Exploring the Worship Spectrum: 6 Views
272
Exploring the Worship Spectrum: 6 Views
272Paperback
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Overview
An exploration of what worship looks like from a biblical standpoint and why the topic of worship can be so contentious among Christians.
Because worship is inherently theological--because it's a manifestation of humanity's response to God's holiness--it's important to take seriously how we worship and the roles it serves in personal displays of adoration and in community with other believers.
Exploring the Worship Spectrum provides an overview, critique, and celebration of six prominent worship styles:
- Formal-Liturgical - represented by Paul Zahl
- Traditional Hymn-Based - represented by Harold Best
- Contemporary Music-Driven - represented by Joe Horness
- Charismatic - represented by Don Williams
- Blended - represented by Robert Webber
- Emerging - represented by Sally Morgenthaler
This unique format allows those with a heart for worship to compare different perspectives and draw their own conclusions on what the Bible teaches. It allows readers to understand the various approaches to worship, carefully evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and make personal choices without adopting a judgmental spirit.
The Counterpoints series presents a comparison and critique of scholarly views on topics important to Christians that are both fair-minded and respectful of the biblical text. Each volume is a one-stop reference that allows readers to evaluate the different positions on a specific issue and form their own, educated opinion.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310247593 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan |
| Publication date: | 03/18/2004 |
| Series: | Counterpoints: Church Life , #3 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.75(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
FORMAL-LITURGICAL WORSHIP
Paul F. M. Zahl
'It was during Dr. Bedell's ministry and well into the 1860s that the Church of the Ascension was called the 'Low Church Cathedral,' because, while its pulpit stood for a broad evangelical Christianity, it was marked by unusual fondness for good music and for a dignified service'. ---James W. Kennedy, The Unknown Worshipper1
I believe in Bible-based verticality, which is another way of saying formal-liturgical worship. There is nothing like it for taking you outside your problems and also bringing you back to them a renewed person, better able to cope and to endure. Biblebased verticality is a glorious thing. This chapter seeks to offer its principles, its roots, and its virtues. It also seeks to parry some familiar objections to it.
Formal worship means dignified service that is not governed by the spontaneity of the moment or the spontaneity of the officiant. It means service in a form, within a mold. It is not off the cuff or as mood would govern. Rather, it accepts the constraint of a consistent and predictable pattern.
Liturgical worship means prescribed worship, service that is required for a given occasion. So if it is Sunday, you have a required act of worship for that day. If a baptism is to take place or the sacrament of Holy Communion is to be celebrated, you conduct the service according to a previously set format. You do not make it up as you go along.
Thus, for example, Episcopal ministers and most Lutheran pastors approach Sunday without giving particular thought to the shape of the service itself. It is formal (i.e., in the form given in a prayer book) and it is liturgical (i.e., set, depending on whether the service is to be one of the two sacraments or whether it is to be Morning Prayer, a service purely of the Word).2 There is freedom in worship within a form, just as J. S. Bach worked within specific musical forms like the cantata and the Mass, just as Shakespeare worked within the sonnet and Giovanni Bellini within the sacra conversazione and the triptych. Form is able, somewhat counterintuitively, to stimulate fineness and quality, even innovation and renewal, in the context of traditional givens.
At the same time, formal-liturgical worship rules out the approach that makes it up as you go along. It is true to say that a high percentage of nonliturgical, nonformal churches ad-lib from Sunday to Sunday. You are not able to know from week to week whether it is going to be a mother-daughter service, a stewardship service, an evangelistic guest service, a youth Sunday, or a Scouting Sunday. F. Scott Fitzgerald was not the first American novelist to write about Americans reinventing themselves. But thousands of churches reinvent the service, or appear to, every Sunday. That, at least, is one burden this writer, as a minister of a liturgical denomination, does not carry.
We are concerned here with formal and liturgical worship. We are thereby also concerned with vertical worship. Vertical worship looks up first, before it looks out. It is transcendent before it is horizontal. It is faced north before it looks around. This means that it is not pastor- or preacher-centered. It is, or ought to be, Word-centered. It is not 'man/woman'-centered, nor is it concerned, in the initial situation, with community. It does, almost always, engender family feeling. The worship of which I speak is, to use the expressive German, senkrecht nach oben: straight up and down, looking right up.
The first principles, then, of formal-liturgical worship are its setness, its givenness, and its direction. It is not informal, it is not nonliturgical, and it is not horizontal. Nor, however, is it cold. Nor is it confining. Nor is it excluding, or non-user-friendly. How can this be?
LEX CREDENDI LEX ORANDI
Formal-liturgical worship must be based on the truth if it is to endure. In fact, if it is not based on the truth, it will finally fall down in pieces on the ground. If vertical worship is not rooted and grounded in truth, specifically Bible truth, then it should not stand. It should 'morph' into casual and horizontal worship. The reason why many evangelical and/or Protestant Christians have rejected liturgical worship over the centuries is that they have associated dignity and formality with unbiblical Roman Catholicism or Anglican Catholicism or just high churchianity that seemed to exist at the expense of Christianity.
The Latin phrase that covers the philosophy of worship I am presenting here is this: lex credendi lex orandi. That means: What we believe determines how we pray. Quite a few liturgical scholars and theologians today want to reverse the order and write: lex orandi lex credendi, or how we pray (i.e., worship) determines what we believe. There are even some writers who claim that our belief systems come after and follow from our language of praise, whatever that is. This is an entirely opportunistic view of worship, which subordinates truth to practice. Lex orandi lex credendi must be completely rejected.
For Anglicans---yet it is important for all Christians who value forms of worship---the lex orandi lex credendi falsehood goes back to a 'power play' in the 1970s by which the Reformation anthropology and Reformation Christology of the old sixteenthcentury Anglican prayer book were muted drastically in favor of a more contemporary picture of the Christian faith and the human condition. Anew and very different prayer book was the result for American Episcopalians. As soon as this prayer book was passed by the Episcopal Church's General Convention (1979), everyone could announce with authority that the prayer book teaches thus and so. But which prayer book? By whose authority? The new one, just achieved? Or the old one, so convincingly and pastorally tested from the 1540s up until the 1970s? And yes, it has come true in experience that twenty-five years of praying the Christian faith in new words and new forms has created a very different church. Those liturgical politicians who piloted the fundamental changes in the 1970s could now observe by the 1990s, with some sad justice: lex orandi lex credendi. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Church people who now prayed Sunday after Sunday without the old confessions and penitential prayers became, well, a lot less penitential.
The fact is, theology has to precede the act of worship. You pray what you believe, not vice versa. It is an axiom here---it has to be an axiom in this consideration of formal-liturgical worship ---that truth grounds prayer, not the other way around. Right thinking about God, Christ, and the condition of the human race is essential in forming and creating worship. 'The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth' (John 4:23--24).
BIBLE VERTICALITY
What is right thinking about worship? For an evangelical Christian, there can be only one answer. It is Bible-truthful worship. Sola scriptura is the objective measuring stick for the propriety of all prayer, be it adoration, thanksgiving, confession, or repentance. If adjectives used to describe God are not in the Bible or they are inconsistent with Bible attitudes, then they are out. If Jesus Christ is described or portrayed as a woman---although he was tender and solicitous and generative of all good---then those terms are out. Services of blessing for same-sex unions are out. Blessings of the animals, which are still the rage in some mainline circles, are out unless they are shorn of ideas that put animal life on terms of equivalent status with human life.
Right (Bible) thoughts of God, right (Bible) thoughts of Christ, right (Bible) thoughts of the human being---these must confirm the value of all formal liturgy.