July 10, 2007
Play It Again
We once had a music minister who week after week force-fed ‘spirit’ to the congregation. His praise team gave repeated demonstrations on when to sway, when to clap and when to raise holy hands. I felt like I was back in high school at a pep rally – ‘Lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!’ On more than one occasion I became a casualty of the worship service and sat down before the 30 minutes of music came to an end. To me overuse of praise jingles becomes mindless. Although Paul was specifically addressing speaking in tongues, I think his directions are applicable to repetitious praise choruses. “So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind.” 1 Cor 14:15 NIV
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Gail;
-----I agree. One person’s emotional responses are not the same as an other person’s. It is wrong for anyone to expect others to react in a situation with the same emotions. At the football game there may be excitement in general, but the emotion of one team’s fans may range from guarded to jubilant because they are winning, while the emotions of the losing team's fans may range from despondent to fretful. Emotions are rather a sum-up of certain basic aspects of an individual’s experiences and ambitions served as both an expression within a situation and a template for interpreting the situation. One situation may limit emotion to the same type among many people, another may hold no limits. The excitement of the spectators at a football game would be far out of place at a funeral. While the emotional climate on a street corner would be set by whatever is generally happening there.
-----The ideology of a football game is the competition between two teams on the field struggling for victory among an organized host of other teams competing for the same ultimate championship to the entertainment of the fans for the return of their dollar. It all exudes a complex mix of emotion generally centered around the stresses of victory and defeat, hope and dismay, enjoyment and boredom, satisfaction and discontent. But the ideological constraint of a library is very narrow, exuding low and controlled emotional states having more to do with contemplation.
-----The ideology of the church event was once rather narrowly defined as well. Generally it was about reverential attention paid to God and respectful attention paid to others. It tended more to the contemplative, self-controlled emotional state of the library, I suppose because folks had the inclination that they were there to learn and be effected as much as to worship and hold God up high. The reverence shown there and the message carried away tended to be the validating factors of their religious experience. But there always have been “those other churches” that thought of the religious experience as a registration upon the emotion more than upon the intellect. From the soul-spiritualism of the Black churches to the holy-rolling of the Pentecostal churches, excited emotionalism validates their religious experiences. It never has been this way because there has been two basic kinds of religious experience, it has been this way because there has always been two basic kinds of people: intellectually inclined and emotionally inclined.
-----The current movement that insists upon contemporary praise is merely an attempt to control the basic ideology of the church event away from reverential contemplation over to emotional expression. This movement does not serve to validate the religious experience for more people as much as it tends to simply validate the experiences of emotionally inclined people while invalidating the desired experiences of intellectually inclined people. It more sorts than it serves.
-----Many churches are now understanding that they should not narrow the ideology of the church event to neither reverential attention nor excited emotion, because in the whole, people seek both experiences and the Scriptures validate both experiences. I hope it is a growing understanding on the part of those who serve as leaders, especially the worship leaders, that they are there to serve not according to their own ideology, but according to Scriptural ideology. And Scripture does not tell us to hold my idea up as an imperative for all, or to hold your idea up as an imperative for all. It rather tells us to hold each other up as imperatives - to go to the other where his need is and serve him there according to his need. For this is what the Scripture teaches as the real validation of your religious experience:
Mat 23:10-12 Nor are you to be called “teacher,” for you have one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
I John 3:17-19 If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in His presence…
James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
Philippians 2:3-4 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vein conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
Rom 15:2 Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.
Et al
-----Although the church event is not necessarily the time for people to come together and help each other with whatever their needs are, it certainly is done within the template which is precisely that frame of mind. Therefore for the music minister to gain access to such a prominent place among the people as the stage, and insist upon his own ways of emotional expression are not humble actions. They are not the actions of a servant. They are not actions looking to the interests of the other. I remember those Sunday mornings. I was there. I saw first hand that this music minister was certainly not pleasing all of his neighbors, while his excuse of, “…you can’t please everybody…” was logically nothing more than an admission of favoritism, “…so I will please only these.” James 2:9.
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