Sunday, July 08, 2007

Tale of Two Churches

Changing of the Guard - an interesting story Lori sent me. Probably representative of the trend for churches these days. SEATTLE P.I.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

One sure way to keep me out of a church is to open a worship service with music played by a nine-piece rock band.

Based solely on the article, Quest sounds like Kevin Smith's "Buddy Christ" run amok.

Not that I'm a fan of geriatric churches, either, but there doesn't seem to be much (or any) middle ground in this merger.

James Lamb / tvjames said...

Middle ground was the old church. I'm a big fan of 9 piece rock bands.

Let's see if it will let me do this...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=PwoCn0DboKA

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ud0kaWLHEd4

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zwunCJArK0A

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7PTvr755V8s

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jP2nz6PG8KM

Unknown said...

Sorry, Christian rock all sounds the same. Not bad, necessarily, but unoriginal and, ironically, uninspired. They tear through a thesaurus to find ten or twelve adjectives to describe something marvelous, then toss them together with a few stanzas of phrases like "He lives in you," or "He lights the way" (seriously, the number of songs using the analogy of Jesus as illumination cannot be counted without the use of a scientific calculator).

It is pop music with a more wholesome message and without the cute chicks in scantily clad outfits. Great idea... lousy follow through.

I'll take "Amazing Grace", "Seek Ye First," and "Onward Christian Soldier" over any of the Harvestpalooza groups any day (or, at least, any Sunday).

By the way, in case you hadn't noticed, your initial post seems to have been posted twice... check your main blog page if you don't believe me.

James Lamb / tvjames said...

Crummy free software. I want my money back. Fixed.

It's said that as he fell from heaven, Satan landed in the choir loft.

I mostly feel differently than you.

The Lutheran Church of my youth has not changed. It used to be fine but now it's unbearable. My parents go to at least two church services a weekend. The Lutheran service on Sunday mornings for communion and liturgy and then a post-modern young adult service at a Baptist church for moving music.

There is some merit in the "classics," especially "A Mighty Fortress" and there is a lot of similarity and blandness in a lot of Christian music, especially as it's performed.

But, it's not about how they're performed on the radio. It's about a worship leader who carefully puts them in order, slowly bringing up the entire congregation to a fever pitch, getting them totally tuned in and excited, finally depositing them at the teaching pastor's feet, hungry, ready and open to hear a compelling message.

Easier said than done. Rarely executed well unless it's a start-up designed that way from the ground up. And those are growing like crazy, so they must be doing something right.

I don't understand why at some point in the 19th. century churches (especially Catholic and Lutheran, to my limited understanding/knowledge) said "Ok, we've evolved enough. We will now hold firmly and resist change."

While we are to be in the world but not of it, is it any wonder that so many churches are dying or at least declining? They've stopped making an attempt to be relevant.

Unknown said...

"While we are to be in the world but not of it, is it any wonder that so many churches are dying or at least declining? They've stopped making an attempt to be relevant."

Funny, I've always felt the opposite to be true. As with all things in the past few decades, religion has been demystified. If anything, it is trying to hard to be relevant when the relevance was always there.

Most churches have transitioned from the King James Version to the New International Version of the Bible. And since most Christian schools are using NIV, too, I had to pour through a lot of it in the last year. Let me tell you, it is a horribly written book. If the NIV would have been my Bible growing up, I probably wouldn't be a Christian now. By modernizing the ancient text, the book becomes condescending and corny. Gone is the dramatic prose and fanciful old English... gone is the language of Shakespeare.

The presentation doesn't irritate me half as much as the garbling of the message. When is the last time you sat in a pew and actually had a minister wearing the ceremonial robes preach to you about shame and condemnation? In order to keep the church full, minsters have compromised (and they are the one group of people on the planet that shouldn't be allowed to do that). Of course church attendance has been going down... we the people don't want to sit still and be lectured at for an hour. So, instead of a lecture, we are treated to a stand up comedy routine and a house band.

Everything in church is bright and happy and everybody leaves smiling and feeling good about themselves. Well, there are times when that's OK, but there are other times when a minister has to say unpopular things to his congregation. There are times when a minister has to yell at us on God's behalf... times of war, times when there are people dying on the streets of hunger, times when more people flock to the small screen to watch a show called "American Idol" than they flock to actual churches (yes, we are literally worshiping false idols at that point), times when God's word has been bastardized to suit the greedy and the immoral.

But churches aren't about that anymore. Instead, it is "Jesus is the light" and "He is my shepherd and we are his flock" and all the other cookie-cutter cliches.

If you've found rock bands that can rally the spirits of a congregation, that's great. But unless that congregation takes that energy and tries to enact change, it is meaningless. If congregation members leave the church and proceed to flip off the first motorist who cuts them off on the highway, it is pointless. All I've seen rock bands do in churches is distract from the main message, and the ministers follow suit by ignoring key aspects of Christianity out of fear of low church attendance.

James Lamb / tvjames said...

That's the point, isn't it? Church shouldn't be about brimstone and hellfire.

"Turn and burn" is really a poor way to change anyone's heart.

We're supposed to leave church happy. Convicted, yes. Re-energized in our fight against our sinful nature, but excited and alive, confident that our saving grace is a gift given to us in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

Not for what I've done, but for who He is. Not for who I am, but for what He's done.

You say I'm too caught up looking for a comedy routine and a house band, but is it possible that you're looking for an old time theatre experience? Or at the very least, the comfort of a simpler time in your young life when the troubles of the world were much less obvious to you?

