Mood, the Second
Let’s start over.
Rule 1: All football metaphors for worship are bad. I live in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the Alabama Crimson Tide. Football is our culture. It’s not part of our culture; it is our culture.
And no football season would be complete without a sermon or communion meditation on how we ought to be just as excited and emotionally expressive at church as we are at a football game.
The problem with the argument is that the fans at a football game are just that: fans. They aren’t players. And comparing church attendance to being a football fan is a very, very unhealthy metaphor. We should see ourselves as on the field playing, not in the stands cheering. We don’t go to church to cheer on the players. We are the players.
And football players can be very physically demonstrative, celebrating victories and enduring defeat in very visible, very physical ways. Which does tell us something.
No one in the history of the world has told a football team to celebrate a touchdown. They celebrate because it’s something they worked VERY HARD to do, together, for months and years on end, at great personal sacrifice. The problem the NCAA has is keeping the celebration from being TOO disruptive, because the players REALLY want to celebrate what they’ve worked so hard to do.
In short, the fact that we feel obliged to speechify to the church about celebrating itself proves that something is desperately wrong — because if we thought something was happening worth celebrating, we’d celebrate. The mean-old elders couldn’t stop us.
I’ve seen it. When we burned the church mortgage, having finally paid it off, the event resulted in shouts of joy and fist pumps and all those football-game sorts of things. We celebrated, not because we had permission, but because we were invested in what happened and we were truly thrilled by the event we witnessed.
We don’t have to be told to be excited by those things that are truly exciting. Winning football teams don’t need cheerleaders or “school spirit” drives. If we’re not visibly excited about our assemblies, then there must be nothing going on to get excited about.
Or maybe there’s a lot going on and we aren’t part of it.
Mood, the Third
The prevalent somber attitude that we in the Churches of Christ call “worship” comes from those same fine 16th Century Calvinists who brought us the Regulative Principle. The Lutherans, for example, are much more expressive, historically, as can be easily discerned by comparing the works of the Lutheran J. S. Bach to the great Calvinist composer … uh, well, if the Calvinists had ever produced a halfway decent composer, I’m sure we’d have something very, very powerful to talk about.
No, the Catholics and Lutherans wrote some great music, while the Calvinists argued over whether the Regulative Principle allows us to modify the psalms to fit the tunes better — a very joyless approach to “worship.”
The Churches of Christ are not Calvinist in their soteriology (theology of how to be saved) but we are culturally Calvinists. Most of our early preachers were Presbyterians or Baptists (back when Baptists were largely TULIP Calvinists), and most of our “converts” came from various Baptist factions. Our approach to building design, “reverence” in worship, our distaste for stained glass, and such like all trace back to our Calvinist roots.
After all, it makes no sense at all to disapprove of a cross in a window of the auditorium (as a “graven image”) while plasti-tacking paintings of the face of Jesus all over our children’s wings. (Thankfully, the women in our children’s program typically have a healthier understanding of these things than our preachers and elders.) It’s cultural, not theological, and therefore largely unconscious and unconsidered. We just know it must be wrong because that’s how it’s always been.
And because CENI is really about rationalizing the answer we want for reasons other than the CENI-stated reason, we use CENI to declare “lifting holy hands” unauthorized, when it’s really commanded, and to say that bowing is metaphorical, when I think Paul was being quite literal.
You see, our real goal is to have a nice assembly that is uncontrovertibly performed decently and in order — and hence only criticized by the young. And CENI can be made to fit any such need — all the while pushing the conversation into the hopelessly dense morass of “the laws of generic and specific authority,” which are so much more easily controlled than the Spirit.
You see, CENI is not only a rationalization for doing what we want, it’s also a mechanism for protecting us from the Spirit’s annoying habit of leading where the members aren’t ready to go. Anyone can cobble together a CENI-based argument against anything.
I think you hit the nail on the head. CENI as well as the frequent reminders about worshipping decently and in order were really about doing what we felt comfortable doing and being able to banish whatever made us uncomfortable. All of the admonitions against emotionalism makes me wonder why we as a people were so afraid of emotion.
