The Gospel Coalition

Yesterday, I posted a reflection on worship called “Steak on a Paper Plate” which questioned whether or not a casual, informal approach to worship will be able to sustain substantive expository preaching over the long run.

Today, a friend and fellow blogger, Zach Nielsen (Take Your Vitamin Z) responds to yesterday’s post. Zach is one of the pastors at The Vine in Madison, Wisconsin and has much experience leading music in church. I like what Zach has to say about the character of the worship leader and I’m glad he has agreed to stop by the blog and offer this response.

Formal or Informal is Not the Main Issue

Zach Nielsen

Being formal or not is more a function of the person who is leading and less about the structure that he imposes upon himself for leading the worship service. You can make a “contemporary” service feel very formal and you can make a strict PCA liturgy feel very informal. It depends on who is leading.

I grew up in a church that followed a very strict ELCA Lutheran liturgy, but the senior pastor had a way of making it feel personal and not simply a robotic recitation of words. On the flip side, I have been to services that are “contemporary” and “informal” that felt very stiff and awkward because those leading did not have the skill set to lead in a way that felt relaxed and more free.

So my question for those leading church services has less to do with the forms and much more to do with the right men leading those forms. Telling constant jokes and being silly can just as easily be placing into a “contemporary” form as it can be in a more strictly liturgical form. It is the man leading who will determines these things.

I do agree that if we never get a sense of the enormity, holiness, and majesty of God, we will produce shallow Christians who will fail to understand our deep need for repentance and forgiveness in Christ. But you don’t have to be wearing a suit and tie to get a healthy sense of the grandeur of God’s beauty, sovereignty, and holiness. Again, this has more to do with the men leading the service and less about what structure they choose to use for the service. The question is more who and then the how will follow.

It seems that the New Testament demonstrates this as well. We don’t see much detail in terms of how are services are to be held, but we see quite a bit of detail concerning the type of man who should be leading that service.

Formal or informal is not the main issue. In the end, shouldn’t there be a healthy sense of both in all our services if we are truly being human?

I believe that the more important question is “Who is leading and does that man have Biblical priorities in mind for the kind of service that he leads?” If the answer is “yes”, then in most cases the issue of formal vs. informal will take care of itself.

Phases of writing redux (I’ve been there!):

Writing a book is like giving birth to a snarling 8 headed monster. It’s so much more than sitting down in front of your laptop and typing. It’s more like a war, as your own words and ideas battle you and each other. In writing your hopes, dreams, fears and inadequacies are exposed. You learn what it is you most want in life and how incompetent you are to actually achieve it.

Why conservative evangelicals should thank God for Clark Pinnock:

Sometimes the outcome of a life isn’t what we would have hoped for, and sometimes there are many parts of a man’s life that we can’t imitate. But we can still give thanks that the word of God was taught, clarified, held forth, even by a man with whom we disagree.

Chris Brauns on blind spots:

A man of understanding doesn’t defensively deny blind spots when they come his way.  He allows them to shape his character.

Union University moves into the top 15 in U.S. News and World Report‘s rankings:

The position is the highest ever for Union and marks the 14th straight year for the publication to list Union among the best universities in the South.

When it comes to the atmosphere of worship services in the next generation, something’s got to give.

More and more churches are focusing on the centrality of the Word in worship. The resurgence of Reformed theology among younger evangelicals, the reestablishment of a rock-solid belief in the inerrancy and inspiration of the Scriptures in the Southern Baptist Convention, the revival of expository preaching… this wave that we’re riding is about to collide with an even bigger wave: the dominance of contemporary worship styles across the U.S. and the world.

For many churches, the biggest requirement for a “worship set” is novelty. We’re aiming for an experience. So we put together a worship service that is more influenced by the latest hits on Christian radio than by theology or history.

We also try to put people at ease. “Good morning… Let’s try that again, GOOD MORNING!” There’s a chatty, street-level style of worship that has become prevalent in evangelicalism. And I’m not sure how our pursuit of novelty and casualness in worship is going to mesh with hearing the Word of God expounded upon in all its glory.

Can a contemporary, casual service bring worshippers face to face with the glory of God in a way that buttresses and upholds the magnificent truths being expounded from the Word? I think the answer is yes, but not always.

It’s like eating steak on a paper plate.

My wife is an excellent cook. Her Romanian dishes dazzle my tastebuds, and her American cooking is terrific too. In the past couple of months, she has been using paper plates frequently. I understand why. We don’t have a dishwasher. She wants to save time setting the table, and she doesn’t want me washing dishes after dinner. Paper plates are easy and disposable.

