I’ve been thinking about accessibility and cultural relevance…

In all of our working toward becoming more culturally relevant and accessible to more people, we sometimes become less accessible. Often, because our church community is our main community outside of work, we understand relevance more as it relates to Sunday morning than we do in a day to day context.

As worship leaders, we naturally want worship to be relevant in our Sunday (or whichever day) services. But in church as a whole, we can become naval gazers even in that. We no longer see ourselves as relevant in life, but try to be relevant in the church building. Our diversity goes far beyond what can be accomplished in one service, one day of the week. Or even in several programs or bible studies or events throughout the week that are hosted by the church.

I think this begins with something Dan Wilt said, “Expose yourself to other worship expressions going on in your city”.1 I would take this further still, and say “Expose yourself to other expressions going on in your city”. For any artist, exposure to different types of art is essential to development. Even though there are many denominations and church styles, for the most part we will always sing hymns and contemporary worship songs that have a similar sound. We have been saying this makes us accessible, and indeed it does make it accessible to a greater group of people. However, there will be those who do not engage in that style of music or art. For them to go to a folk concert or a blues jam or a punk show would be equally as beneficial as going to another church’s worship service. Whether or not the music is “Christian” is irrelevant to the fact that God can use any music to inspire and engage people to worship. 

As a dancer, when I began to lead dancers, I noticed that the “Christian” dance that was available was only liturgical and/or an extremely simple style of dance led by older women that didn’t have the ability to move well and wore clothes that covered themselves so fully that one couldn’t decipher in they were actually dancing at all. Don’t get me wrong, I love that people feel the freedom to worship, but is this all we have to offer? I began to take many classes of all different styles, including African, hip hop, and modern contemporary dance, and found that it was much easier to express with my body my worship because I had good training and a foundation of moves from which to choose. 

Mark Miller said, “if we are to have an outward focus and continue to grow, our worship must resonate close to current culture”.2 To know current culture, we must be in current culture. As as artist, this means getting out to art shows, seeing bands and choirs, symphonies and dance companies. Inspiration comes in all of these places. I want to be relevant in church services, but also in my artistic world outside the church. I want to be a respected presence in the artistic community. And as a visual artist, there may not be a place in my particular worship community to use my gifts in a Sunday morning if I want to be accessible to the majority who attend. However, at an art show, I can be accessible and culturally relevant while being Jesus in the midst of the city I am in.

I think it is so important to be relevant and accessible in our churches. My hope is that we don’t stop there, that church service does not keep us looking inward and instead becomes a springboard to move outward. When we move outward, we should be inspired again to move inward. We must be relevant and accessible in the world as well as in corporate worship. 

1. Dan Wilt, Inside Worship Magazine, Vol. 61, p. 11

2. Mark Miller, Inside Worship Magazine, Vol. 49, p. 8

“Intimacy, in any relationship, does not just happen when the lights are low and the music soft…Intimacy is a posture, a positioning, of one heart toward another.” 1

We have intimate moments when we sit together and weep and mourn, or hold one another in love, but that trust is built through days of laughing together and enjoying friendship together. 

So much of how I see God is formed in my relationships with others. Our community has always held high a standard of friendship, and I have learned much about love and intimacy in that. Two years ago, my husband and I came to a crisis in our marriage. I wasn’t sure, after only two years, if we would stay married, which was devastating to both of us. Our good friends, who we had worshiped with, led with, cried with, prayed with, and laughed with, came to our aid. We were able to be honest with them to the point of extreme pain. None of them knew the answers for our situation, but they all believed in us and our marriage and wanted to fight for us. They made the time to walk a horrible situation through, wading through my outbursts, my husbands fears, through all the layers of lies and misconceptions we had built in our lives, until we got to the raw and tender part of our hearts. This is when we started to heal.

I see God in those people. I know intimacy is with him directly through prayer and devotion and seeing him around us in nature and life, but I began to know him so much more intimately through our marriage. Seeing my husbands loyalty and unwavering devotion showed me a part of God’s heart I could never have otherwise known. I saw that God would never leave, no matter what I have done or how I’ve failed him. 

