"A church is a place where we try to think, speak, and act in God's way, not in the way of a fear-filled world." -W.S. Coffin
Okay folks, I'm just going to come right out and say it: I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the endless complaining about the decline of church membership. I'm tired of hearing people complain that it's not like it used to be. I'm tired of hearing people say things like "we have to get more people in the pews." I'm tired of EVERY SINGLE church committee I talk to ask me what new ideas I have to "grow the church." I'm tired of the blame game-- every one in the church wants to blame someone else for why people have stopped coming.
Why am I tired of hearing all of this? It's not because these questions aren't important in their own way. But quite frankly, when it comes to the future of the church, these are the wrong questions. We need to be asking different questions. Questions like: how can the church meet the changing needs of people in the 21st century? How can the church respond to anti-gay bullying and teen suicides? How can the church respond to a war-torn society, and a country that is embroiled in two endless wars? How can the church respond to the rising unemployment and poverty in this country? How can the church respond to a growing gap between the haves and the have nots? How can the church respond to bigotry against Muslims, Hispanics, and other groups? How can the church respond to an increasingly polarized society where we judge our neighbors rather than love them? THESE are the questions I want to be talking about in our churches.
Oh, and by the way, we get so carried away by the distraction of fewer people in the pews that we forget to minister to the congregation we have-- rather than the congregation we want, or the congregation we think we should want.
Things change. Things are not like they used to be. Things may never be the same. The church may never be the same. But here's one thing I know: God isn't going anywhere. So what are we so worried about??? Let's have a little faith. And let's go back to the gospel, and the work it calls us to do in a broken world. Peace. Reconciliation. Kindness. Justice. Let us walk humbly with our God.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Why We Worship
There is a question being asked by Christian leaders all across the country right now, in almost every mainline protestant denomination. That question is: why aren't people coming to church anymore?
This is a complicated question with a complex answer. There isn't just one factor as to why people in our culture have stopped coming to church. However, I think that one potential factor in the equation is that for many people, there isn't a sense of why worship really matters. And in a culture when we are all too busy, we are all over-scheduled and over-programmed, why would people go if they don't know why it matters? And so that’s what I want to focus on this morning. The question of why worship matters, and what it is we actually do when we come to church week after week.
In order to answer that question I looked first to the dictionary, which was not particularly helpful. According to Webster, worship is: “reverent honor and homage paid to God or a sacred personage, or, to render religious reverence and homage, as to a deity.”
Now it’s not that reverence towards God isn’t a big part of it, but I actually think there is a whole lot more to it than that. So I kept looking, thinking I might find a better definition of what worship is. Eventually, I came across a quote by the late Anglican priest William Temple, who said that “to worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”
Now that’s more like it.
This definition— I believe— comes much closer to getting at the heart of what it means to worship. Because it’s not just about the routine of singing hymns, saying prayers, and paying homage to a deity. God doesn’t just call us into worship to pay homage. God calls us into worship in order to be in relationship with us. Worship is about making a connection with God. It’s about taking time to recognize and make room for God in our lives. It’s about acknowledging — because sometimes we get a little confused on this part— that we are in fact not God—and that we are a part of something larger than ourselves. It’s about acknowledging that Christianity is not something we do by ourselves. Worship connects us with God, but it also connects us with a larger Body of faithful people.
In our opening hymn this morning we sung an invocation from the African nation of Tanzania. In African culture, they have a deep understanding of how worship binds us together with God and one another. For them, it’s about the music. It’s about the music, the dancing, the drums, and the singing. Music and worship help shape community and identity— it transforms a group of haggard and disparate individuals into one Body in Christ. Music also bridges the gap between the very real problems of daily life— which in Africa can be some of the most impenetrable problems the world has known— and the transcendent God who we recognize as the creator of all life. It is through worship and song that a community is able to sing themselves into hope for peace and reconciliation in a broken and hurting world.
In our reading from Ephesians this morning, we hear that Christ brings peace to those who are far off and peace to those who are near. That being one in Christ, none of us are strangers to one another, but rather all of us belong to the household of God. All of us are part of the community Christ himself built. When we sing songs like our invocation from Tanzania, or the Hallelujah from Honduras, we stand in community and solidarity with Christians all over the world. We join our voices with theirs in one common song-- recognizing that despite our many differences, we are all part of the household of God. What’s more is that through our worship, we open ourselves up to hope in the midst of the harshness of life. Worship opens our minds to possibilities of healing beyond the fearful predictions of the pundits and the op-eds and the politicians. It awakens our imaginations to the possibility of something more-- a hope beyond our human frailties and imperfections. A hope that—in the words of St. Paul— cannot be seen.
