In contemporary society the heart is reached through participation, and all approaches to worship—traditional, contemporary, or blended—need to relearn how to achieve services characterized by immersed participation.
Robert E. Webber
Category Archives: Worship
Like Us, Like Him: Christmas Eve Sermon
Here’s my Christmas Eve sermon from Matthew 1:18-25. http://www.mylhumc.net/502652.ihtml
The sermon should be on top of the player’s list, but if not, click on the tab that says, ‘speakers,’ click on my name (Tom Fuerst) and it’s the sermon titled, Like Us, Like Him.
This is How it Should Be Done
I’m preparing to take over the Wed. night pastor’s Bible Study at my church.
I’m going to be teaching through the book of Jonah, but my emphasis will mostly be on developing good Bible reading skills (hermeneutics).
Someone from my church sent me this video. I think it’s a prime example of great engagement with the book of Jonah and great oral delivery of the book’s story…and all that from a little kid. This is how it should be done, friends.
Worship: Finding the Right Preposition
This is a post by a friend of mine, Jonathan Powers. Jonathan and I have begun guest-blogging on each other’s pages in an effort to make our blogs more well rounded. He’s a Phd. student at the Robert Weber Institute for Worship and the Arts. I think you’ll find his discussion of worship well worth your time!
What is worship? This is a very basic question concerning who we are as Christians. It is also a question many find difficult to answer, even theologians haven’t settled on a definition. Some definitions are complex, “worship is an act of religious devotion where one fully submits and dedicates oneself to a deity, attributing to the deity a sense of worth.” Then there are simple answers such as, “worship is celebrating God.” However, neither fully grasps what worship is. (Churches often add to the confusion by focusing more on a style of worship than on the content of worship.)
Perhaps then, defining worship is not the best starting point for gaining a proper understanding of worship. Like love, worship is something done, something experienced, not just something talked about. Worship is both word and action.
I make no claims to be a great theologian, but in my search for a proper understanding of worship, I have found two terms that help in a way no definition has ever sufficed: revelation and response. In other words, God reveals Himself in either word or deed; His people respond in both word and deed.
Biblically, this is the form shown over and over again. Isaiah 6 and Luke 1 are great examples of this conversational form of worship. God speaks or acts first. His people respond in word and action. Christian worship then is a series of revelations and responses. Revelation is the Word of God at work within a Christian community. It is the truth of the Triune God and God’s relationship with God’s people. Response is the reply of God’s people to this truth, a prepared or spontaneous opportunity for His people to answer, reply, or react.
It is interesting to evaluate a typical Sunday morning on the criteria of revelation/response. Does God get the first word? Are we called into a revelation of God’s presence, (whether through song, Scripture, or spoken word), before we begin responding through praise, adoration, and thanksgiving? I am beginning to find my understanding of worship taking a subtle but important shift. It all has to do with finding the correct preposition: worship isn’t something I do to God or for God; it’s something I do with God in the sense that we worship with Christ (see Hebrews 5, 9, &10).
Worship is like a dialogue. God speaks, we respond. Perhaps this does not help us come any closer to settling on a definition of worship, but perhaps it will help us better understand our experience of it.
- Jonathan Powers
Winston and Worship
There’s a great little restaurant in my hometown called Sir Winston’s. It’s named after Winston Churchill, who made his famous Iron Curtain speech right down the road at Westminster College.
Not only is the food pretty good, but the the restaurant is set up like a British pub. Particularly fun are the gianormous British flag with the near-life-sized Winston Churchchill cutaway hung on front of it and the random pictures from Churchill’s life posted around the place.
Despite their efforts to create a British mood, when my wife and I went in there today I noticed something horribly out of place: the music Usually when we go into restaurants I try to listen to the music in the background to deduce what kind of mood they’re trying to set. (Plus, Phoebe and I like to dance to it if possible.) In a place that has worked so hard to create a British atmosphere through and through, Sir Winston’s ruined their continuity with their music choice. I distinctively heard both the Black Eyed Peas and Tina Turner, plus some other American pop songs that I couldn’t place.
Shouldn’t they at least have been playing British bands? Wouldn’t John Lennon’s voice and Paul McCartney’s bass sound more appropriate in such a setting? Heck, even old Mick Jagger would’ve been more pleasing, despite my general distaste for the Rolling Stones. Indeed, if they wanted to be truly authentic, they should’ve probably gone even older than these two to something pre-WWII. 
While this discontinuity in Sir Winston’s only bothered me for a moment, I have to admit that I see the same discontinuity in churches and it bothers me even more (and even more frequently).
When we go to church, the staff has gone through great pains to put together an order of worship that looks nice on paper – it conforms to people’s expectations and traditions. But what about flow? What about continuity, particularly between the musical aspects, the prayer aspects, and the preaching aspects?
What if instead of music ministers doing there own thing to prepare and preachers doing their own thing to prepare, what if they got together and decided upon a theme that would give the service continuity? This means that the preacher would need to have his sermon topic thought through long before the week of the sermon, and this would mean that, at the very least, the music minister would need to come up with songs that emphasize the theme of the message.
In other words, instead of everyone doing what they do without regard to everyone else, what if everything came together in a nice flow, committing to one point or theme, and carried it through from beginning to end – from the welcome, to the songs,to the prayer, to the sermon, then to the Eucharist?
Sir Winston’s is a good restaurant, regardless of the music they play. But when one part of the setting is out of place, it sticks out like Glenn Beck at a PETA convention.
