Jan 02, 2012
Historic Worship or Worship according to the Church that Started Yesterday
Posted by Pastor Todd Murphy in | Comments (0)
Well happy new year. It is time to start a new year of blogging. Hmmm. There are so many places we could begin. But for now I want to start with something really practical and central to the life of the Church, worship. That is what the Church is all about. The call of the Gospel is the call to sinners who do not worship and obey God to do just that, to become worshipers and practitioners of God’s commandments. That is what the Bible calls repentance. However I like to describe the modern worship of the church that is not historically Protestant or Catholic (call it broadly evangelical) as “the worship of the church that started yesterday.” Ok Todd, so what do you mean by that? Well lets back up a bit.
Sacred Journey is historically speaking “evangelical” in the sense that the Protestant Reformation was “evangelical.” But that is something totally different from “evangelicalism.” What I mean is that what we are primarily concerned with is the euanggelion, “the Gospel.” The Reformation was a Gospel-centric movement to recall the Church back to it earliest orthodox theology and Gospel tradition. So as a church within the “Reformed Church” tradition, what we really mean by that is “Reformed Catholic Church.” The term “catholic” means “according to the whole.” So in the spirit of catholicity, the Reformers went back to scripture and the Fathers to see how the Church worshipped and practiced “according to the whole.”
Evangelicalism, as we know it today, really has its genesis in the First and especially the Second Great Awakenings. Up until about the 1700’s you could count the major Christian traditions on about 10 fingers. But with the Second Great Awakening Christianity splintered into thousands of disunited fragments. What happened? Basically the Church entered its own period of the Judges where “everyone did what was right in his or her own eyes." Here is the bottom line, everyone started giving themselves the authority to pick and choose what the doctrine and practice of the Church should be. They jettisoned the standard practices that were core to Orthodox, Roman, Anglican, Reformed and Lutheran Churches. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that there was nothing that needed fixing in any of these. But in spite of their differences, there were core non-negotiables in all. So to put it simply, our goal at SJC is to be “evangelical” in the sense of being focused on the Gospel, but not to subscribe to “Evangelicalism.” But this also does not mean that we do not consider those who are among Evangelicalism are not our brothers/sisters in the Gospel. There is much we share.
Here is why I am writing. I am often approached by visitors to our Church from the ranks of Evangelicalism because they find themselves somewhere between quaintly intrigued, and utterly mystified by what we do. In fact we have had people occasionally utterly offended by what we do in our service. Most of the time it is just a paradoxical confusion as to why we proclaim such a robust message of repentance and faith, and yet our service is filled with “catholic” things such as liturgical prayers, creeds, weekly celebration of the sacraments, infant baptism, etc. On the other hand we do not have any of the standard worship furniture expected of Evangelicalism such as alter calls, seeker-sensitive services, very redundant Worship music from the 90‘s, and emotionalism, etc. Well there is a simple answer for this. Our services and gathering are fundamentally structured around what the Church has always done.
There is a bi-polar problem in the Church today between form on the one hand and motivation on the other. Basically some of your old denominations tend to find their security in sticking to form while Evangelicalism finds security in the motivation of the heart with little attention to form. And that is why both are sickly. You cannot really have one without the other and have a healthy church. The forms of worship, be those sacraments or creeds, do not have 2000 years of history in the Church for no reason at all. They act as guide wires to worship. But they do not get the job done by themselves. Our heart, mind, will, and emotions must be engaged. But having them engaged without some structure, tradition, and guidance leaves us with the disunified ecclesiastical mess that is now called Western Evangelicalism. How many Pentecostal groups are there? How many Baptist, How many non-denominational denominations? And how is any of this good for the testimony and witness of the Church?
Here is the bottom line. The reason “Evangelicalism” is such a fragmented and disunited mess is because of a spirit of independence. Independence is rebellion, and rebellion, is as the sin of witchcraft (1 Sam. 15:23). Nathan O. Hatch documented this very well in his insightful book The Democratization of American Christianity. Here he shows how that in the American colonies following the war of independence, that same populist spirit bled over into the religious sphere. The broken state of the Church in the west today is due to nothing short of a rebellious spirit of independence. We think we have the right to choose both what church, and what doctrine is best for us. We have rejected historical Church tradition. But try that with you kids at dinner for a while. Let them choose what suits their tastes best and watch them put on the pounds as they gorge themselves with cookies and ice-cream for dinner. Very seldom is what is most preferable the most healthy for us. That is the kind of Church Evangelicalism has produced, a flabby and sick Church.
So when I am quizzically asked why we do what we do at SJC, my answer is something like this: “this is what the church has always done!” I usually get some blank stares or a “but what about the Bible?” What about it? The Bible is to be read an interpreted by the Church as a whole, “according to the whole.” Who made you or me the private and final say in what is doctrinally right or wrong. That does not mean we have no input ourselves, but it also means that our individual opinion or interpretation has no right to trump 2000 years of what the Church has practiced. So when I am asked “why do you say creeds,” I say, “because they are my creeds because I am a Christian and member of the Church.” And when I am asked, why do you baptize infants? I say “because that is what the Church has always done and it would be audacious for us to think that we can dispense with what the Church has always done because we do not immediately see with wisdom of it.”
But you may say, but Todd, what if I really do not believe that ________, is right? Lets use baptism for an example. Maybe you are like me and come from a background where you were taught that baptizing infants was a heresy. Well the first thing to understand is that itself is an interpretation and tradition you were taught. So you can’t be sure of its correctness any more than the opposite. Second, look at it historically. What the Church has always practiced was the baptism of infants and the idea of excluding our children from the Church is what is actually “new.” Lets be very clear, the term heresy basically means to “choose.” So a heresy is when someone chooses their own private interpretation over the established practice of the Church. heresy by definition is choosing our own way over that of the Church. But that all aside, the church needs to be a safe haven where you humbly learn doctrine as you go. We have families at SJC who cannot swallow the infant baptism pill. No problem. They are part of our family, we love them because they are apart of our church family. And they have the room to work out their own understanding of the Gospel as we do.
Further, I am not sitting here thinking that none of my theology and practice needs correcting either. That is what it means to be a disciple, a “learner” of the Gospel. But because of that knowledge of my own brokenness and imperfection, I am going to follow the pattern of what the Church has historically practiced to be safe. I am going to avoid leaning on my own private opinion that is so fallible.
The problem is not in disagreement. Christians are always going to disagree and struggle with things. The problem is with breaking with the Church and inventing new denominations because we do not like something. That is the history of Evangelicalism. Its sin is not in taking issue with this or that doctrine. Its sin is this: First for not doing its homework to see what the Church had originally practiced and trying harder to understand the wisdom of it; Second, the disunity of breaking with the Church and starting new denominations and traditions in its place. This has lead to the untold fracturing of the church and the destruction of its witness in the world.
Here is my question for the new year. What if the Church began to go back to what the Church has always done, follow that in faith and unify, regardless of our differences. That is what we are trying to do at SJC. We are trying to be a community where one is confronted with historic Christianity and yet with a gentle latitude to let people work out their understanding of the faith in community. We are not trying to homogenize people into all reciting the same bullet list of ideas. We are not interested in making people into infant baptists, Calvinists, or anything else. We are interested only in leading people to a robust following of Jesus. We are pursuing historic Christian belief, orthodoxy. But that is not a place, but a pursuit. And everyone is not at the same place in the pilgrimage. And so as we lead people in this pursuit, we do not want to be a church of the worship that started yesterday. We want to be a haven for those who want to learn the historic Christian faith that was once delivered to the saints.
Posted by Pastor Todd Murphy in | Comments (0)
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