Now we may not see it, but we can feel it. When we join our voices in song and our hearts are stirred, we feel that hope, and we know that it’s real.
And so we are connected by our common life of worship to other people of faith in nations all over the world. But there is more! That connection spans not only across the globe but also across time. Our common worship connects us with all those who have gone before us and all who will come after us. What we do every Sunday morning is shaped by hundreds and hundreds of years of church practice. Week after week, we say prayers that have been spoken by priests, mystics, and lay people since the first century. The Lord’s Prayer--which we say every week-- has also been uttered by apostles like Peter and James, theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, reformers such as Martin Luther, humanitarians such as Mother Theresa, and activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These individuals come from vastly different times and places, and God knows they would have plenty of theological and political differences between them. But they all have one thing in common with each other, and with us-- they worship. When we come together in worship every Sunday, we not only stand in their footprints— but we are also called to fill them— called to be next in the line of saints that spans from before the time of Christ to a mere generation ago.
The very last line of William Temple’s definition of worship says that one of the reasons we worship is to “devote the will to the purpose of God.” When we come to worship, we are reminded of all the saints who came before, and how they devoted their wills to the purposes of God in the work of building Christian unity, developing theology, reforming the church, working to end poverty, and fighting against tyranny and oppression.
Well guess what folks-- that work is not yet done! The church still needs people devoted to promoting unity in an ever more polarized and divided society. The church still needs people to develop theology that is relevant to the world we live in. The church still needs people who speak truth to power and hold the institutional church accountable. The church still needs people to fight poverty and oppression, and work towards justice in the form of human and civil rights.
Maybe, just maybe, those people are us!
But in order to do that work we need to be grounded. And that is yet another reason why worship matters. It grounds us in the faith of our fathers and mothers. It gives us the strength and encouragement to do the work that God calls us to do. It gives us the hope that the work can be done when others tell us it can't, and the imagination to see possibilities for peace and reconciliation when others tell us such things are impossible.
Now, despite all the compelling reasons I may have just given for why worship matters, the truth is that there are going to be mornings when you just don’t feel like it.
You’re tired.
You’re stressed.
You’re overwhelmed with work or family.
And you think to yourself, “Maybe just this one morning, I’ll stay home.”
My encouragement to you on those mornings is this: COME ANYWAY.
Because it is those mornings when we feel tired, stressed, depressed, or overwhelmed, that it is most important for us to be in community— that it is most important for us to be connected to God— source of life and giver of strength. It is those times when we don’t have the strength or energy to pray that we can let others lift us up with their prayers. And then someday, it will be our turn to do the praying when someone else cannot. That’s the great thing about community and our common life of worship together.
And so, we worship. We come here as individuals, but though our common worship together we become one body— united in Christ, strengthened by the spirit, and rooted in the love of God. And let all God’s people say: Amen.
This is a complicated question with a complex answer. There isn't just one factor as to why people in our culture have stopped coming to church. However, I think that one potential factor in the equation is that for many people, there isn't a sense of why worship really matters. And in a culture when we are all too busy, we are all over-scheduled and over-programmed, why would people go if they don't know why it matters? And so that’s what I want to focus on this morning. The question of why worship matters, and what it is we actually do when we come to church week after week.
In order to answer that question I looked first to the dictionary, which was not particularly helpful. According to Webster, worship is: “reverent honor and homage paid to God or a sacred personage, or, to render religious reverence and homage, as to a deity.”
Now it’s not that reverence towards God isn’t a big part of it, but I actually think there is a whole lot more to it than that. So I kept looking, thinking I might find a better definition of what worship is. Eventually, I came across a quote by the late Anglican priest William Temple, who said that “to worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”
Now that’s more like it.
This definition— I believe— comes much closer to getting at the heart of what it means to worship. Because it’s not just about the routine of singing hymns, saying prayers, and paying homage to a deity. God doesn’t just call us into worship to pay homage. God calls us into worship in order to be in relationship with us. Worship is about making a connection with God. It’s about taking time to recognize and make room for God in our lives. It’s about acknowledging — because sometimes we get a little confused on this part— that we are in fact not God—and that we are a part of something larger than ourselves. It’s about acknowledging that Christianity is not something we do by ourselves. Worship connects us with God, but it also connects us with a larger Body of faithful people.
