Who should be on stage, up front, perceived as leading worship?
I can remember, as my second lead pastor took the reigns while I was a youth pastor in the United Methodist Church, taking a trip to Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church, now Ginghamsburg Church. They were doing some earth shattering things in the 90s. They hired band members and the band members didn’t have to be Christians just great musicians. They used projection, and had awesome set designs. They used drama, and their sanctuary was multipurpose. Mike Slaughter is still the pastor there and I think that they are still a UM church, but dropped it from their official name.
I left that Saturday evening unispired. The music and transitions were tight, but people just watched…and there was little awe expressed at the mystery of why God would love us so much.
Ever since that time I have struggled with the question of who should be on stage. Who should we allow permission to be perceived as a leader of worship? It is boiled down in this question, “If Johnny, the drummer, doesn’t know Christ, but he’s the only drummer available do you let him help lead worship?”
Now before we go much further let me say that we will always have posers, and depending upon where people are in their personal walk with Christ there will always be the possibility of “phoning it in,” or losing perspective on why they are actually up there. And I don’t mean to pick on drummers. It’s just a hypothetical and drummer is always where I land with this hypothetical. I don’t think that they are any less important. However, they are most likely not a Phil Collins either.
So, why is all of this coming up on this Friday. Today, I land at Ezekiel 44. Ezekiel has been given details of the Temple and the Altar and now it turns to the instructions for the Levites and Priests. Through Ezekiel God slams them for allowing “foreigners” to take charge of the sanctuary. It is clear from the context that there was something sacred about the things the Priests and Levites did. There was something that only people who’s hearts were prepared for the work, and who had disciplined their bodies for the work (cricumcision) should be doing.
Now, times have changed. We no longer live under the law. We, now, are Temples and do not worship in the Temple. Non-Jews, regardless of our circumcision, have been grafted into the Vine. When I order Pad Woon Sin at the local Thai restaurant I can order pork as the meat of choice. Jesus has made a way for those who were unclean before to become clean for all times.
However, there is still something sacred about what we do with worship within the context of “the gathering.” I will Ignore, for a moment, that we now lead a life of worship and that everything we do is an act of worship. For people outside of the Body of Christ there is no such thing. They really have no ability to truly worship, because we now worship in Spirit and in Truth, and those outside of Christ have neither accepted the Truth or the Spirit and so how, therefore, can they worship?
Tight transitions, and awesome performances will bring people in for a little while, but when they perceive that there really is nothing more to what they are experiencing than the typical show it will wear thin. Bands will “Go Big” and people will eventually stay home.
Ezekiel 44 somehow reinforces for me that it is important that the people who may be perceived as worship leaders, like Johnny the drummer, should have experienced the life altering transformation that comes from a life sacrificed to Jesus. Because when the Spirit speaks, and plans need to be changed Johnny needs to hear and be able to obey. Only God knows who walks in our doors on the weekends, and there may be one song, one word that needs to be said, that will present an opportunity for that person to be changed.
When we started a contemporary service in that UM church, so long ago, we brought in a band who played at the Campus Crusade events on UK’s campus. Everyone was nervous about the perception of the people who attended. Lots of silver haired folks with lots of money and influence were in that church. In order to expose everyone to what we were going to do both worship services were contemporary. The only thing that we could ultimately control was whether our hearts were ready to worship. That was my charge to them. “Don’t worry about the crowd. If we worship, then God will take care of the rest.”
I wonder what I would have said if Johnny didn’t know what in the heck I was talking about? I wonder if it would have mattered?
I think even today, Ezekiel would say that it matters. What say you?
I want to associate with organizations that have personality – Kem Meyer
I just got turned on to Kem Meyer’s blog today. I am not completely sure who she is yet, but her post on Sept. 1 about her experience with CD Baby just made me think. Why do I take myself seriously? Why can’t I become a little more comfortable with being myself? Why can’t what I do every day be made into a whole lot of fun?
Anyway, check it out.
Your work is sacred…
More Good Work
In honor of Labor Day, more thoughts and quotes about the dignity of work.
Sep 4th, 2009 | By Skye Jethani | Category: Church, Faith, Formation, Main Feature
There’s an unemployed man in your congregation. After searching for months for a job, he’s finally gotten a position on a landscaping crew. On Sunday, before the close of the worship service, a leader calls the man up to the platform. He tells the congregation about the member’s new vocation and then invites others up to the platform to place their hands on him. Together the church prays and ordains him for his new work, asking God to make him an instrument of his beauty and care for creation, and praying that he would bring pleasure to God and goodness to others through his labor.
How would your church be different if this sort of scene was a regular occurrence? For landscapers? For business people? For students going back to school? For moms volunteering in the community? For financial planners? For nurses? For police officers?
Consider this remark from Dallas Willard:
“There truly is no division between sacred and secular except what we have created. And that is why the division of the legitimate roles and functions of human life into the sacred and secular does incalculable damage to our individual lives and the cause of Christ. Holy people must stop going into ‘church work’ as their natural course of action and take up holy orders in farming, industry, law, education, banking, and journalism with the same zeal previously given to evangelism or to pastoral and missionary work.”
I don’t think Willard is devaluing missionaries or evangelism. Rather he’s affirming that the scope of God’s mission in the world may be far larger than our church tradition often recognizes. Here’s another bit from Os Guinness describing the origins of our misunderstanding about calling:
The truth of calling means that for followers of Christ, “everyone, everywhere, and in everything” lives the whole of life as a response to God’s call. Yet, this holistic character of calling has often been distorted to become a form of dualism that elevates the spiritual at the expense of the secular. This distortion may be called the “Catholic Distortion” because it rose in the Catholic era and is the majority position in the Catholic tradition. Protestants, however, cannot afford to be smug. For one thing, countless Protestants have succumbed to the Catholic distortion as Wilberforce nearly did. Ponder for example, the fallacy of the contemporary Protestant term “full-time Christian service” – as if those not working for churches or Christian organizations are only part-time in the service of Christ. For another thing, Protestant confusion about calling has led to a “Protestant distortion” that is even worse. This is a form of dualism in a secular direction that not only elevates the secular at the expense of the spiritual, but also cuts it off from the spiritual altogether.
“Everyone, everywhere, and in everything.” What a beautiful way of understanding the scope of our mission. And it seems wonderfully congruent with the mission statement painted at the front of my church’s sanctuary: “Forming a people through Christ to glorify him everywhere.” I’m becoming more convinced that if we are to seek this purpose we’re going to have to address our implicit and false dualisms (sacred v. secular, clergy v. laity) head on.
