In processing this further, I am thinking that it might be appropriate to look at the time between all worship services as an intermission, irrespective of whether we have received a benediction or not, since worship is the meaning of time. The Westminster Shorter Confession supports this idea when it asks, “What is the chief end of man?” to which it responds, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Thus according to this confession, which is intended to function as a biblical summation, the very purpose of our existence (an existence that moves through time) is the glorification and enjoyment of God. This can be further distilled by saying that the purpose of human existence is to worship God, as worshiping God means glorifying him particularly by expressing that he is our deepest delight and satisfaction, or using the words of the confession, our deepest enjoyment.

In viewing the time between services as an intermission, a potential problem is that it could imply taking a break from worship, which would further imply that there is a space where humans could be unhinged from the purpose of their existence. This is nonsense. Drawing from experience, I would like to try to resolve this problem by pointing out that whenever there is an intermission, at whatever kind of performance, the crowd conducts themselves in a way that is appropriate to the venue. Translating this into the context of worship, the venue in which we live is God’s world, and we should always conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the place we occupy. Moreover, and more importantly, the venue in which we live is one in which the distinction between actors and audience is dissolved, as all who come to the show are called to actively participate. In this context, the stage, which would be the worship service proper, is merely a focal point for the performance we carry into the world, and the intermission is just that time where we embody the performance we participated in upon the stage.

Most North American Christians assume they have the right, if not obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the church to take the Bible out the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to every child when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked… Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.

Yikes!! What possessed Mr. Hauerwas to say this? Isn’t he undermining the Protestant conviction regarding the priesthood of all believers with its concomitant impulse to deconstruct the barrier between the laity and priests, by giving all believers access to the Scriptures?

The rationale for Hauerwas’ statement comes earlier in this section where Hays, the author of The Moral Vision of the New Testament, pointed out the influence of the Patristics, particularly Athanasius, on Hauerwas’ thinking regarding the relationship between one’s character and one’s vision. The idea is that one’s moral constitution functions as a lens through which one sees the world, and all things in the world, including texts. This means that one’s moral disposition will profoundly influence how one will appropriate and apply the Scriptures. This, perhaps, can be summed up in saying that corrupt people will read and apply the scriptures corruptly.

I have to confess that I see worth in Hauerwas’ critique, and yet I wonder about our need to hear the Word of God in order to be revivified, renewed, and morally transformed. Though I have not read how Hauerwas addresses this matter, I imagine he would say that such need should primarily be met through the Church’s encounter with the Word, which is to say that the proper context for reading Scripture is in the gathering of the Church, not in the privacy of one’s prayer closet.

This response, however, still tramples upon my Protestant (and perhaps bourgeois) instincts. And yet, there is historical precedent to support Hauerwas’ proposal. In the early Church there were no mass produced Bibles, and so the reading of Scripture was a collective affair. Theologically, there is still further support in that a dominant motif for understanding the life of a believer is incorporation. When a person comes to faith he or she is made a part of the figurative body of Christ, which through the Spirit is connected to the resurrected and exalted body of Christ. This means that salvation is not primarily a private, me-and-God, affair, but a response to God’s purpose to sum up all  things in and through Jesus. Certainly, in this light, the collective gathering of the Church is the most proper context for reading Scripture.

Having said all this, I am still not willing to go out and retrieve Bibles from the hands of the unwashed masses. I know of too many instances, both now and in history, where people were edified and personally transformed through a private reading of Scriptures.

I guess I am going to have to consider all of this a bit more.

Celebrant: We pray for Barak our president, Arnold our governor, Ashley our mayor, and for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world
Congregation : That there may be justice and peace on the earth

In this particular prayer a liberal president and a conservative governor and mayor are equally upheld, and so it forces Christians to pray across party lines. To generalize, it puts the name of potential political adversaries on the lips of believers to ask that God would not curse them, nor judge them, but uphold them, and regardless of their political persuasion, guide them by wisdom.

I would love it if all who called themselves followers of Christ would demonstrate the spirit of this prayer in their lives. I would love it if the spirit of this prayer was so characteristic of Christians that the world, and particularly the media, couldn’t figure out where to place them on the political spectrum. This certainly is one way the Church could demonstrate that it lives, moves, and has its being beyond the broken options of this world.

Somewhere in the New Testament Christians are referred to as a peculiar people. The idea behind this designation is that Christians are to be genuinely engaged in the world, without fitting into the pattern or patterns of this world. Christians are to be completely active in societies without becoming rooted in the ideologies that profoundly constitute the people of those societies. In short, to be peculiar is to not fit, and to not fit is to be so caught up in the Kingdom that no worldly category can contain you.

To sum up what I am saying, I want to see the liturgy spill across the walls of the Church and out into the world.

Ya gotta give me a break regarding the quality of this photo as it was done with my cell phone, which is not amenable to taking pictures in low light. It is my plan to go back with a better camera. For now, however, I wanted to post it, as I just plain like it. It evokes a sense of American Christianity with its use of a sacred symbol that borders on kitsch in its use, or perhaps misuse, of technology. Maybe it’s just me, but when I see neon I can’t help but think of a bar or a liquor store, and although I do think beer is one of God’s many blessings, somehow neon and religion just don’t quite fit for me.