In the same way, our church services may be good whether or not the music or the preaching line up together. But are they excellent? And what would be the long term impact of a single service with a single theme penetrating people’s minds and souls for one hour, not just the 20 minutes of the sermon?
Sir Winston’s and the Tina Turner don’t belong together. Neither do “I Can Only Imagine” and a sermon against sentimentality. Both may have their place, but they should not be side by side.
The Resurrection of the Body and Embodied Worship
Without a bodily resurrection, Christ’s cross merely brings about another pointless death of a Galilean slave.
Without a bodily resurrection, Christ’s cross does not defeat death, does not trounce the Devil, and does not secure our salvation and unite us to the Triune God.
In a recent conversation someone attempted to convince me that the bodily resurrection didn’t matter; all that matters is the spiritual idea of resurrection as something that inspires us to morality. In response I argued, along with Paul in I Corinthians 15, if Christ’s resurrection didn’t happen in real, physical space and time, then it means nothing, we believe in vain.
But in the course of this conversation I realized something significant – the Evangelical world, for all it’s fighting against this sort of liberalism, is functionally no different. If one were to look at our worship services, it is the cross, not the resurrection, that is emphasized; our worship is abstract and spiritual in emphasis, not embodied and concrete.
But here’s the thing – if Christ really rose from the dead, then more than merely spirituality or morality get impacted, there are implications for the physical world, as well. The physical world is given value precisely because Christ rose, not in a spiritual sense, but in a physical sense.
This blog series will explore the multiple ways in which Christ’s physical resurrection impacts the physicality of our worship. We do not worship a distant deity abstracted from our everyday, physical lives. We worship a God who took on flesh and resurrected in the flesh, thus giving value to the material world as material.
The implications of this “material” theology are four-fold and will be explored throughout the rest of the semester. James K. Smith, in his book Desiring the Kingdom lays them out like this:
- Christian worship understands human persons as embodied rather than mere thinking things.
- Christian worship prioritizes practices rather than ideas as the site of challenge and resistance.
- Christian worship looks at cultural practices and institutions through the lens of worship or liturgy.
- Christian worship retains a robust sense of antithesis without being simply “anti-cultural.”
I hope you will not only join us through this blog series, but that you will see the significance of the physical world, the senses, the creation, and your body in worship.
Prayer and the Prophetic Impractical
Yesterday we visited Gethsemane Abbey as a Chapel team. JD set no other agenda except reflection and prayer. And though there is never enough time for such a trip which accomplishes nothing of pragmatic value, that’s what makes such a trip all the more important.
It occurred to me that one of the ways Christians might be a prophetic voice in the future of this country is in our willingness to take time off our busy schedules of production and incessant consumption, simply to go pray.
I know it sounds either too idealistic or too pious to be practical.
But what if the prophetic is in the impractical?
What if the prophetic is in the actualization of things usually assumed to be stuck in the realm of ideas?
What if our slavery to the 9-5 is exactly what keeps us bound to the ideas and agendas of the Empire with its ethic of consumption and production? And what if this slavery is exactly that which hinders our ability to see the God who provides, sustains, and cares for even the flowers of the field which do not toil or spin?
Why the Worship Wars Miss the Point
A few months ago I interviewed for an Associate Pastor position at a wonderful church with wonderful people. The only problem, really, was that they were fixated on a particular style of worship. When they asked me about my preferred style of worship I told them I basically think the Worship Wars miss the point altogether.
You see, for me, I am much more concerned with what worship does and says than any particular style.
What if the worship wars have missed the point? What if our preferences and our distastes don’t matter at all? What if worship is not primarily about us, or is only about us in a secondary sense?
I have heard people say that they “can’t worship” to this particular style or that particular style of music. But what if such people miss the point because they assume that worship must arise from within them? What if our acts of worship are prompted, not by the sounds of drums, organs or inner, subjective feelings, but by the living God who through the Holy Spirit draws us to Himself? In other words, what if worship isn’t even primarily our act to honor God, but God’s prior activity whereby He moves first, through the Holy Spirit, in the lives of believers to offer praise? What if He is the first cause in the church’s worship?
And what if worship means something to the world outside these four walls…say, in the political sphere? What if worship is the church acknowledging and announcing that it is the risen Jesus Christ who is king, not an earthly ruler; it is Jesus Christ who is sovereign, not any nation or state? If this is the case, worship is both the honoring of God for who He is and the calling of the nations to repentance in acknowledgment that Jesus Christ is the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all human life.
These are the first of many reasons why the worship wars have missed the point. God in all His fullness, seeks to creatively call the nations to acknowledge who He is, and challenge the church to greater faithfulness to His image. But He is the primary Actor, He is the one who provokes our worship; it does not arise from within us because we bring nothing worth offering on our own anyway.
Very few worship services actually accomplish these things. It may require a great deal of imagination and humility on our part as the church – the worshipping community, but I want this to be the first* word in a very long discussion on the meaning of worship. Our preferred worship style, then, is not guitar vs. organ, but is worship that, arising out of the promptings of the Holy Spirit, seeks doxological excellence, honors the Triune God for who He is and what He’s done, and calls the nations to submit to Him.
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*Yes, I do know that this isn’t the ‘first’ word, many have written on it before and have done so more eloquently than I am. But for many readers, this may be the first time they’ve heard such an idea, because they go to churches who pride themselves on the Contemporary vs. Traditional debate. I want to challenge them to think beyond this dichotomy an imagine an alternative possibility.
