Chris Moyles’s commentary on charismatic worship

For those who don’t know, Chris Moyles is the most popular radio presenter in Britain; his morning show, on BBC Radio 1 (essentially a mainstream pop music station), attracts approaching 8m listeners. This video contains an extract from his show dubbed over the TV broadcast – of baptisms in a church in Peterborough – that they are discussing in the extract. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StEDAjhuiTo] Four things strike me about the comments, considered as useful data for missional concern in the UK: 1. Moyles (who is 35) and his posse belong to a generation that is no longer reflexively cynical about church. Britain, and Europe, is often described as ‘post-Christian,’ but this phrase can mean two very different things, or so it seems to me. A culture can be ‘post-Christian’ in the sense that it has consciously turned away from its historic commitment to Christianity. Church is inevitably then regarded as comical, outdated, irrelevant. Or a culture can be ‘post-Christian’ in the sense that it has lost any memory of ever having been Christian. Church is then alien, but at least potentially interesting. I grew up with the tail-end of the former concept; Moyles, four years younger (and a lot more culturally current…), seems firmly in the latter. Across the country, I suspect Moyles’s attitude is common in urban and suburban areas, and more widely in SE England; here in rural Scotland, we are a bit behind the times on this one. 2. The clip also demonstrates the lack of even basic knowledge concerning Christianity that younger generations in Britain now have. This is a missional issue – the Alpha course, for instance, assumes a significant level of cultural Christian understanding in its teaching material. 3. What is it that Moyles found attractive about this church service? Two things, it seems to me. Obviously, enthusiasm, commitment, engagement was important – ‘I’ve been to gigs with less atmosphere’. The church presented itself as vibrant and exciting, and this is in itself attractive. 4. The second attraction, though, was the professionalism of the performance: ‘they had a proper perspex cage around the drum kit and everything…’ They were doing what they did well. No peeling paint, no worn carpets – and you just know that the after-service drinks were not served in institutional green...

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Matt Redman’s doxological theology

There is a well-established tradition as to how academic theologians deal with contemporary worship music. You first decry the theological poverty of the music, then point to the traditional liturgy as the perfection of doxological theology, then express a wish that the music was more like the liturgy. Allow me to dissent from the tradition somewhat. Starting at the end, ‘the traditional liturgy’ strikes me as a deeply problematic concept. There are many different liturgical traditions, each instantiating different theological concerns. For some reason, theologians from a broadly evangelical background (who tend to be the ones decrying contemporary worship music, on account of the fact that they have encountered it) tend to point to Anglican liturgies for proper doxological theology. With all due respect, every Anglican liturgy ever promulgated is, as far as I can see, a theologically-incoherent political compromise between Catholic and Reformed traditions (not excluding the Book of Common Prayer, which when published offered a liturgy judged so poor that something like a third of Anglican clergy resigned their ministries rather than use it – OK, I know it wasn’t quite that simple, but…) At the other end, is there any serious theological vision in contemporary worship music? Let me take an example, Matt Redman’s FaceDown album. I choose this partly because I know it quite well, and partly because it is, more or less, a live recording of a worship event, and so might be expected to display whatever coherence can be found in this tradition. The CD begins with ‘Praise Awaits You,’ a song of approach addressed to God, asserting the people are gathered with the intention of worshiping, and are now ready to worship. Already, however, worship is understood as a response to God’s action, a continual theme of the album. Thus, the gathered, ready people cannot yet worship: they come and wait for God’s initiative (‘O Lord open our lips / And our mouths shall proclaim your praise’ – if you must). The next two songs then acknowledge and name the divine action that makes worship possible. First, atonement (‘Nothing but the blood’: ‘Your cross testifies to grace, tells of the Father’s heart, to make a way for us…’), and then revelation (‘Seeing You’: ‘No one can sing of things they have not seen – open our eyes towards a greater glimpse, the glory of you…’). Worship is now possible, but only as a response to God’s initiative, so the next track, ‘Gifted Response,’ acknowledges this explicitly: ‘This is a gifted response, Father we cannot come to you by our own merit. We will come in the name of your Son…’ The first song of explicit worship, ‘Dancing Generation,’ echoes the gifts of God that enable worship: atonement (‘Your mercy taught us how to dance…’) and revelation (‘Your glory taught us how to shout…’), both re-affirmed in the bridge (‘It’s the overflow of a forgiven soul, and now we’ve seen you Lord, our hearts cannot stay silent…’) In the narrative of the music, the experience of worship immediately leads to a desire for the deepening of the experience of God. In language strangely reminiscent of accounts of the ascent of the soul in the medieval mystical tradition, there is prayer for a more comprehensive sight of God (‘Pure Light’: ‘And through grace untold to see you, with this heart unveiled to know you, Lord in your pure light…’). The granting of this prayer leads to a further response of worship (‘Worthy, you are Worthy’) and to the central moment of the CD, the title track: Welcomed in to the courts of the King I’ve been ushered in to Your presence Lord, I stand on Your merciful ground Yet with every step tread with reverence And I’ll fall facedown As your glory shines around… This is followed by a further reminder that all worship depends on God’s prevenient action, ‘Breathing the Breath’: ‘We have nothing to give that didn’t first come from your hands. We have nothing to offer you which you did not provide.’ Then the music moves into a pair of songs that serve as dismissal: an affirmation (‘Mission’s Flame’) that worship must result in action: ‘Let worship be the fuel for mission’s flame. We’re going with a passion for your name…’ and also can provide a motive for mission: ‘Let worship be the heart of mission’s aim – to see the nations recognise your fame, till every tribe and tongue voices your praise, send us out.’ Finally, ‘If I have not love’ borrows from 1 Cor 13:1-3 to affirm that the ultimate result of a vision of God must be an increase of love, for God...

