You may well have realised that we were away for Christmas - visiting my parents in Suffolk for the most part. While we were away, my wife and I took advantage of the already present baby-sitters to allow us both to go out to midnight Communion on Christmas Eve - a rare opportunity!
The problem was, where did we go? The church my parents attend, where we would usually go if we were back in Suffolk, didn't have a midnight service. So we decided to go to the church my Grandma attends, which as it happens is the church I grew up in. Being able to take my 84-year old Grandma with us and allow her to "show off" her family was of course an added bonus for her (and no doubt one which will have earned us all brownie points)!
So we arrived at the church, which at first glance appeared not to have changed much since I was last there some 13 years ago... and we proceeded to engage what was in many ways, a pretty foreign experience to me, despite my history at that church. For starters, it took a while to get used to singing from a hymn book instead of a screen - and that was made more complicated as the entire service proceeded to follow a liturgical pattern set down in the service book, complete with bold passages for all to say together and ordinary type for the minister to read.
The hymns, played at regulation organ speed on an electronic organ, although one tuned to sound as much like a pipe organ as is possible, were, although not entirely unknown to me, generally somewhat obscure for a Christmas Eve communion service (although we did sing all six verse of O Come, All Ye Faithful!) and the sermon. Well, lets just say, it seemed to be a chance for the minister to expound a well-honed socio-political message, using carefully selected bible passages for support. Not that it was a message that I found particularly difficult, or would chose to disagree with particularly, but it felt a little bit "cherry-picked" for me, rather than an exposition of biblical truth....
All in all, it was a very traditional service, and one completely different even from what we'd have had at Queens Road, which, lets face it, is hardly "cutting edge" in worship terms! And yet, having said all that, above everything I found odd, or difficult, or downright foreign, it was Jesus, the incarnate son of God, the newly born Messiah, who shone through.
It may have taken a few days to get round to it, but once the busy-ness of Christmas was over, that service started me thinking. Because, despite all I found "wrong" with it, it was clear that it was the same God being worshipped there, and that it was a place where people were able to meet with God. And at the end of the day, isn't that what worship is really about? Isn't the whole point of a service, in fact of everything that we do as "church", to facilitate and enable people to meet with God. So does this mean there is a place in church, in the broadest sense of the word, for liturgy, for hymns, for tradition?
Emphatically, Yes! Because God has made each of us different, with different tastes, with different ways of thinking, with different ways of relating to each other and to him, then he must value diversity - and that means he must value different styles and understandings of worship. We may all be united in the body of Christ, but that doesn't make us into identical clones or robots. If people are truly meeting and doing business with him, then the type of music, the form of words, the presence or absence of liturgy is as irrelevant as the language used or the colour of the sanctuary walls!
However, there is a word of caution here as well, because whilst these things are irrelevant to God, they are not necessarily irrelevant to people - if the style of worship is to facilitate in the meeting with God, then it must take account of the people who are meeting Him. And that means it needs to remain relevant and open to people coming into the church from the outside, not just to those who are already there. The hows, whys and wherefores of that are going to be different in every church, with each church needing to develop and understand its own particular way of being church, in the context of the people within, but more importantly, the context of the people to whom the church is called to reach out - because if the church is not reaching out and sharing the Good News with those outside its walls, then not only is it not fulfilling the Great Commission, but it is placing itself firmly on the path to extinction.
No comments:
Post a Comment