But after a few weeks of paper plates, I told my wife, “Your cooking is too good for paper plates.” Slapping down a hot dog and baked beans on a paper plate in the middle of summer is just fine. But when my wife makes her famous pork chops and rice, or her Romanian cabbage rolls, or steak and mashed potatoes, paper plates just don’t cut it. I said, “Let me wash the dishes. But at least give us dishes!”

When it comes to worship, we are frequently told that form doesn’t matter. Style is not what’s important. I get that. I’m not downing contemporary music or advocating a return to liturgy, organs and hymns. I’ve been in contemporary worship services that have put me on my knees before the holiness and majesty of God. Cultural forms adjust and adapt.

But in worship today, there is a tendency toward casualness. The emphasis on feeling God’s closeness in worship may short-circuit the possibility of being transformed by a glimpse of the Transcendent One. There’s hardly any room for feeling awe in worship, and I can’t help but think that part of our problem is the form.

Form and content mirror one another. A church with serious Bible preaching is going to have a serious worship service (contemporary or traditional isn’t what matters, but serious it will be). A church with a feel-good preacher is going to have peppy, feel-good music.

Christians need to sense the weight of God’s glory, the truths of God’s Word, the reality of coming judgment, and the gloriousness of God’s grace. Trying to package the bigness of this God into most casual worship services is like trying to eat steak on a paper plate. You can do it for awhile, but at some point, people will start saying, “I want a dish.”

Doug Wilson uses the “mosque at Ground Zero” controversy to provide a stinging indictment of contemporary Christianity for not exposing the vacuous nature of secularism:

I said that the Muslims know what they are doing. What is that exactly? They are exposing the intellectual, theological, and ethical bankruptcy of secularism, and they are doing it on purpose. To answer their challenge, someone as intelligent as Charles Krauthammer is reduced to saying that sacrilege is defined by what lots of people think, true or false, doesn’t matter, or where lots of people died, right or wrong, doesn’t matter either.

Someone really does need to tell secularist America that her gods are genuinely pathetic. And currently, the Muslims are doing this because the Christians won’t. And the Christians who won’t do this are not so much in need of a different kind of theology as they are in need of a different kind of spine.

Jon Acuff’s set of Christian Twitter rules. My favorite is “Twudge not, that you be not twudged.”

We need a “Christian twitter handbook.” Some document we could refer to and dissect and disagree with but in the process at least discuss this communication medium. I’m not a Twitter expert, but these are the things I’ve learned on the mean streets of Twitter in the last year.

Cool infographics which explore and analyze the meaning of this summer’s most fascinating movie, Inception.

Tim Challies on the risks and opportunities of technology:

Whether a technology introduces something radical and revolutionary or whether it simply provides a new solution to an old problem, this one thing remains true: every technology brings with it both risk and opportunity; every technology solves some problems while also introducing new ones, it opens up new opportunities even while imposing some new kinds of limitation.

Traveling evangelists are quietly disappearing. I’ve listed some reasons for the decline, but I believe there may still be a future for vocational evangelism.

Clayton King is the type of evangelist I hope we see more of in the coming years. His evangelistic ministry is church-based and Christ-centered. Though he is young, he is already mentoring those coming up behind him.

What I like most about Clayton is that his style of evangelism does not negate (in fact, it highlights) the paradoxical nature of Christian discipleship. The call to discipleship is not just a call to making heavenly accommodations upon your death. It’s the call to pick up one’s cross.

Clayton’s book, Dying to Live: Abandoning Yourself to God’s Bold Paradox(Harvest House, 2010), emphasizes the cost of dying to oneself in order to live to Christ. As I read the book, I couldn’t help but hear echoes of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. How might Bonhoeffer engage in evangelism in our context today? I’m certain he would focus our attention on the cross and expect the cross-centered life to color everything we think about discipleship. And it’s that same paradoxical picture (dying to live) that forms the heart of Clayton’s vision.

So the title has a double meaning. At one level, Clayton intends to pique the interest of people who are dying to live, people who want to experience life in its fullness and not settle for a mere existence with little purpose or direction. Only Christ offers the meaning and fulfillment our hearts hunger for.

But at another, more profound level, the title takes us into the nature of regeneration. Those who are dying to live in the first sense must realize that they must die to themselves, their sins, and their idolatry in order that they may be raised to a new way of life. By dying, we live. By losing our life, we find it. By taking up the cross, we receive the crown.