Really, you boil it down to the simple truth that we are all sinners destined for hell, except for the fact that we've been redeemed, he's taken our place.

We're in the court room. God's in the judge's seat. We're as guilty as sin. The prosecutor knows it, the judge knows it, the defense attorney knows it. The bailiff and everyone else in the courtroom knows it. The verdict is handed down. Guilty. The punishment is handed down. Death. And then in a Perry Mason sort of way, God's son stands up and says "Hey, I didn't do it, but I wish to take his place. Put me to death for what James did."

I can't earn that. What I can do is go to a place where I'm surrounded by people who believe like me, a place where we can worship, sing songs of praise, draw nearer to God through rousing, resonating music. Hear a message that convicts, a message that has application, a lesson that helps during the week when I am out in public, to ground me and remind me that I am not of this world. To remind me to be a witness to the world through my actions, my words and my life.

To a degree, it is personal choice, King James or NIV or The Message, a pastor who wears robes or a suit or dockers, whether the music is organ, acoustic guitar (yeah, growing up in the early '80s the Catholic church we attended was stuck in the '60s) or drum kit -- but I'd argue that you need to keep the main thing the main thing, but everything else you must change with the times if you are to reach people to whom salvation, grace, faith, love of another kind, to whom these terms and concepts are all foreign.

What do these people know? Rock bands, comedy clubs and coffee houses.

What do they want? Love, community, a life that's bigger than their mere existence.

Meaning.

Hope.

James said...

That's the point, isn't it? Church shouldn't be about brimstone and hellfire.

"Turn and burn" is really a poor way to change anyone's heart.

We're supposed to leave church happy. Convicted, yes. Re-energized in our fight against our sinful nature, but excited and alive, confident that our saving grace is a gift given to us in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

Not for what I've done, but for who He is. Not for who I am, but for what He's done.

You say I'm too caught up looking for a comedy routine and a house band, but is it possible that you're looking for an old time theatre experience? Or at the very least, the comfort of a simpler time in your young life when the troubles of the world were much less obvious to you?

Really, you boil it down to the simple truth that we are all sinners destined for hell, except for the fact that we've been redeemed, he's taken our place.

We're in the court room. God's in the judge's seat. We're as guilty as sin. The prosecutor knows it, the judge knows it, the defense attorney knows it. The bailiff and everyone else in the courtroom knows it. The verdict is handed down. Guilty. The punishment is handed down. Death. And then in a Perry Mason sort of way, God's son stands up and says "Hey, I didn't do it, but I wish to take his place. Put me to death for what James did."

I can't earn that. What I can do is go to a place where I'm surrounded by people who believe like me, a place where we can worship, sing songs of praise, draw nearer to God through rousing, resonating music. Hear a message that convicts, a message that has application, a lesson that helps during the week when I am out in public, to ground me and remind me that I am not of this world. To remind me to be a witness to the world through my actions, my words and my life.

To a degree, it is personal choice, King James or NIV or The Message, a pastor who wears robes or a suit or dockers, whether the music is organ, acoustic guitar (yeah, growing up in the early '80s the Catholic church we attended was stuck in the '60s) or drum kit -- but I'd argue that you need to keep the main thing the main thing, but everything else you must change with the times if you are to reach people to whom salvation, grace, faith, love of another kind, to whom these terms and concepts are all foreign.

What do these people know? Rock bands, comedy clubs and coffee houses.

What do they want? Love, community, a life that's bigger than their mere existence.

Meaning.

Hope.

KEVIN МАРУСЕК said...

"While we are to be in the world but not of it, is it any wonder that so many churches are dying or at least declining? They've stopped making an attempt to be relevant."

Funny, I've always felt the opposite to be true. As with all things in the past few decades, religion has been demystified. If anything, it is trying to hard to be relevant when the relevance was always there.

Most churches have transitioned from the King James Version to the New International Version of the Bible. And since most Christian schools are using NIV, too, I had to pour through a lot of it in the last year. Let me tell you, it is a horribly written book. If the NIV would have been my Bible growing up, I probably wouldn't be a Christian now. By modernizing the ancient text, the book becomes condescending and corny. Gone is the dramatic prose and fanciful old English... gone is the language of Shakespeare.

The presentation doesn't irritate me half as much as the garbling of the message. When is the last time you sat in a pew and actually had a minister wearing the ceremonial robes preach to you about shame and condemnation? In order to keep the church full, minsters have compromised (and they are the one group of people on the planet that shouldn't be allowed to do that). Of course church attendance has been going down... we the people don't want to sit still and be lectured at for an hour. So, instead of a lecture, we are treated to a stand up comedy routine and a house band.

Everything in church is bright and happy and everybody leaves smiling and feeling good about themselves. Well, there are times when that's OK, but there are other times when a minister has to say unpopular things to his congregation. There are times when a minister has to yell at us on God's behalf... times of war, times when there are people dying on the streets of hunger, times when more people flock to the small screen to watch a show called "American Idol" than they flock to actual churches (yes, we are literally worshiping false idols at that point), times when God's word has been bastardized to suit the greedy and the immoral.

But churches aren't about that anymore. Instead, it is "Jesus is the light" and "He is my shepherd and we are his flock" and all the other cookie-cutter cliches.

If you've found rock bands that can rally the spirits of a congregation, that's great. But unless that congregation takes that energy and tries to enact change, it is meaningless. If congregation members leave the church and proceed to flip off the first motorist who cuts them off on the highway, it is pointless. All I've seen rock bands do in churches is distract from the main message, and the ministers follow suit by ignoring key aspects of Christianity out of fear of low church attendance.