Monday Morning Music Ministry

7-22-13

What has happened to American religion in the past generation? The solid rock of the simple gospel, the “good news,” has not changed, but other things have, radically: responses; core beliefs; church attendance; worship practices; new denominations; no denominations; new Bible translations; views of Heaven and hell and sin and salvation.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, as the sports expression goes. That scorecard used to be the Bible itself, but no more.

This is not a mere matter of mature believers finding their way. Is it American consumerism that gives believers the temptation to pick and choose the worship-flavor the week? Or the best concert and show on Sunday mornings? I think so, yes. And, by the way, this has led, in my opinion, to the major uncategorized denomination in America – Pick-and-Choose Theology. But that is for another time.

As a Sunday morning pilgrim and stranger of late, I notice that many churches have been treating hymns and hymnals as if they carry deadly microbes. Every song’s words are projected on big screens now (oddly, never the music, making a challenge for those not in the club, confronted with unfamiliar songs). Churches have Masters of Ceremonies. The music is pop or rock – even if most of the congregation dislikes those forms of music on their car radios. Worship is often a concert, as I say; minimal congregational singing. People are in love with the music, or a soloist, or a multi-media show… but not necessarily with Jesus.

It is significant that where once statues of saints, and meaningful religious symbols, stood behind the pulpits, many churches today have drum sets and Peavy amps. Our adoration finds focus “out of the abundance of the heart…” (Matthew 7:34).

I have been in dozens of churches where the service will be opened by someone like a pitchman in a car commercial: “Good Morning! How ARE you? I can’t hear you!! Turn around and give your neighbor a smile!!!…” Is there no place in the American church for the person who wants to enter, lay before the altar, and cry? Where do the broken-hearted sit? Is there a section for the desperately yearning? (“Oh, didn’t you get last week’s handout, telling you to turn lemons into lemonade?”)

Creeds are seldom recited any more. Tell me it is not because churches don’t believe in anything anymore. Confessions are seldom spoken, or even read. Tell me it is not because churches tell their flocks that there is no such thing – serious, anyway – as sin or hell. I’m OK; you’re OK; but this whole thing sucks. Excuse me.

The church in America is losing souls because, collectively, it has lost its own soul.

Speaking personally, I realized that the hole in my heart was that I have been missing the Liturgy. I was born Lutheran and drifted, hungry, into Pentecost, mega-churches, and other options. But starting in the first generations of the church 2000 years ago, the main tenets of Christianity were codified to answer skeptics and heresies… and Creeds were capsule statements of foundational beliefs. Likewise, the “Lord’s Prayer,” which Jesus gifted as a model prayer. Likewise the catechisms. Likewise again the bedrock hymns that stood the test of numerous generations – as sermons in song.

If the Liturgy became empty, as many of us recognized years ago, it was not the fault of the forms or the words… but in ourselves, that we grew lazy. Every part of the traditional worship service, Catholic and Protestant, represented a different essential fact about Jesus as Lord – from the Introit (entrance) to the Gloria Patria (Glory to God) to the Kyrie (Lord have mercy)… all the way to the Agnus Dei (sacrificial Jesus, the Lamb of God) and Nunc Dimitis (“Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace…”). Beautiful. Meaningful. Cliff’s Notes of the entire Bible message. Liturgy is a rite. But it is right.

I have a vision that the church of Jesus Christ can be revived in America and Europe by being what it was in the First Century. And what it is, I am happy to say, where the church IS expanding, on fire, elsewhere in the world. South of the Equator. In Asia. In persecuted lands, even. House churches, neighborhood groups, families and friends. Not “small groups” that are spinoffs from mega-church franchises; but small groups who don’t need the show biz, who gather because they want to and need to… and because they know they meet Jesus when they do.

One hopeful sign in the Post-Christian West is the Taize Community. It is an ecumenical monastic order that began in Burgundy, France in 1940. Its founder was Brother Roger Schutz, a Swiss Protestant, and its first community, on the border of Occupied and Free France, sheltered people displaced by the war, and Jews. Now its staff is more than a hundred brothers from Protestant and Catholic traditions, drawn from approximately 30 countries. They are not Catholic monks nor pastors of specific Protestant denominations; but they are people who live, and serve, in the manner of age-old monastic practices.

To describe the Taize community (and its work, for it now holds services and events around the world) is difficult, because it is disarmingly simple. It is simplistic in the manner I gave voice to above. It is not a denomination. It is truly ecumenical, asserting basic Bible beliefs. It has been accepted by churches, and former church members, across the board. Two Popes received and endorsed Brother Roger’s work; and he also received the Templeton Award, traditionally a media prize of the contemporary American church.

Every year more than 100,000 young people from around the world make pilgrimages to Taize for prayer, Bible study, and various projects. They commune, and then go back home, refreshed and equipped to worship in intimate group settings where they live.

Sometimes, to discover truths to guide our future, we must look backwards, in a way, to re-discover the truths of the past. Not everything “new” is good; in fact, much of it will be bad. Why have we forgotten that rule of life? Here we have examples before our eyes: youths, and new Christian believers around the world, are embracing Christ, not because of electric guitars or changing-flavor beliefs of the month, but because of the simplicity, the utter simplicity, of the gospel, and of authentic community.

+ + +

This video clip is a brief look at a Communion service in Taize (Taizé, actually; pronounced tay-ZAY), displaying the simplicity and what the brothers have been able to achieve as a harmony between foundational beliefs, traditions of the ancients, and contemporary life with its challenges. Worshipers and pilgrims return to their homes around the world, transmitting the simplicity of the gospel, of renewed lives, and of obedience.

Click: Worship at Taizé