Ministers of what?

Ok, ok. I was on a roll and then I suddenly stopped blogging. Well, that’s what happens when you’re plagued with a cold and then a mountain of work with just a few added responsibilities of being the best man in a wedding. So, I’ve had to forego some of the blogging, but I do need to do a little bit of catch up. I have several things I’ve wanted to write about, but I’m going to address an issue I’ve mulled over for months now. What exactly is the substance of the music ministry? I think our answers will make a huge impact.

Since the mode of proclamation for music ministers requires so much time and effort (i.e., music), it’s easy for us to get caught up in the means. But the truth is that we are ministers of the word, not of music. If the focus of your ministry is on the details of notation, it is time to reorganize your priorities. I’m not trying to diminish excellence; not by any means. I believe that you convey much about the importance of your message in the care you use to communicate it.

However, proclamation of the word is the center piece of Christian worship. This does not mean that everything is less important than preaching. It means that everything should be preaching. This concept of proclamation should permeate all of our activities in worship.  In essence, we should be seeking to saturate the music and liturgy from top to bottom with the word.  If this is true (and it is), then this has some serious ramifications for us.  It means that we need to be well-versed in scripture.  It means that we need to take great care to choose content that says what we want it say and not just sound the way that we want it to sound.  It also means that our musical standards should be sky-high because we are proclaiming the gospel.  We are proclaiming the word.  Imagine if the King of Glory were to walk in to your church service and the fanfare sounded like a middle school band camp?  I realize that there can be limitations to our talent level, but I think more often those are imposed by an insufficient view of the importance of what we have been called to.

This sounds like I’m arguing both sides, and I am.  The problem for many of us is that the pendulum swings too far in a particular direction.  Honestly, we need balance.  We can’t just say that the pastor is responsible for the word and we are to focus on the music.  That would be say that your music ministry is not a ministry at all.  We as ministers should be going to great lengths to provide a balanced diet of scripture in what we sing, say, and pray.  However, if we believe that the content of the songs and liturgy is our only focus, then we aren’t conveying the grandeur of God’s glory that we are privileged to communicate.

Most of this has been written out of a desire to see music ministry live up to it’s full potential.  And to clarify, we’re not supposed to be competing with the preaching ministry, but they should be working in perfect compliment.  While the preaching ministry has the ability to expand on concepts and make them applicable, God has gifted us with music that can accomplish so much.  We can sing his praises, but we can also teach and admonish one another.  We sing the beautiful words of psalms and hymns and they get tucked away in our brains to be recalled later; a luxury that preachers don’t so often have. Music ministry is a weighty task that takes our full effort to do rightly.  Our expectations of our ministries should be high and well rounded.  Anything less is a disservice to God and the people of our congregations.

Christian Culture?

I am definitely under the impression that a church’s aesthetics/style, whatever you want to call it, should flow organically from the actual people that make it up.  If we’re seeking to be genuine in our corporate worship, then I can’t see replicating some other church’s formula.  This is how my brain works: our “gathered worship”  is expressed through our style.  That is to say, the actual worship is the obedient adherence to what God commands us to do.  Exactly how we do that is up to us, as long as it’s faithful to scripture.  With me so far?

Soooo… if we place a value on a certain way of doing things and claim that it’s more “Christian” than some other way, that’s religion.  Religion with maybe a touch of idolatry.  This, by the way, is not a “worship wars” problem for me.  This is a “why in the world are we trying to be like other churches when we’re a totally unique body?” problem.

Anyhow, all of this programming and formulating has led to a Christian Culture that has become accepted practice and I believe it’s robbing our church bodies of freedom to express their own personality in faithful worship.  That creativity that God put in us is a reflection of his incredible, infinite depth of creativeness [Gen. 1.27 & 2.19].  I mean, if God weren’t creative, we wouldn’t be here.  God is genuinely glorified when we are creative.  We’re testifying to His own nature.  So, why rob ourselves of that opportunity?