In our opening hymn this morning we sung an invocation from the African nation of Tanzania. In African culture, they have a deep understanding of how worship binds us together with God and one another. For them, it’s about the music. It’s about the music, the dancing, the drums, and the singing. Music and worship help shape community and identity— it transforms a group of haggard and disparate individuals into one Body in Christ. Music also bridges the gap between the very real problems of daily life— which in Africa can be some of the most impenetrable problems the world has known— and the transcendent God who we recognize as the creator of all life. It is through worship and song that a community is able to sing themselves into hope for peace and reconciliation in a broken and hurting world.
In our reading from Ephesians this morning, we hear that Christ brings peace to those who are far off and peace to those who are near. That being one in Christ, none of us are strangers to one another, but rather all of us belong to the household of God. All of us are part of the community Christ himself built. When we sing songs like our invocation from Tanzania, or the Hallelujah from Honduras, we stand in community and solidarity with Christians all over the world. We join our voices with theirs in one common song-- recognizing that despite our many differences, we are all part of the household of God. What’s more is that through our worship, we open ourselves up to hope in the midst of the harshness of life. Worship opens our minds to possibilities of healing beyond the fearful predictions of the pundits and the op-eds and the politicians. It awakens our imaginations to the possibility of something more-- a hope beyond our human frailties and imperfections. A hope that—in the words of St. Paul— cannot be seen.
Now we may not see it, but we can feel it. When we join our voices in song and our hearts are stirred, we feel that hope, and we know that it’s real.
And so we are connected by our common life of worship to other people of faith in nations all over the world. But there is more! That connection spans not only across the globe but also across time. Our common worship connects us with all those who have gone before us and all who will come after us. What we do every Sunday morning is shaped by hundreds and hundreds of years of church practice. Week after week, we say prayers that have been spoken by priests, mystics, and lay people since the first century. The Lord’s Prayer--which we say every week-- has also been uttered by apostles like Peter and James, theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, reformers such as Martin Luther, humanitarians such as Mother Theresa, and activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These individuals come from vastly different times and places, and God knows they would have plenty of theological and political differences between them. But they all have one thing in common with each other, and with us-- they worship. When we come together in worship every Sunday, we not only stand in their footprints— but we are also called to fill them— called to be next in the line of saints that spans from before the time of Christ to a mere generation ago.
The very last line of William Temple’s definition of worship says that one of the reasons we worship is to “devote the will to the purpose of God.” When we come to worship, we are reminded of all the saints who came before, and how they devoted their wills to the purposes of God in the work of building Christian unity, developing theology, reforming the church, working to end poverty, and fighting against tyranny and oppression.
Well guess what folks-- that work is not yet done! The church still needs people devoted to promoting unity in an ever more polarized and divided society. The church still needs people to develop theology that is relevant to the world we live in. The church still needs people who speak truth to power and hold the institutional church accountable. The church still needs people to fight poverty and oppression, and work towards justice in the form of human and civil rights.
Maybe, just maybe, those people are us!
But in order to do that work we need to be grounded. And that is yet another reason why worship matters. It grounds us in the faith of our fathers and mothers. It gives us the strength and encouragement to do the work that God calls us to do. It gives us the hope that the work can be done when others tell us it can't, and the imagination to see possibilities for peace and reconciliation when others tell us such things are impossible.
Now, despite all the compelling reasons I may have just given for why worship matters, the truth is that there are going to be mornings when you just don’t feel like it.
You’re tired.
You’re stressed.
You’re overwhelmed with work or family.
And you think to yourself, “Maybe just this one morning, I’ll stay home.”
My encouragement to you on those mornings is this: COME ANYWAY.
Because it is those mornings when we feel tired, stressed, depressed, or overwhelmed, that it is most important for us to be in community— that it is most important for us to be connected to God— source of life and giver of strength. It is those times when we don’t have the strength or energy to pray that we can let others lift us up with their prayers. And then someday, it will be our turn to do the praying when someone else cannot. That’s the great thing about community and our common life of worship together.
And so, we worship. We come here as individuals, but though our common worship together we become one body— united in Christ, strengthened by the spirit, and rooted in the love of God. And let all God’s people say: Amen.
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