Valerie Hess

    Watch your thoughts; they become words.
    Watch your words; they become actions.
    Watch your actions; they become habits.
    Watch your habits; they become character.
    Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

From Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, p. 103.

“The effectiveness of the clergy is certified by the spiritual condition of the sheep.” Commentary on 1 Corinthians 9:2 (Orthodox Study Bible)

Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

I am back into major work on the book as the revisions came back from our great editor. That means I am putting most of my writing energies into the manuscript and not here on the web site. I hope you can enjoy the rotating quotes on my page. They change every 20 seconds so if you have a minute and need a new direction in your thinking, spend some time reading a few.

May God bless your day.

This is part of the MSFL blog conversation going on about the book Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation by Kent Carlson, Mike Lueken. It deals with a bigger issue behind why a seeker church may find itself at a place it doesn’t want to be at down the road. What do you think? You can comment here or go to http://msfl.arbor.edu/?page_id=133 to join the discussion there.

When I was in graduate school, working on a Masters in Music/Church Music and Organ, one of my worship professors said, “We are not free to worship as we please. We are bound by the Gospel.” That statement has stuck with me throughout the years and always comes back to mind when I hear about “seeker sensitive” churches or churches that are trying to be “relevant” or “authentic.”

Besides the inherent problems that come with using “shorthand” language (define those terms above, for example), worship leaders are asking the wrong question first when seeking to craft a “meaningful” worship service. When they are making the gathered people of God the subject and not God the subject, they are already off on the wrong foot. When we are asking, “what do people want,” and not “what does God require,” we are setting ourselves up for failure.

Whatever happened to the idea of following the way the Church has worshipped since New Testament times and on through the centuries? We DO know what that worship was like, even as we may not know how the music sounded. We know that wherever Paul took the Gospel, he also taught new converts how to worship. That early worship was based on what later became known as the lectionary and the historic liturgical forms.

That historic form, Gathering, Word, Meal (yes, the Eucharist was an every week event), and Sending, and the cycle of readings, which we call the lectionary, was built from the ancient Temple worship that God commanded way back when ancient Israel built the Tabernacle, down to the color of the pomegranates on the curtains. The basic forms have been made Christo-centric, for example, the Psalms are now seen as pre-figuring Christ, and they get filled in with various languages and music styles (yes, you can do praise choruses with this format) but they are still what the Church has seen as a pattern since the early chapters of the Book of Acts.

So why is it, then, that a church like Oak Hills is surprised when, after re-inventing the worship wheel, the leadership discovers that people aren’t being fed by it? Why do we find it OK that there is an entertainment approach to worship in many faith communities, with the performers on the stage as people watch from the auditorium? Why are we surprised at a creeping consumerism when, in trying to be “relevant,” we wake up one day to realize “relevant” has shifted with cultural changes? Dean William Inge says it this way, “A church that marries the spirit of an age, becomes the widow of the next generation.”

While I applaud a book like Renovation of the Church, I also shake my head and say, “what did you all expect?” When we walk away from the path that has been clearly laid out, either from ignorance or arrogance, we will get less than optimal results. We will get people who go to church but have no interest in following Jesus. We will get the opposite of worship that is, as the Nairobi Statement of Worship and Culture says, transcultural, contextual, counter-cultural, and cross-cultural.

May God grant us the ability, through the discipline of submission, to follow his ways in all ways, especially as we worship.