worship

Things I Suspect About Worship

/ W. Keith Brenton / 4 Comments

I’m no expert about worship. Frankly, I’m not sure I “get” it at all.

Sometimes my heart is engaged. Sometimes I’m just going through the motions. Sometimes I’m focused. Other times I’m distracted. Sometimes I’m with others. Sometimes I’m by myself.

But these are a few of the things I suspect about it:

  • God wants us to worship Him because it’s good for us to realize how much we should depend on Him … not because He needs to hear it.
  • Worship was never meant to make us comfortable. Frankly, the whole idea of sacrifice at the heart of it makes me really uncomfortable, because it pounds into my brain that sinleadstodeath sinleadstodeath sinleadstodeath; that graceleadstolife graceleadstolife graceleadstolife; and that despite all of my best efforts I am going to be and imperfect, bumbling, pitiful failure at the morality game. And bringing up sacrifice only weekly, or just at Easter – instead of daily – makes it a bit more comfortable for me.
  • Worship has to come from the heart, not from an indexed book of rules with check-mark boxes beside each one, legislating every conceivable “thou shalt” and “shalt not” with regard to the way I express my bewildered awe of the Creator.
  • Worship in spirit and in truth – despite all the ways I’ve heard it explained – is a concept that still somehow eludes me, and I wonder if that’s intentional.
  • When Jesus brought up the subject of worship in spirit and in truth, it wasn’t a command. It was a prophecy. For some it has already come true. For me – and I’d bet a lot of others – it’s mostly yet to happen.
  • Worship can’t be forced. If it could, there’d be a lot more rules about it. Sure, quote your Old Testament chapters at me all you want. Underlying them all is still the plain fact that people need and should want to worship God; to understand that He is a jealous God; to feel that He is a loving God; to accept that He is a just God; to be drawn closer to Him as a Father God. And that it calls for extraordinary effort.
  • Some ways that you worship God are probably really different than some ways I do. A few of mine wouldn’t make sense to you or “speak” to you at all; and vice-versa. My guess is that I don’t have a right to require you to adopt mine any more than you should expect me to adopt yours. The final arbiter on any given point would be God, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t pleasing Him be the goal? Wouldn’t it please Him for me to feed you by participating in the ways that nourish your spirit, and for you to reciprocate for my hunger? Could that be why He calls us to dine together in the first place?
  • Seeing, hearing, experiencing God’s activity in the world persuades me to want to worship Him. Walling myself off from God’s activity with anything – especially my own activity – has the opposite effect.
  • Worship is virtually impossible when the name of Jesus isn’t even mentioned, except maybe to close a prayer or a casual reference in communion. He’s the Go-Between. The Intercessor. The Mediator. The One whose Spirit interprets the groanings of us pitiful would-be’s to the incomprehensible language of the Great I AM.

That’s just a few of them. I suspect more, but I’m feeling distant and grumpy and cold right now, and not in the mood to search them out and confirm them among the shouts and pleas and whispers of His word.

I don’t “get” worship tonight because I might begin to “get” God … and I just don’t know if I could handle the change that it would make – and break – of my heart.

Instruments Of His Peace

/ W. Keith Brenton / 14 Comments

Does anyone remember why musical instruments are forbidden in our fellowship, Churches of Christ?

My guess is, the answer is no – and anyone who could remember first-hand what started it all would be well over 150 years old by now.

You’d have to look it up in the history books, now – and the “wikipedia” entry on the matter reads like this:

… L. L. Pendleton, who was a member of a Midway, Kentucky church brought a piano into the church building. One of the elders of that assembly removed the piano that evening but it was soon replaced by another. Until that time all singing in the churches had been a cappella – without instrumental accompaniment. Generally speaking, the bulk of the urban congregations, particularly in the Northern states, were not totally adverse to this development, which was also gaining momentum in the other religious groups around them, while rural congregations, particularly in the Southern United States, tended to oppose this trend.

I haven’t found a refutation of any of these basic facts (although it was a melodeon, not a piano), including the one that Restoration churches had been singing a cappella until that time. Restoration churches had also been questioning a number of other items termed “innovations” – things like cooperative missionary societies or other church organizations which were condemned by some as divisive (though colleges were permitted). There were also questions of exclusivism – the belief that only people who had and followed the correct interpretation of scripture constituted the true church. And there were problems between Northern and Southern churches over slavery, and there is no point in glossing over any of them.