Below I give a small excerpt from one of his sermons titled “The Gospel, The Church, and the World,” which was based on a passage from 1 Peter 2:4-12, and in which one of the key ideas is that believers are called to live as resident aliens. Just prior to this excerpt Keller had been talking about the reputation of the Early Church in Ancient Roman society.

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No one had ever seen a group of people that held to all those practices. They were aliens. They weren’t like the Greeks. They weren’t like the Romans. They weren’t like the Jews. They were aliens. Well, you say, “That was then.” Well, okay, now think about this for a second. What if there was a group of people now that were following those same set of biblical values?… Rejecting blood thirsty sports (militarism), empowering women, reveling in the combination of races and classes, radically serving the poor. What kind of group is that?… Sounds liberal. Forbidding abortion, forbidding sex outside of marriage, forbidding same sex practices, insisting that Jesus is the only way of salvation, and what’s that sound like?… It sounds like a horribly conservative group. Guess what, we’re still aliens. We do not fit into Western  relativistic individualism; we don’t fit into traditional hierarchical legalism, we don’t fit. We don’t fit conservative, we don’t fit liberal. We’ve always been aliens.

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Redeemer Presbyterian

The Sermon Above

Free Sermons

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It seems to me that God is doing in the Emergent Church movement something that He does over and over. When His gift is rejected by the people He has prepared to receive it, He seeks out a new people. So it is that sons and daughters of Anabaptists and Pentecostals are being drawn to the Great Tradition. It is a moment for repentance for those of us in the historic churches which have stewarded the Great Tradition but have lost touch with the life which generates the tradition and which carries it forward. It is also a moment of testing for that which is emerging. Will they marginalize doctrine and the labor of seeking a consensus in faith and order? Will they succumb to the motto that deeds unite and doctrine divides and then find themselves in the midst of church dividing controversy with no deep doctrinal consensus to guide?

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Reflections On The Emerging Church

How does this work? I have two guesses. First, I imagine that God has established a principle of synergy into the very fabric of the Church’s being, so that when people share things in common, when they move beyond the boundary of their immediate family toward caring about the whole family of God, they find that the total provision is more than the sum of its parts, that in the Kingdom of God 1+1 does not equal 2, but instead it equals 3 or 4 or 5. As good as this idea is, however, I prefer my second guess, which is the miracle of God’s presence. This kind of miracle is not the product of a distant God intervening in natural human affairs, but rather the work of God’s Spirit who both inspires people to move beyond their norms and who blesses the fruit of their labor with a hundredfold return. This is where the provision that normally covers one family multiplies beyond all natural boundaries and explanations toward the covering of thousands. This is a supernatural witness that boldly proclaims that Jesus is resurrected and living among his people in the power of the Holy Spirit.

So, this is the vision. I don’t know it experientially and I am not sure if it is orthodox. What I do know is that it is frightening. What if God doesn’t show up to multiply our provisions, what if my brother or sister in Christ doesn’t throw into the pot as I have. What will God require of me to make this vision a reality. Does this imply some kind of communal existence? I am not sure. I am just thinking that it’s not cool when middle class Xians, for all their moralizing, look and live like every other middle class family. I am just wondering how my present manner of living is keeping me from the fullness of life that God intends to give all who claim Jesus’ name.

At times, I have felt that my brothers and sisters in Christ find it something of an oddity that Paula and I are Anglican (understood as semi-Catholic). This article does a pretty good job of explaining what led us into this tradition, and why developing and expressing our faith through liturgy, sacrament and symbol is so powerful.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

In Younger Evangelicals, Webber discerned three phases of evangelicalism since 1950, each dominated by a different paradigm of church life and discipleship. Each group continues in some form today, but the first two have been superseded by the third: “traditional” (1950-1975), “pragmatic” (1975-2000), and “younger” (2000-?).

Traditionals focus on doctrine-or as Webber grumps, on “being right.” They pour their resources into Bible studies, Sunday school curricula, and apologetics materials. The pragmatics “do” church growth, spawning the culturally engaged (and hugely successful) seeker-sensitive trend, with full-service megachurches and countless outreach programs. Currently, the younger evangelicals seek a Christianity that is “embodied” and “authentic”, distinctively Christian. In this they follow Stanley Hauerwas’s and William H. Willimon’s widely read 1989 manifesto, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, which calls the church to reject individualism, consumerism, and a host of other modern malaises.

For the younger evangelicals (Webber’s tag refers to “emerging,” if not Emergent, evangelicalism), traditional churches are too centered on words and propositions. And pragmatic churches are compromising authentic Christianity by tailoring their ministries to the marketplace and pop culture. The younger evangelicals seek a renewed encounter with a God beyond both doctrinal definitions and super-successful ministry programs.

So what to do? Easy, says this youth movement: Stop endlessly debating and advertising Christianity, and just embody it. Live it faithfully in community with others-especially others beyond the white suburban world of many megachurch ministries. Embrace symbols and sacraments. Dialogue with the “other two” historic confessions: Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Recognize that “the road to the church’s future is through its past.” And break out the candles and incense. Pray using the lectio divina. Tap all the riches of Christian tradition you can find.

If you want to learn more about this movement or Robert Webber’s ideas, check out the links below:

Ancient-Future Worship
Robert Webber’s Ancient-Future Legacy