We held our "Yay for You" service on Sunday night to celebrate the end of an eight week leadership training course for young leaders in our town. We put together a worship team of people who had never played together before - utter madness.
We didn't have enough worship time either.
But friends and supporters were a gracious audience, and they all had enough experience in their own patch to know how to follow directions and pick up if they happened to get lost. And God is very gracious.
It was high energy stuff, and yet we only pulled together a couple of brackets of three. Our usual Sunday service is just so staid by comparison, even using the same songs. Partly having a different keyboard player helped, and having a bass player, even one as shonky as me was useful.
But overall, the service illustrated for me just how different the expectations and experience of contemporary worship is.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Creeds and worship
How do creeds relate to worship?
Do you want a theological or a liturgical answer?
Theologically, what we believe shapes how we worship, and I think how we worship shapes what we believe.
I wonder how well we are served by the Nicene-Constantinople creed, born in controversy, established to delineate a particular orthodoxy in a specific location. Our arguments are less over whether Jesus descended to the dead, and more about how Jesus can be like you if Jesus really is like me.
Liturgically, saying or singing creeds together has a lot going for it. There can be a discussion about whether a creed is a framework, like jazz, or a prison. Some worship traditions seem to manage without formal statements of what they believe.
And which creeds are we talking about anyway? The ones that 'all' Christians everywhere believe? Or the local, recent new ones that try to address the issues?
I wonder if the question itself is loaded? Should creeds relate to worship? It all smacks of an intellectual, rational, logical approach to worship which leaves out the poetry, the non-linear, the creative dancing to the song of the Spirit, the spontaneous, no, not the contrived, planned spontaneity of a pentecostal singfest, but, well, for example, in worship on Sunday, a baby provided a counterpoint to Chris' communion liturgy. Delightful.
Do you want a theological or a liturgical answer?
Theologically, what we believe shapes how we worship, and I think how we worship shapes what we believe.
I wonder how well we are served by the Nicene-Constantinople creed, born in controversy, established to delineate a particular orthodoxy in a specific location. Our arguments are less over whether Jesus descended to the dead, and more about how Jesus can be like you if Jesus really is like me.
Liturgically, saying or singing creeds together has a lot going for it. There can be a discussion about whether a creed is a framework, like jazz, or a prison. Some worship traditions seem to manage without formal statements of what they believe.
And which creeds are we talking about anyway? The ones that 'all' Christians everywhere believe? Or the local, recent new ones that try to address the issues?
I wonder if the question itself is loaded? Should creeds relate to worship? It all smacks of an intellectual, rational, logical approach to worship which leaves out the poetry, the non-linear, the creative dancing to the song of the Spirit, the spontaneous, no, not the contrived, planned spontaneity of a pentecostal singfest, but, well, for example, in worship on Sunday, a baby provided a counterpoint to Chris' communion liturgy. Delightful.
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