By the time that the U.S. Census Bureau separated the two factions officially, 40 years later, there were questions about baptism contributing to the division. Then lots more followed: how many cups? Bible school? dining in the building? … and even more nonsense that doesn’t deserve to be mentioned.

But it all started with a pre-World War II “battle of Midway” that forever changed the course of the movement.

All of the articles and papers that have been written on the subject since; all of the trees that have perished; all of the good intentions of serving and worshiping God the right way have failed to sound even one note of unity – or a few notes of harmony – as a lasting result of that division, capstoning the primary purpose of the Restoration Movement.

To read some of them, you’d think there was someone arguing back.

I haven’t encountered anyone arguing that the first-century church worshiped with musical instruments; though there is discussion about when it began – between the third and sixth centuries is the common thought. The fact is, we don’t know. It wouldn’t make much sense for Christians in prisons and catacombs to sing with musical instruments, but others meeting in houses and synagogues might have had the opportunity. The fact that musical instruments aren’t mentioned in most of New Testament scripture doesn’t prove that they weren’t used. (That would be like arguing that since God isn’t mentioned in the book of Esther, He had nothing to do with what happened in it.)

Certainly Israel worshiped God with instruments of music; you find references to them peppered throughout the Psalms. Do we have trouble with the fact that the sound of harps is heard in heaven during God’s Revelation to John, harps played as loudly as rushing waters and peals of thunder? Or that the saints victorious over the beast are given harps to accompany their praise to God?

Do we then conclude that at some point in the intertestamental period God changed His mind about accepting praise accompanied by musical instruments, but that in the kingdom yet to come He will change it back?

Are we just arguing the case because we still believe Christians have to understand and perform perfectly in order to be acceptable to God, and if our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were wrong about this issue they are therefore forever lost and damned? If we accept the possibility God could forgive some of them for being wrong about slavery, could He not forgive them for excluding others based on a belief about acceptable worship?

Are we arguing it because we want to maintain our peculiar distinctiveness, our sectarian uniqueness, our tribal identity, our claim on the name “church of Christ”? And with it, the unquestioning confidence that we are right about this and if you’re not right about this you’re going to hell?

Are we arguing it because it’s hard to say that we were wrong and exclusive and prejudiced and divisive?

Or are we arguing it because we just like to argue?

Is that the way for us to be instruments of His peace?

Suffer the little children

/ W. Keith Brenton / Leave a comment

My family and I enjoyed our first family retreat with many other families from our church last weekend at the Christian campground where our son has spent a week the past two summers. In fact, he and I stayed in the same cabin he stayed in then.

It rained almost the entire twenty-four hours we were there. We had a great time anyway. The kids swam in the swimming hole until exhausted. I hiked two trails, drinking in my time alone with the Creator like the cool, falling rain. We shared a devotional time around the campfire in the evening, capped by the blessing of freshly-made smores.

And for the first part of worship Sunday morning, the children led. I didn’t know some of their songs — including “Hip, Hip, Hip, Hippopotamus”! — but I surely was uplifted.

One of them was led by an adorable, precocious 4- or 5-year-old girl. I could tell that one of our children’s ministry deacon, ostensibly leading or at least wrangling these younger worship leaders, had a moment of hesitation and even responded to some parent’s half-joking unheard comment with “Well, she’s not teaching or having authority over the rest of us, is she?”

It couldn’t spoil the moment for me. There, on the bleachers under a big wooden shed-of-a-gymnasium that was open to the mist-shrouded green surround, a child was praising God for all of it and her parents and friends joined her.

I couldn’t help but think of a time when His Son scolded His best friends: “Let the children come to Me; don’t forbid them! Why, anyone who wants to be part of my kingdom needs to become just like one of them!”

So we were. We sang “Jesus Loves Me.” We sang “This Little Light of Mine.” We sang a half-dozen others.

And the little children led us.

No punitive lightning fell from heaven.

In fact, a few moments later, shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy of leaves above and chased the greyness and the mist from the campground.

Tell me God wasn’t smiling.