Brian Doerkson says the whole story of God and the Bible is relationship. 2 And although in the Old Testament especially we see a direct connection between man and God (Moses on the mountain, Abraham and Isaac, etc.) in the New Testament there is a community building that is showing God to each other. Jesus made that relationship human.

I don’t want to make the mistake of supplementing my time with God alone only with human relationships. I think our community in it’s fervor to build friendships with one another at times lacks the desire to relate to God on a vertical level as well. I have seen the phrase “worship is a lifestyle” misunderstood to mean that corporate worship takes a back seat to conversations about God. I never want to talk about God more than I talk to him. However I know I fall short in this area often.

Integrity walks hand in hand with intimacy. When we are intimate with our creator and with those around us in honest and accountable relationships (which I believe only come through friendship) we are confronted with integrity at each moment. When we are intimate, we cannot be fake, we can’t hide behind a song or a dance. Those around us know our hearts and see through our gestures of falsehood, whether or not we even know ourselves that we are hiding. 

I have always worn my heart of my sleeve. I do not hide much, although I have had to learn to be wise in that, too. But for the most part I don’t find value in keeping my soul hidden. I am who I am, and the more I can be open, the more others can be encouraged to be open as well. 

This is my desire. To be a people who aren’t afraid to trust, to bare our hearts and souls, and know that someone is there who isn’t afraid of knowing us at that deepest place.

1. Dan Wilt, The Values of Intimacy and Integrity, Essentials Green, 2009

2. Brian Doerkson, Intimacy, Video, Essentials Green, 2009

Here is a song I wrote about Intimacy

Finally my final project is done. Sorry for the lateness…I had great aspirations to do a mosaic for this, but it slowly turned into a total disaster, which turned into a painting, which turned into another disaster and made it’s way into the trash for pick up. So now at the 11th hour I decided to write a song, since that is what works for me. 

It is called Immanuel and is a song for Advent. I love the Christmas season so much and have really valued the teaching from Ancient-Future Time by Robert Webber on Advent and the meaning of the season. I took his ideas on the three “comings” that make up advent  to create this song. The three main focuses are:

1 – our expectation of Christ’s return and the renewal of the whole earth at the end of history

2 – our longing for Him to come into our hearts and for us to be aware of Him on a continual, daily basis

3 – His coming to earth incarnationally to eventually bring redemption to the world

Ultimately it is the Kingdom theology always coming into play. The Kingdom is the now and the not yet. Christ came, is coming now, and will come again. This song hopefully depicts those events. 

Here are the lyrics:

Immanuel

In this advent time we look to your coming once again

We wait with expectation for our Messiah to return

Immanuel, Immanuel

Your kingdom comes

As You come to us

Jesus the Son

Revealed to us

We light a candle for you, so we remember that your birth

Has brought us all redemption through incarnation come to earth

Immanuel, Immanuel

We desire for You to renew our faith in You today

To turn our hearts toward You, to be reborn in us each day

Immanuel, Immanuel

Our gorgeous church building where we were married. It was important to me to have the ceremony in a place already full of beauty.

In thinking on the role of art and music in the church and larger culture throughout history, I am once again astounded and excited to see how important God has made art in representing who He is and what He has done.

Right from the moment of creation, the beauty of Eden and it’s inhabitants, God said it was good. Then he created man and woman in His own image, full of creativity and the glory of their creator. Since the fall of man, we have been trying to recreate that beauty, that imagery of perfection and fullness. This is not an empty aim, as along the way we reflect the personality and loveliness of God. (1) We may never reach perfection in this life, but we can certainly strive to represent Christ in the best way we know how.

When God instructed Moses to build the tabernacle, He was extremely precise in the way it was to be done.(2)  So precise that no lay person would be able to construct what was required. Skilled craftsmen were needed for each part of the tabernacle: weavers, metal smiths, carpenters, incense and oil makers, potters, and more. It is a statement of God’s perfection. Not of our perfection, but of our submission and the use of our ability to demonstrate God’s perfection. 

