Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 3 - August 26, 2019
Beginning toward the end of the nineteenth century and extending throughout the entire twentieth century, there has been a troublesome shift in the understanding and practice of pastoral care from a biblical and sacramental model to a therapeutic, counseling, or psychological model.98
The distinctive nature of the pastor, however, as a servant of the Word and Sacrament, puts him into the unique position as a representative of Christ who comes to His people in the Liturgy. The Liturgy is always an eschatological event, preparing people for a blessed end and the final consummation. This does not mean that the pastor simply shows up to read some liturgical texts on Sunday or at the bedside. Certainly, pastoral care includes listening, silence, spiritual conversation, and extempore prayer. But the Liturgy is certain, true, and tested.
Christianity is not about great faith; it is about faith in a great God.
Even where Christians and liturgy are not, even there God is meeting with people and showing them His grace. The church does not gather because Christ is present in the meal; the church gathers because Christ is in our hearts and our community, and He shares the meal of grace with us.
Lou Giglio has provocatively and helpfully explained:
If one has any other goal in gathered worship than engaging with God, coming into the presence of God to glorify and enjoy Him—any other aim than to ascribe His worth, commune with Him, and receive His favor—then one has yet to understand worship.
Our aim, as the congregation gathers to meet with God in public worship on the Lord's Day, is to glorify and enjoy God, in accordance with His written Word.
An apt motto for this approach is: “Read the Bible. Preach the Bible. Pray the Bible. Sing the Bible. See the Bible.” Committing to a regular diet of these five components would revolutionize congregational worship in evangelical churches. It would also contribute to doxological unity (without imposing an unbiblical, artificial uniformity).
People who appreciate the Bible's teaching on worship will have a high view of preaching. They will have little time for the personality-driven, theologically void, superficially practical monologues that pass for preaching today.
Do we not learn the language of Christian devotion from the Bible? Do we not learn the language of confession and penitence from the Bible? Do we not learn the promises of God to believe and claim in prayer from the Bible? Don't we learn the will of God, the commands of God, and the desires of God for His people, for which we are to plead in prayer, from the Bible?
Scripture passages that discuss singing in public worship include Psalm 98:1; Revelation 5:9; Matthew 26:30; Nehemiah 12:27,46; Acts 16:25; Ephesians 5:19; and Colossians 3:16.
What we mean by “sing the Bible” is that our singing ought to be biblical—shot through with the language, categories, and theology of the Bible. It ought to reflect the themes and proportion of the Bible, as well as its substance and weightiness.
Consequently, when evangelicals consider circumstances (such as having a “contemporary style” of music) as key to the effectiveness of public worship, or as the distinctive of a particular congregation's approach to corporate worship, they manifest, and perhaps even foster in their congregants, two errors. The first error is thinking that circumstances are more important than the elements and content of our gathered worship. The second error is thinking that circumstances are neutral.
Since our worship is for God, our first question is not, “What do we want to do?” or even “What would others like to do?” but “What does God want us to do?”
In the Bible we find God accepting these acts of worship: singing, praying, reading the Bible, preaching, celebrating sacraments, giving offerings, confessing the faith, and making holy vows.
True Christian worship is filled with delight—the delight of the believer's heart in God Himself. The congregation delights in God because He is God.
Careful exegesis must determine what is descriptive and what is prescriptive for worship today.
Traditional hymns were written in a time and a place apart from the world of the biblical writers and psalmists—they are cultural expressions of another era in time. As beautiful as they may be, they sound very little like real Jewish psalms from their time or place would have sounded. If traditional hymns were culturally derived, why should not the worship we express today be a strong cultural derivative as well?
I am contending that the continually stated preference for a style (yes, I believe that traditional evangelical worship expression is a style among styles) and an ongoing elevation of that style in contradistinction to others begins to make a preference a prejudice.
I believe we are getting better at closely examining both our lives and our doctrine. I just also happen to believe that we have some glaring blind spots, and we are hiding behind “we are biblical” language in order to say “we are right.”
People like certain styles, and there is nothing wrong with that, provided the lyrics are biblically sound.
Music has a way of bypassing the mind and engaging the heart. Music has the capacity to stir deep passions and harness the energies of zeal.