Ironically, we find purpose by abandoning ourselves to God’s purpose. Clayton makes the case for this paradox by telling personal stories, reminding us of famous movie scenes, and introducing us to biblical characters. Along the way, he rehabilitates the legacy of Jesus’ disciple, Thomas. Though we think of Thomas as “the doubter,” Clayton reminds us that Thomas was willing to go with Jesus to Jerusalem. “Let’s go die with him!” Thomas once said (John 11:16). Sure, he had his doubts, but Thomas is also a powerful example of following Christ – what it means to abandon one’s personal plans and look to the cross.

As the book progresses, Clayton focuses on what it meant (and means) to declare that Jesus is Lord. Quoting Bonhoeffer, he explains the difference between costly grace and cheap grace. It is only through embracing the costly grace offered to us through the death of Christ that we are able to trust God in the dark times and see our suffering in light of God’s purpose.

Dying to Live accomplishes two things at once. It’s a wake-up call to Christians who may have forgotten the counterintuitive, paradoxical nature of the Christian life. It’s also an evangelistic plea to non-Christians, showing them a great salvation bought by the costly blood of Christ. Clayton does not minimize the costs of discipleship. He emphasizes them. (And that makes him a fellow proponent of the “subversive evangelism” I write about in the last chapter of Holy Subversion.) Pick up Dying to Live and you’ll be challenged by this readable book that shines light on the paradoxical nature of salvation.

Scot McKnight interviews Brian McLaren at the Q Chicago. What irks me about this conversation is how condescending McLaren is to McKnight, as if Scot is too muddled a thinker to be able to comprehend McLaren’s new paradigm. No… Scot knows and understands McLaren’s paradigm and chooses to reject it. The irony seems to be lost on McLaren when he talks down to McKnight in a way that excludes him for being “exclusionary”.

Yes, there is now a search engine for the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

The ten worst cities in the U.S. in which to live. I’m surprised by a couple that made this list.

Seth Godin on resilience and the incredible power of slow change:

Most existing systems (organizations, cities, careers, governments) are resilient to external shocks. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t still be here. Earthquakes, edicts and emergencies come and they go, but the systems remain.

And yet, it’s the emergencies we pay attention to.

No single event demolished the music business. It was a series of slow changes over the course of two decades, all the way back to the CD.

Smoking killed far more people than terrorists ever did. It’s just not as dramatic.

O transcendent, almighty God,
What words can sing your praises?
No tongue can describe you.
No mind can probe your mystery.
Yet all speech springs from you,
And all thought stems from you.

All creation proclaims you,
All creatures revere you.
Every gust of wind breathes a prayer to you,
Every rustling tree sings a hymn to you.

All things are upheld by you.
And they move according to your harmonious design.

The whole world longs for you,
And all people desire you.

Yet you have set yourself apart,
You are far beyond our grasp.
You are the purpose of all that exists,
But you do not let us understand you.

Lord, I want to speak to you.
By what name shall I call you?

Gregory of Nazianzus
329-389

I love this passage from The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story by D.A. Carson:

“No one has ever seen God,” John reminds us (1:18). Isn’t that what God said in Exodus 33? “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exod. 33:20).

Now John adds an exception: “But the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18).

Do you hear what this text is saying? Do you want to know what God looks like? Look at Jesus.

“No one has ever seen God,” and God in all of his transcendent splendor we still cannot see until the last day. But the Word became flesh; God became a human being with the name of Jesus; and we can see him…

• Do you want to know what the character of God is like? Study Jesus.
• Do you want to know what the holiness of God is like? Study Jesus.
• Do you want to know what the wrath of God is like? Study Jesus.
• Do you want to know what the forgiveness of God is like? Study Jesus.
• Do you want to know what the glory of God is like? Study Jesus all the way to the wretched cross.

Study Jesus.

1. From USA Today: “Forget pizza parties,” teens tell churches.

2. Commentary from Jon Nielson on the above article

3. Say goodbye to the “untouchable preachers”

4. Prop 8 Got Struck Down, Now What?

5. A Grace-Filled Engagement: The main problem with most marriages is lack of submission… to God.

6. JD Greear on the places we find rest, and why our rest ought to be in God alone

7. Stuff Christians Like #872: The guy writing the check during the offering

I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. (1 Tim. 2:1-2)

Here’s one reason to pray for our leaders:

JAMES K. POLK (1845/1849)

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1860/1865)

WOODROW WILSON (1913/1920)

JIMMY CARTER (1976/1980)

RONALD REAGAN (1980/1989)

GEORGE H.W. BUSH (1988/1992)

BILL CLINTON (1992/2000)

GEORGE W. BUSH (2000/2008)