Again in the early church through the middle ages we see the importance of architecture and the value of art pieces in the buildings where Christians gather. Any town in Europe will reveal at least one cathedral, built to last and full of artistic pieces in the way of stained glass, stone works, carpentry, etc. What has impressed me most about these buildings is that the life span of those who worked on them was not long, especially in the middle ages. The larger cathedrals, such as the Strasbourg Cathedral in France, was

Strasbourg Cathedral - too large to get a full shot of it from the square

built over 200 years, meaning it took several generations to finish. This speaks not only of  the determination to build something awe-inspiring and strong, but also of humility. The humility of passing one’s own work onto another generation not knowing what the finished product will be, or if it will be anything like the original design. In the case of the Strasbourg Cathedral, it changed designs entirely three times. I question whether I would be able to devote my own life to an artistic expression that I believed in, knowing that at my journey’s end another person would complete the task to their own judgement and visions. 

These great buildings were made to inspire and awe and “lift the hearts of people to remember and celebrate the living, resurrected Lord”.(3) We have in many ways drifted so far from this experience in our architecture. The Reformation certainly played a role in this. While many things were good and necessary in this time, the extreme nature of the sermons of men like John Knox in Scotland and England incited riots and the destruction of much liturgical art and objects for worship, seeing them as idols. This idea has seemed to hold true in Protestant circles even until now, although it seems to finally be moving back to the intended use of the arts. Art itself is not to be idolized. But the One who the art points to is to be adored. 

This break has come not only into the liturgical aspect of art, but also the daily life of individuals. I recall instances where I have heard that dancing is sinful, and therefore children are not trained in a beautiful expressive art. This art that Jewish people have celebrated with since the beginning of time. I have also been a part of discussions that we are not to mix with unbelievers with our music, because we need to be separate from the world and holy. But Christ himself sat in the homes of tax collectors. And if we are to be light to a dark world, how can we do so unless we are in that world. In it but not of the mindset of it. This is where art can move beyond buildings and into spaces that have not known worship before.  

In our postmodern age where our world is also full of new technology and constant changes, we still must hold to our faith, but the expression of it has become even more vast. I still long for beautiful spaces to worship, but now worship is on video, online, in every city in different ways. We have media arts in our services and on youtube. I think the church has come to fear in some ways the moving forward of technology. We tend to either embrace it and live on the “cutting edge” of technological worship services, or we refuse to have any part in it at all. I have been thinking on this often lately, and I think time itself and the development of technology is not good or bad. It simply is movement. We have nothing to fear in this. But we must cling to truth in every age, in every space, with every art. 

The tabernacle became a synagogue. The synagogue became rooms in houses. Rooms became cathedrals. Cathedrals became churches. In all of these places lives the Spirit of God. But if we can learn from history, our artistic expression is valuable to the development of our faith, to the deepening of it. I think we can embrace technology, but I still think the strongest impressions are made in person, in community, and in art. If we would release our artists to create, we would see beauty come alive in our objects of worship (the cup of wine, the altar table) and in our places of worship (the buildings) and in our cultures (the pubs, the coffee shops, the art galleries, the theatres). 

God speaks through art. Let us not limit His voice.

The entrance to our sanctuary (I love that word)

1. N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, Harper Collins Publishers, 2006, p.40

2. Exodus 35-40

3. Dan Wilt, Essentials In Worship History: The Language of Space, 2008, p.2

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St.Stephen’s University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

On reading about the Christian Year, and of all the sacraments celebrated or not celebrated, I was struck by our constant return to community.

According to James F. White, “The Christian community needs to assemble in order to worship and this act of coming together may be the most important single activity of the congregation.”1 Over and over as I have read through this book and specifically the value of Baptism and the Eucharist, I understand it all as a corporate event. Communion with Christ and the purpose of knowing Him cannot take place outside of the church as a whole.

