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 Church is inevitably then regarded as comical, outdated, irrelevant.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...
Read MoreMatt 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...
Read MorePreaching, 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...
Read MoreLiving in the real world
I’ve commented fairly often in conversation that the only downside of having moved to St Andrews is, when faced with the most irritating comment that comes to pastors and academics alike, ‘But you don’t live in the real world, do you?’ I now simply have to admit, no; this strange and marvelous town is many things, but it is just a little too like fairyland to be ‘the real world’. The thought came back to me when I noticed that several friends (including Andy and Craig) had launched an initiative at the recent BUGB/BMS Assembly called Real Life Worship. The stated aim (in a post by Andy) is this: It is an attempt to connect real life to worship. Worship that forms us relationally, politically, socially and economically. Now, I understand the point, and I support it wholeheartedly (and I love the prayer that forms the first substantial blog post), but I find the language odd – and actually slightly disturbing. What is ‘real life,’ or ‘the real world’? If we interrogate the use of the terms, it tends to end up in one of two places: either finance, or a place of naked suffering. (To their credit, Andy, Craig, and friends seem not to have fallen into either of these traps; rather they are aiming at something like ‘the rest of life’ or ‘ordinary living’). The notion that there is something ontologically basic (‘real’) about finance is merely ridiculous. Like all idols, money is a fiction, one which we once found useful but now have imbued with so much authority over our lives that it has the ability to destroy us. (This concept of idolatry from 1 Cor 8.) Money may be powerful, but it is in no way ‘real’. It makes promises that it is unable to keep (‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand…’ – the notes I current have in my wallet carry this promise from RBS, and it seems a little hollow), on which we choose to build our lives (and so we have reconstructed our society in far-reaching ways to protect me, and RBS, from their defaulting on that promise). Our choice does not make it ‘real’ – it merely makes us foolish. Alternatively, ‘the real world’ is the place where struggle and suffering is most visible and desperate. There is something more ‘authentic’ about life on an urban estate (or in the face of urban poverty) than in the comfortable suburbs. This idea is more explicable than the previous one: human reactions in contexts of suffering and poverty are generally more immediate and direct, less covered over by the mores of polite society. But still, is this ‘real’? I presume that God is real. Our reality is the truth of our being as intended and determined by God. It would be tempting to become slightly Buddhist at this point, and claim suffering as illusion, but that would be wrong. East of Eden, God’s determination of human life is gospel shaped, following the pattern of cross-and-resurrection. Suffering is real, but only within this wider narrative. What, however, of where I started: pastoral ministry; academic life; the practice of worship? I claim no privilege for the academy, but I’m not sure that I am prepared to accept any necessary deficit, either. A particular moment of academic life, or a whole academic career, may proceed at some disconnection from reality, but there is nothing necessary or even likely about that. We are as capable as surrending to the idol of financially-driven priorities, and so living unreal lives, as anyone else, but not more so, as far as I can see; we are capable of devoting ourselves to chasing irrelevancies, but so are many others. Pastoral ministry I do claim privilege for. The calling of the pastor is, by the ministry of Word and sacrament, to be a constant reminder of the real world in the lives of those who chase idols or illusions, and to fit them for reality. Worship, finally, and back to Andy’s language: ‘connecting real life to worship’? How can we imagine worship that is not connected to ‘real life,’ the life God is forming within us and fitting us for? Worship is real life, pretty much; all other life is ‘real’ only insofar as it is ordered by worship. (Of course, I realise that the ‘Real Life Worship’ folks know this, and are precisely aiming to find modes of worship that usefully order the rest of life so it becomes real – an urgent and necessary task; I’m not trying to criticise what they are doing, only reflecting on a chance turn of...
