Following on from my post yesterday, I am rather uncomfortable with the Sunday emphasis, and the thought that church is only church whilst it sings hymns and says set prayers.Now I know that 95% of the congregation don't live this scenario, but still the Sunday focus is almost overwhelming. Don't get me wrong, I am pleased that we are making use of the projection system, and that we are using more modern worship material, and that we are serving coffee after every service. BUT that is not church...
I find it strange that folk serve the community in so many ways, and if they were asked would probably express in words that the service they give is as a direct result of their faith, but sadly, and all too often they allow Sunday worship to overshadow what they have offered. What happens during the week is seen as relatively unimportant.
I want to turn that upside down, I want Sunday to be a celebration of all that it means to be God's people 24/7, certainly that is what is reflected through many of our prayers and hymns, but we can't connect to that celebration...
Not only that I want us to either re-discover the meaning that lies behind our traditions and practices, or to ditch them and to dare to discover new more contemporary practices. This means that things might get a bit messy, but that is OK.
Does this mean that God will no longer be the focus of our worship; BY NO MEANS; I hope that it will mean that God is more fully the focus of our worship as we celebrate his incarnation in and through our lives, whether that is when we are doing some shopping for a neighbour, helping with a hospital transport scheme, working in an office or on a factory assembly line ( the list of course is endless)...
To be free to worship God and to be his called out people means to be free to BE his people 24/7. To do this I suspect that we all need to break free from some of our inhibiting thinking. As I was driving down the M62 on my way home from a local preachers meeting yesterday The Killers song "Human" came on the radio, those few minutes of driving in the dark became holy moments of worship. I really like the song anyway so being on my own I turned up the volume and sang along...
As I drove and sang something happened in me, its story triggered of some thoughts... Inspired by Hunter. S. Thompson'sstatement that America was raising a generation of dancers ( people who live in a constrained and choreographed way), the song asks questions about who we are...
The message of the gospel is a message of freedom in Christ, but too often even those who believe it live trammeled lives, we are victims of our culture, and of our won desires on the one hand, and prisoners to expectations and traditions of the church on the other. We find ourselves caught between dancing to either one tune or the other, unable to hear anything but snatches of the deeper music that catch us unawares at times of unusual receptiveness.
Calvin Miller describes the music in his poem The Singer:
"Only the stars and mountains knew it,
but they were old,
and man was new, and chained to
simple
useless rhymes...
thus he could not understand the majesty
that settled down
upon him."
As a church we must not be content to make minor changes to our Sunday morning worship, we must re-discover who we are by rediscovering the one who has called us... this re-discovery will go on on a daily basis for we will never grasp the wonder and the glory and the wildness of God, but we must dare to try to allow ourselves to do so by releasing the image that we have trapped within our narrowness. Dave Perry captures the essence of that in this post, and with one of his many thought provoking images:
.............................................
Dave says:
"What a delusion this is. Who is keeping whom safe and secure? It is we who are imprisoned, not Christ. We deny ourselves freedom and life in its fullness. We keep ourselves and our fears locked up; we sentence ourselves to confined lives. We look out at Christ from behind bars of our own making."
We need to tear down the bars, open our ears to the song, and to embrace fully our call to be with him, and then go where he sends us...
It isn't easy, it won't be comfortable, and to quote the killers there is for me at least only one way forward... "I am on my knees looking for the answer!"