What do you do when a church body has been so entrenched in “Christian culture” that they don’t even know of an identity outside of that?  I think this is a worthy question.  And it’s certainly a question I don’t have an answer for.  I’d like to know what you think.  A great part of our gospel freedom that God has given to us is our freedom to express our worship in a way that’s true to the way God uniquely made us [1 Cor. 10.31].  That’s one big thing that sets us apart from other world religions.  Also, as protestants, many of us have heritages full of people that have fought for our local congregational autonomy (to varying extents).  Let’s not wait for a couple generations to pass before we either work this out of our system, or allow it to become indistinguishable from truth.

Pervasive Worship

Let me be candid.  It’s a daunting and humbling task for me to write on the subject of worship.  Even though I have spent the majority of my life “leading worship” and the last several years trying to define what that really means, I am still hard-pressed  to compact it into the neat little box of a definition.  One of the most difficult hurdles in writing on the matter is this: everyone has their own opinions on what worship is and those opinions drive the way they follow Christ.

This is dangerous ground, people.  And it’s very telling of the nature of worship.  It’s pervasive and extends into the far reaches of our thoughts and actions.  Harold Best writes that we are unceasingly worshiping.  God created us in a way that we are constantly ascribing worth to everything we know.   Those things we place a value on above our own, we worship.  And I can see this played out in my own life.  Where does my money go?  Where does my time go?  Maybe I’m not chasing the latest fashion trends or taking on a second job to afford a new car that I don’t need, but am I more consumed with self preservation than the cause of Christ?  Most of the time, unfortunately.

So, I’m just going to forego the necessity of explaining that worship extends beyond the songs we sing on Sunday morning.  Just to keep it brief, worship is the goal, music CAN BE the vehicle.  It isn’t the exclusive expression of worship, but it is one way to honor God.  So how then do we have such a difficult time with music in our churches?  Obviously no matter if you’re given a Lexus or a Pinto to drive, you’ll make it to your destination.  So then I would say the fuss is about the car we’re driving (not literally. Stay with the analogy).

What’s happening is that we are chasing our fulfilled desires and calling it worship.  We want to feel a certain way in a service.  We want to dress a certain way.  We want to hear a certain style of music or preaching.  But what is the true worship of God?  I would say that it is the total yielding of one’s self to Christ because of who God is.  Anything less is idolatry.  Believing that worship is inherent to a specific time and place and in a certain context falls way, way short of the worship of God.  In fact, it’s the worship of our own desires and perceived needs.  When we have been called to sacrifice our lives [Rom. 12.1], constraints like that don’t matter anymore.

The catalyst needs to be our love of God.  That will drive us towards obedience, which is the essence of worship.  Jesus makes this clear in Matthew 22.37-40.  He says “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind…”, because obedience begins with understanding who God is and putting your faith in Him.  But how can we trust him if we don’t know him?  The good news is that God has revealed himself to us through his Word [John 1.14-18].  We have an opportunity to know God, and through it be transformed into creatures who earnestly seek His will[Rom.12.2].  This is the beginning of the true worship of God.

Start with the Psalms.  Daily.  There is an endless depth of the character of God found in Israel’s hymnbook.

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Sources/ Suggested Readings :

Harold Best, Unceasing Worship. John Frame, Worship in Spirit and Truth.

Wineskins.

I’m striving to be more consistent with my postings.  It has been a hectic week, though, trying to finish up all of my projects for classes.  I’m finished with all but one.  Praise God.  Interestingly enough, one of my papers dealt with a topic that I’ve really struggled with over the last couple of years:  the tension between contemporary church and traditional church.  This is a very deep and divisive issue in Evangelical America.  I’m a young guy, often playing contemporary styles of music, so of course I tend to partner myself with “contemporary” congregations.   At the same time, I realize that there is a need for scriptural centrality in our corporate worship services.  This is an area that a lot of models for contemporary structures fall short.  We get so busy trying to be “culturally relevant” that we forget the bible in it’s infinite and eternal relevance.  As a pastor once said, “Give it to me plain, let the spirit do the rest.”

So, as I was doing my paper, I was trying to decipher the core model for corporate worship in the New Testament.  We have a few ordinances (baptism and communion), but otherwise, structure is up for grabs.  I thought about how Jesus changed everything, though.  He talked about how this New Covenant, his total fulfillment of the law… well… it just wouldn’t fit into the old ways of doing things (Luke 5.33-39).  Religiousness was going to be traded in.  Faithful and dutiful worship would not be, though, and thats where things get tricky.