Contemporary worship is that expression of worship within the Christian church today marked by the primary usage of contemporarily written worship lyrics and music, is sonically concurrent (to some degree) with the music of popular culture, and is used widely and increasingly across the Protestant (and to some degree, Roman Catholic) spectrum of today's globally worshiping congregations. These expressions of Christian worship music and liturgy are rooted in multiple contemporary cultural idioms, contemporary cultural soundscapes, and contemporary cultural mindsets. Contemporary worship music
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Worship is all about God and pertains to me only in that I, in relationship with Him, share in this privileged act of communion.
In other words, as human beings we are engaged in historical process along with the rest of humankind. We will wrestle with each other over truth and in the end, we hope, find that we each brought something to the tussle that strengthened both parties.
Contemporary worship engages culture on the levels of language, music, intimacy, emotion, simplicity, and story—and subverts worldviews in the process.
The edge is a tenuous and unforgiving place, but it seems to be the place where Jesus and His disciples lived.
Though there are kingdoms in conflict, we cannot utterly dismiss the fact that all of culture is not evil.
There are three major practical skills that a contemporary worship leader must develop to lead a group of people in worship effectively. These three practical skills are song selection, band development, and worship leadership The ministry skills of pastoral leadership, theological reflection, and spiritual formation all provide balance and sharpening to these practical skills.
The music of contemporary worship can bridge the gap between one's culture and one's faith, creating space for a new way of thinking to dawn on the soul's horizon.
Music unlocks the heart, and unlocking hearts to worship God is the co-mission of the church with Christ.
We are designed to live out the words of the early church bishop Iranaeus of Lyons, spoken in AD 185: “The glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”
As Dallas Willard puts it, “Emotions are a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.”65
To say “tsk, tsk” to young believers all over the world for their worship music choices, calling those choices cultural accommodations and television-induced penchants—while they live lives committed to radical social conversion in the manner of Jesus—is preposterous.
It is clear that much of contemporary worship music is lyrically simple in comparison to hymns.
We pursue unity in the body of Christ, yet none but the most extreme among us would demand that uniformity be the visible evidence of our unity.
Rich as they are, the sound of hymns can be somewhat homogeneous.
We are listening to Robert Webber when he calls us to Rediscover the Trinitarian nature of worship (we worship the Father in the language of mystery; the Son in the language of story; the Spirit in the language of symbol). Rediscover the theological themes of transcendence, creation, immanence, incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension and eschaton. Rediscover how God acts through the sacred signs of water, bread and wine, oil and laying on of hands. Rediscover the central nature of the table of the Lord in the Lord's supper, breaking of bread, Communion, and Eucharist. Rediscover how
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Those whose theological roots are found in a revivalist or Arminian theology of conversion (that man cooperates in his conversion by free will) are quite at home in highly emotional worship designed to move people to “give their hearts to Jesus” and to “choose God now.”
According to Wilt, the important question for contemporary worship is, “Where can I go and meet with God?” This is an important question. A more important question, however, is, where and how do I meet a gracious God?
Ecstatic feelings of excitement, passion, and joy may cause one to feel as if he or she is in the presence of God, but feelings can be easily fooled and are frustratingly unreliable, fickle, and fleeting.
Any attempt to establish one's faith on a musically induced emotional experience generated by worship leaders and praise bands/music is to build one's faith on a very uncertain and unstable foundation. Music does not sanctify; God's Word does (John 17:17).
The real question is not, is Christ worthy of me and my life, but am I worthy of Him?
When Christ speaks, people are gathered, and His Word always comes with the Holy Spirit, who creates faith, sustains faith, forgives sins, sanctifies, comforts, and gives life and salvation.
There is an unspoken assumption throughout his essay that one who knows Jesus instinctively knows how to worship God.
Quite simply because Wilt has acknowledged that, from the contemporary worship perspective, the debate is not over the interpretation and application of Scripture. Rather, it is a philosophical and sociological discussion about the relationship between the church and the culture it is trying to reach with the gospel of Jesus Christ. To begin with, this helpfully explains why so often contemporary worship apologists and their critics seem to be talking past each other.
To begin with, culture is simply not the neutral tool or context that Wilt assumes it to be.
These values seem to betray the extent to which Wilt is being shaped by culture rather than Scripture at precisely those points where Scripture and our culture are at odds.
Certainly we must worship our Savior from within our culture. Yet just as certainly worship must take its cues not from its context, but from its object, not from our changing culture, but from the unchanging character of God.
I submit this book should probably have been called “Perspectives of Conservative-Evangelical-Primarily-White-Suburban-Middle-to-Upper-Middle Class Worship.”