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Preaching, worship, and reality

(Further thoughts, relating both to my George Beasley-Murray memorial lecture, text available here in case anyone is interested, and to this post.) Somewhere near the heart of the argument in my GBM lecture was the question, does preaching reflect reality or change it? To take the classic historical example, most of the Lutheran debates about the preaching of the law and the preaching of the gospel turn on the supposition that the preaching of the gospel is effective proclamation: an authoritative declaration that the hearer, merely by virtue of having heard the declaration, is now forgiven and reborn through the atoning sacrifice of Christ (which declaration, of course, demands the response of faith, and permits of no other response). It seems to me that many of the recent ‘preaching wars’ have been between people who think preaching should reflect the realities of our lives as lived, and people who think preaching should reflect the reality of life as narrated in Scripture. (In Hans Frei’s terms, when preaching do we read the text into the world, or the world into the text?) I suspect that both are wrong: our life as lived is broken, fragmented, partial, unnarratable (‘fallen’) – it has no nameable reality. The only proper response to any proposed metanarrative is incredulity; we live in a theatre of the absurd, with no plot, no meaning, to interpret our various exits and entrances. In this context, preaching is an act of re-narration; it is a moment within God’s overarching salvific work of gathering up the broken pieces of life and world and, through Christ, weaving them into new creation, a moment in which the new story of life and world is written, and, by being told, is (at least potentially) actualised. But this is not merely the announcement of the eternal reality, the unchanging truth, of things as revealed by the text of Scripture; as far as I can see, when it comes to created realities, Scripture is not very interested in unchanging truths. Rather, it is a series of announcements that God is doing a new thing – each new thing, of course, is perfectly congruent with what went before, but it is nonetheless, new, unpredicted, unexepected. The ongoing reality of salvation and sanctification is the weaving together of the broken fragments of our lives into a new story that can make sense. Preaching, thus understood, is a moment in which the Sovereign Lord is making all things new, it is the writing of names thus-far unspoken and unknown (Rev. 3:12) – the creation of hitherto-unimagined identities and meanings. It is, fundamentally, the effectual announcement that in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has determined that your life, also, will be changed decisively from this moment on. (Theological aside 1: As some readers will realise, somewhere beneath all this is a particular account of the relation of created time to God’s eternity, such that election is something eternally real and so actual and happening at every moment in time. Call it ‘Barthian’ if you must, but it is splattered all over the earlier tradition if you bother to look for it (try tracing the doctrine of creatio continua for an extreme example) – as Barth well knew.) (Theological aside 2: what, then, of Frei? He was, of course, describing an observed shift in hermenuetics when he came up with his memorable phrase (it’s somewhere early in Eclipse; I don’t have either book or precise reference with me); I suspect that the implicit ontology of the post-liberal theology developed by Frei, Lindbeck, and others might tend in the sort of direction I’m describing here, even if none of them would particularly locate the decisive re-narration in the ministry of preaching – Will Willimon has come closest to working it through in these directions, although with a more political slant than I’ve given here.) If all this is right, then what of worship? Clearly, there is a liturgical place for both the narratings of reality that I have rejected: in worship we do recall and celebrate the eternal truths of God’s deity; and in worship we also hold the contingent and fractured reality of the world before God in intercession and petition. But is that all we do? Does worship change reality also? The tradition of charismatic hymnody which was one half of the soundtrack of my Christian formation assumed, quite emphatically, that it does: ‘By the power of His blood we now claim this ground’; ‘Come and sing this song with gladness, as your hearts are filled with joy…’; and so on. There are strands of declaratory pronouncement in...

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A sonnet for Trinity Sunday

To God the Father Great God, within whose simple essence we Nothing but that which is thyself can find: When on thyself thou did’st reflect thy mind Thy thought was God, which took the form of thee: And when this God thus born, thou lov’st, and he Loved thee again, with passion of like kind, (As lovers’ sighs, which meet, become one wind) Both breathed one spright of equal deity. Eternal father, whence these two do come And wil’st the title of my father have, As heavenly knowledge in my mind engrave, That it thy son’s true image may become: And cense my heart with sighs of holy Love, That it the temple of the spright may prove. Henry Constable (1562-1613) (A better doctrine of the Trinity than can be found in most current dogmatics, combined with warm-hearted devotion; and all in perfect Petrarchan form; what more could you ask...

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