The appealing thing about religion is that you know precisely what actions you have to do to please your god.  But relationship is different.  It’s fueled by an inner desire that causes you to do things that please the other person.  Think about how you interact with family.  This is all the more difficult, because with God, you only see a part of Him.  Only what he has revealed through His Son; like looking in a mirror dimly (1 Cor. 13.12).  So religion is easy.  And we are lazy.  And that’s precisely the reason for Luke 5.39!

Anyhow, I think “contemporary” versus “traditional” is really relationship versus religion.  What is talked about in the New Testament as necessary is biblical Truth, love and fellowship.  These are the core needs of the church. However you decide to get there is up to the congregation.  People who wear flip flops to church are just as likely to value the aesthetics of a worship service as the people who dress in suits and ties.  If your structure is as important as (or sometimes MORE important than) faithful worship, then you have a problem.

Contemporary church means genuinely meeting the needs of a body, without looking to the way things have been done before, assuming that there is some extra means of grace in it.  Format is not part of the equation.  Sing your hymns.  Sing your pop hits. As long as it’s done in the Spirit of worship, it’s glorifying to God.

My paper is actually a bit more eloquent, and far more informative than this blog.  If you want to read it, comment or email me.  It’s only a few pages long, but it’s way better than this rant.

Hence the title of this blog

I think it’s ironic that idle and idol are homonyms.  Idleness is generally the cause of idolatry, for Christians least.  When we stop thinking and doing, we become idle.  It’s exactly at that point when we pick our idols and begin to worship gods other than the One, True and Living.  Usually this god is ourselves; our flesh that we are desperately trying to satisfy.  And what’s truly sad is that this idolatry causes us to be progressively less and less effective in our own faith (Ps. 115.2-8).   For Christians who live in the freedom of New Covenant worship, we sometimes act exactly like the Assyrians who did not even have the spirit upon them, as we do.

They worshiped the LORD, but they also served their own gods in accordance with the customs of the nations from which they had been brought. (2 Kings 17.33)

And so, we engage in the same kind of ritualistic worship.  Although I do believe God intended the corporate act of worship to engage our visceral senses, the rituals of worship without true sacrificial worship is worthless ( Ross, Recalling the Hope of Glory).  It’s just the motions.  Idolatry robs us of the ability to genuinely worship God, no matter how deeply you believe going to a worship service and raising your hands and singing loudly is real worship.  If you are going home and serving yourself, you are not worshiping God.  The bible defines Christocentric worship as being ‘living sacrifices’ (Romans 12.1).  So if we have the ritual, but not the actual worship, our acts of worship are worthless. (Remember Cain and Abel?)  The songs and all the trappings of a worship service are but rags, anyhow.  I could go on, but I digress.

I believe, through what I’ve seen and read, that this serving of the self leads to a possibly more catastrophic end for us Christians.  It leads to reinterpretation of the scripture from our personal experience (i.e. justifying our choices and actions based on the way we feel about something). This postmodernism is a plague, but it’s enticing because it allows us to have our cake and eat it, too.  We can make God fit into our custom mold that lets us get away with ungodliness, believing that we are not to judge others, but ultimately I believe that we are saying “don’t judge me for the way I live.”  I think 1 Corinthians 5 has plenty to say about those in the church who live by the flesh without remorse.  Read it.  You’ll see.  And I’m not saying that people don’t fall.  I’m saying there is a biblical standard for the way we are to live, and you can’t work the flesh into the equation, no matter how hard you try.  I actually have so many thoughts on this, I’m going to have to split it up over time.

The bottom line is, we are to discipline ourselves (1 Tim.  4.7).  This means we can’t just sit around and think about the way we feel, because then there would be no absolute truth, and Jesus made it very clear that he is the Truth and the way is very narrow; probably more narrow than we’d like to believe these days.  If we aren’t busy disciplining ourselves, we are idle.  When we are idle, we are left with the desires of the flesh.  When we are consumed with the flesh instead of a renewed mind, we are left to idolatry.  You can’t be an idolater and get worship right.  You just can’t.

Hence the title of the blog.