Read MoreJohn Stackhouse on worship music
[ht Andy and Ben] John Stackhouse (who was once kind enough to buy me breakfast) has posted a farily blunt condemnation of certain trends in contemporary worship music, focusing on Chris Tomlin. He makes, as far as I can see, two separable complaints: on the one hand, contemporary worship music (as exemplified by Tomlin) is lyrically poor – an aesthetic judgement; on the other, that it is doctrinally light or erroneous – a theological judgement. I have posted before on the error of assuming that the great songs that have come down to us from earlier ages were in any way normal in those ages. Wesley, Watts and Newton were the pinnacles of what was happening in their day, not average examples. And each of them wrote his fair share of weaker lyrics – consider this, from a verse-diatribe against Muslims, by Charles Wesley: The smoke of the infernal cave, Which half the Christian world o’erspread, Disperse, Thou heavenly Light, and save The souls by that Impostor led, That Arab-chief, as Satan bold, Who quite destroy’d Thy Asian fold. O might the blood of sprinkling cry For those who spurn the sprinkled blood! Assert Thy glorious Deity, Stretch out Thine arm, Thou Triune God The Unitarian fiend expel, And chase his doctrine back to hell. Yes, well… Charles Wesley was allowed to publish 6000-odd hymns by his brother (who censored an unknown number as not being good enough). We know perhaps twenty – perhaps not that. Were the other 5980 all of the same quality as ‘And Can it Be’ or ‘Hark the Herald’? Oddly enough, no… (and even his best are sometimes the result of editorial work: famously, Wesley wrote ‘Hark, how all the welkin rings / Glory to the King of Kings…’ Whitefield edited the first two lines a few years later, much to Wesley’s disgust, by all accounts; the first verse also ended ‘universal nature say / Christ the Lord is born today’; someone else put that one right…). But consider a hymn-writer we’ve all-but forgotten: Benjamin Keach was a significant leader amongst the Baptists, and taught our churches to sing hymns, which is pretty amazing, when you consider the general quality of his output: The Pure in heart are thy delight O Thou most holy One! All that do what things are right May sing thy Praise alone. All mixtures, Lord, in Doctrine And Practice thou dost hate; Ourselves therefore with wicked men Let’s not associate! (Hymn 32 from A Feast of Fat Things (1696); this is pretty average quality for Keach; by no means his worst.) Of course, that’s not an excuse for bad writing, but it does make Ben’s point: good hymn-writing is hard, really hard. We cannot expect every song written to be of high quality, and there is a place for singing about welkins, because an editor may appear who puts the problem right and gives us a great hymn from the wreckage of something that just isn’t. (Whittier’s ‘Dear Lord and Father’ is actually the last six stanzas of an odd 17-stanza poem entitled ‘The Brewing of Soma’ in begins like this: The fagots blazed, the cauldron’s smoke Up through the green wood curled; ‘Bring honey from the hollow oak, Bring milky sap,’ the brewers spoke, In the childhood of the world. And brewed they well or brewed they ill, The priests thrust in their rods, First tasted, and then drank their fill, and shouted, with one voice and will, ‘Behold the drink of gods!’ Who saw a hymn in that?!) John’s complaints about the quality of Tomlin’s writing are actually slightly eccentric: he complains about mixed metaphors (which is a classic of bad hymnody, admittedly), but also about the use of half-rhymes. But this is endemic in Christian hymnody (and in English poetry), and is in some of the greatest hymns we have. Wesley again: Come, and partake the gospel feast; Be saved from sin; in Jesus rest; O taste the goodness of your God, And eat his flesh, and drink his blood! (From ‘Come sinners to the gospel feast’) Neither of those ‘rhymes’ is even close, but it’s a great piece of writing by any poetic standards I know. Rhyming ‘God’ with ‘blood’ is so common in Wesley as to be almost a leitmotiv. What of the claim of weak theology? John says ‘We are the most educated Christians in history, and yet our lyrics are considerably stupider than our much less educated Christian forebears…’ Well, for starters I’m not sure about this – once again, one would need to look at what they actually sang, not the classics that have come down...
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