@ Gary: I’ll give you a couple of examples of how using “worshiping decently and in order” gets used to justify whatever we’re comfortable with. In the church I grew up in–in a tribal culture that prides themselves in NOT using clocks, aka “white man’s machines”–we always “tarried one for another.” We fellowshipped until everyone got there, and then we started formal worship; if you could call it that.
When we went to visit our cousins in the “white” church, the men would wait in the back room while one of them watched the second hand on his wristwatch. At 10:59:45 (fifteen seconds before scheduled start time of 11:00), they would march out to start formal worship.
The interesting thing is that both congregations used the same scriptures to justify opposite decisions; and both decisions were culturally appropriate.
Paul never intended the phrase “Decently and in order” to convey a strict and rigorous order of worship. But rather called on the assembly to observe common decency and courtesy. I’ve heard of people use this verse to support stale emotionless gatherings or even as a universal ban on dancing.
“Decently and in order” was the equivalent of a Rorschach ink blot onto which we projected the style of worship we felt comfortable with.
Paul spoke of the church in Corinth when assembled eating together and each having a psalm, or a comment to share with the other. It was essential (concerning order) that they not all talk or sing at once. Obviously they took turns. That made their gathering ORDERly, as the apostle desired.
Interestingly the early Stoneite churches had a practise of all praying out loud at the same time and lifting up their mingled voices to the Father together. It was supposed to have had a remarkable effect upon those who witnessed it. The practise did not survive union with the more rationalistic Campbell movement.
The Nazarine Church of the 40-70’s did this everyone praying out loud all at the same time, both men, women and children. Don’t know if they still exist or still do this.
Always was debated by us in the COC whether those present that spoke many different languages “heard” the Apostles speaking in all their different own languages while the Apostles spoke in one, or was all those different languages “spoken” out loud by the Apostles to that crowd of thousands. Was the miracle in the hearing or the speaking?Talk about a miracle either way and without megaphones or electric loud speakers. What a thing that must of been to behold.
Didn’t Jesus say that worship was IN SPIRIT which is a place contrasted to ZION and Gerizim? Then IN TRUTH is the Word or Logos which is defined by the Greeks as the Regulative Principle and is opposite to what Paul called Worship IN the FLESH (Philippians 3). The Campbells agreed with the church in the wilderness and tried to restore the pattern:
Church is a School of Christ. We are washed with water INTO the Word or School of Christ.
Worship is Reading and Musing the Word (Logos) of God.
The Tabernacle was to be a Tabernacle of Witness and animal sacrifices were allowed only after the people rose up to PLAY at Mount Sinai. God gave the Tabernacle a new meaning and no one who was not of the Jacob-Cursed Levi tribe could come near or into the presumed “holy” places on the penalty of death. Not even the Levites could enter the holy or most holy place. In 2 Chronicles 29 a Levite could not enter into the “holy” place even to clean out the Assyrian garbage.
The Qahal, synagogue, ekklesia or Church of Christ (the Rock) is defined for a holy convocation on the first and seventh days of festivals and came to be each REST day. The godly people were quarantined to their local area and may never have been to Jerusalem for animal sacrifices: Christ in Isaiah 1 and Jeremiah 7 says that sacrifices and burnt offerings were not commanded by God. Acts 7 etc shows that when God turned them over to worship the hosts of heaven rather than the creator, animal sacrifices came with the pattern from Egypt, Greece, Canaan or Babylon.
Hebrews 12 warns of the fall at Mount Sinai and warns that we should approach God in reverence and godly fear. Literal worship under the law was usually falling on your face.
Maybe we all work too hard DOING worship when Jesus invited us “outside the camp” to rest and “learn of me.” That, according to the Campbells and Romans 14, let people leave anything that did not edify or educate at home. After all, the “service” under the Law of the Monarchy is called “Hard Bondage.”
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