Marcus’s groundbreaking new book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, context is “one of the most powerful cues affecting our memory.” So, if you learn something in a classroom, you’re more likely to remember it in a classroom. If you smelled lavender while memorizing a list of words, lavender will help you recall them. (Study after study proves it.)Why am I interested in this? Consider the implications for Christian worship. Marcus's assertion about context affecting memory strikes me as a Hebraic notion of formation. The key activity for Hebraic worship can be summed up in one word: Remembering. The personal and corporate memory formed through Christian worship shapes our character, faith, imagination and total sense of personhood. Everything about the worship context literally encodes the memory of our story deep in our mind and heart. Multi-sensory, tactile dimensions of worship take on great significance for the Hebrew mentality. Think burning animal flesh, blood, bitter herbs, tasty lamb, unleavened bread, inscriptions on gates, doorposts, written on foreheads, bound to wrists, inscribed on hands, and so on. The way we practice worship literally changes the shape of our mind through the deep encoding of memory.
As a practical matter, think through the implications of baptism and the Lord's Supper in light of these thoughts.
Pushing out the edge--- what are the implications for the way we do theological education? And what about the theological formation/education that happens in worship?
Are you with me?
posted by John David Walt | at 6/06/2008 12:25:00 PM | 0 comments
Who can spin this one into a worship thought? I've got some ideas. . . . . . . anyone else????
The piece is a bit over 4 minutes. It starts a shade slow so stick with it. It gets pretty interesting. posted by John David Walt | at 6/06/2008 07:30:00 AM | 4 comments
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Defining Worship
How do you define worship? Definitions abound out there from the earliest days to the present one. Why does it matter? Because the way you define worship will determine the way you design worship.
Warren Wiersbe, in his book, Real Worship, defines it like this:
posted by John David Walt | at 6/04/2008 12:11:00 AM
| 10 comments
Worship is the believer’s response of all that they are – mind, emotions, will, body – to what God is and says and does.
Louie Giglio, founder of the Passion Movement, which has contributed much to the world of worship in the last ten years or so defines worship this way:
William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the early 20th century, defines worship this way:
Now consider a quite different take on defining worship. It has captured my attention in recent years and caused me to do a lot of rethinking. It comes from James Torrance, an English reformed theologian, who offers it in his book, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace.
“Worship is a full life response to the greatness and the grace of God.”Worship.com defines it this way:
Everything you think, everything you say, and everything you do, revealing that which you treasure most in life.
William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the early 20th century, defines worship this way:
Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God.
It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness,
nourishment of mind by His truth,
purifying of imagination by His beauty,
opening of the heart to His love,
and submission of will to His purpose.
And all this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of human expressions of which we are capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin."
Now consider a quite different take on defining worship. It has captured my attention in recent years and caused me to do a lot of rethinking. It comes from James Torrance, an English reformed theologian, who offers it in his book, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace.
"Worship is the gift of participating by the power of the Spirit in the incarnate Son's communion with the Father."Can you see the paradigm shift here? How would you describe the difference in the latter and the former definitions? Remember-- the way we define worship determines the way we design worship.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Worship Quote of the Week
"To achieve worship in spirit and truth we must look at the content of worship, not just the sincere intent of individual worshipers. We may have deeply moving experiences in worship but, without a full, through-Jesus-Christ revealing of God, how do we know it is a true experience of the true God?" (Lester Ruth. Worship True to God.)
Do you agree? What about this notion of worshipping in spirit but not quite in Truth? Does worshipping in Truth depend completely on the worshiper or does it depend on the way the worship service is designed? Can you have a fantastic experience of worship built on shoddy worship design? What are the implications of that?
I like what Lester is saying here. A good-feeling worship experience is not contrary to good theology and yet it may be quite devoid of it. In other words, a good experience in worship does not depend on good ideas behind the elements of worship. . . . . . . does it? Any examples anyone could share where this is the case?
Any thoughts on what are the essential ideas--- the basic theology?
BTW-- I'm working on a Part 3 to the Job Description of a Worship Leader series. posted by John David Walt | at 6/03/2008 07:30:00 AM | 0 comments
Today...