“Bless me Lord. Bless me Lord.
You know that’s all I ever hear.”

In light of the other stuff I’ve said here recently, I thought it might be good to refer you to Keith Green’s classically prophetic song “Asleep in the Light.” So I found this video containing the song on You Tube.

I hesitated to put it up since it contains cheesy worship-lyrics and pictures that sometimes do, sometimes don’t really get at the heart of what Green is saying. But then I got to thinking about it and the worship graphics seemed particularly appropriate.

It left me thinking, “I wonder why we don’t ever sing THIS contemporary christian song in our worship assemblies.”

Quite awhile back my friend Justin Baeder — Harding graduate, Church of Christ kid, Seattle church planter, geeky technology dude with a love for WordPress, and all around cool, postmoderny kind of guy — wrote an article entitled Moving Beyond the Worship Service. It’s good stuff. I encourage you to read it over.

Look at the sermon topics in a seeker-sensitive church, and you will find things such as “Prayer = tools for solving problems” and “How to have a great marriage.” Through sermons like these and uplifting worship music, the worship service promises everything we need to be successful Christians. If you want to go deeper, you can join a home Bible study or class, but that’s optional. Real church happens on the stage every Sunday.

There is a good conversation (in three six eight parts — start here or work backwards) going on over at Patrick Mead’s blog about the ‘instrumental music’ questions in the history of Churches of Christ and Christian Churches/Disciples of Christ. I say ‘good conversation’ to mean that I like very much the tone and nature of what Patrick is offering and the responses that others are providing.

But I will openly admit to a deep ambivalence about the subject matter itself. I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with what Chris Gonzalez says :

I have spent 20 years having this conversation and still the same conversation is being had. Maybe I am impatient. Perhaps I am disloyal. Maybe I am just a wimp. Whatever the case, I am glad to be, for the first time ever, an outsider to this conversation.

I also feel like an outsider to this conversation even though I am still embedded in the Church of Christ communities I have always known as my heritage. I just have no motivation or interest in this subject. It frequently feels for me a subject entirely beside the point.

That said, I think there is something even deeper about my mild consternation.

Recently, I have begun to sense a growing tide of opinion among a fairly good-sized number of my Church of Christ friends that embodies a kind of unspoken “if only…” regard for instrumental music in worship. At times it appears almost as a glazed-eyes fascination with all things christian musicky. I think there are a number of influences in play here. (more…)

I’m convinced that our pervasive need to create spectacle and be voyeurs of spectacle is damaging not only our ‘worship’, but also our very identity as believers. It is a corrosive solvent eroding our authenticity and hindering our encounter both with God and with God’s world.

This video of Brian McLaren just speaks so clearly to me.

“When you try to make everything pretty, it ends up seeming really cheap.”

To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program.” This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

– A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

I stand amazed in the presence … of a God so mundane and banal. A God so relentlessy upbeat. So predictably “for us.” The God who reliably grants our nation victory in its wars and blesses us with a persistently growing, universally good economy. The God who never thwarts our plans to build new church buildings or enlarge our ministries, except when he’s wanting to “test our faith” so that he can come through in the end with just the right amount of money or stuff.

Another quote from Calvin Miller:

“When the mystery is gone, so is the church — at least the vitality of the church. I believe we are now in just such an advanced stage of spiritual decline. Unless we figure out how to get mystery back in the church, her vitality will continue to wane. We have how-to’ed as long as we can. (more…)