For all the controversy over modes and purposes of baptism, they all take place in the context of the church, at the very least in the presence of family and clergy. As White states, “Initiation is a communal act, and the community must be present. The whole congregation is a sponsor.”2 No matter the procedure of baptism, it is notable that it was considered always a part of initiation into the church body. The Eucharist is also done as a whole body, each one taking a piece of the same bread and often sipping from the same cup. We acknowledge Christ and His death and resurrection together as a family from whom we draw accountability and comfort.

As our culture moves toward an even more individualistic age, how can we retain the importance of community? Will access to information via computer and television lull us into becoming alone? I wonder while we have access to so much more in light of the computer age, how much personal contact and social interaction has been lost? Can we build the same kind of relationships online as we can living face to face?

When looking at the early church, and how important meeting together was to them, I believe we have lost some of the importance of this personal contact. Those believers had daily communion with one another, they were able to encourage and instruct, and learn together. How often in our society do we go through an entire day, even week, without giving an encouraging word (or receiving one)? How long can we be left to our own thoughts before being instructed or enlightened by another person who knows us?

The more I read on the sacraments, the more I am inspired to act these out on a constant basis with the people in my own community, beginning with my husband. I do not want to become so digital in my learning and experience that I forget the feel of being underwater, or the touching of a hand as I break bread with someone. I want to ensure the meaning of the sacraments stays strong in my life, as a representation of who Christ is, what He did and will do, and how we as a body belong to that life.

Baptism and the Eucharist are not only about the celebration of Christ, but of us in Him. They are  of  the entire church, our families, communities, denominations, and world. We all belong.

“We are all one body, we have the same Spirit, and we have all been called to the same glorious future. There is only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and there is only one God and Father, who is over us all and in us all and living through us all.”3

1.James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship, Abingdon Press, 2000, p.86

2.James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship, Abingdon Press, 2000, p.226

3. Ephesians 4:4-6, NLT

In the last two days I have received messages regarding petitions that have been made to rescind Morgantaler’s Order of Canada, and to rescind Obama’s status of President-Elect because of his alleged lack of proof of citizenship. 

My first reaction was to sigh and roll my eyes. I was exasperated. And then I had to stop myself and ask why that my initial feeling. These are important issues to people. Especially since both of these men have something to answer for in terms of legalizing abortion. I fully believe that life is the most precious thing on earth and would never ever wish even for any life to be aborted. However, this was not the first thing that popped into my head.

I felt like this was just one more thing that Christians are up in arms about and flailing around. And I am tired of petitions! I feel the same way about the issue of gay marriage. I know this makes me a very liberal Christian but I just don’t care if gay people get married. I mean straight people aren’t staying married no one seems to be up in arms about that. Please hear me – I am not condoning a homosexual lifestyle nor do I condone abortion. And I’m not completely against petitions. It’s just not the real issue to me. The real issues begin long before laws are formed about these things.

We can be such a reactive people. Which speaks partly to our sense of justice: we see injustice and we stand up to defend the weak, which is good. Sometimes we defend an ideal, or just a tradition or a truly righteous way of living. But we have become known as a reactive people.

What if more of us banded together to be proactive? To create change before something becomes an issue of the day. In the issues I have already listed, I think the real problem is not the law, but it is our ability to love people and care for them through their hurts. If we took care of those who have been abused and walked out healing with them, we might have a lot less gay marriage to think about. If men in our world were Godly fathers who loved their children and respected women, would as many people turn to the same sex to fulfill what they have missed in the abuses of their childhoods? If we taught people that sex is about love and not a desperate desire to be wanted, if we made others feel a sense of belonging and worth from a young age, would we even have an issue of pre-marital sex? Can we walk through healing with a woman who has been raped? Are we willing to call people to a higher moral standard in their families and therefore prevent some of these things later in life? Or have we in the West become so individualistic that we fear confrontation of this kind?

Is it easier to sign a petition than to love our neighbor?

Not only that but instead of only making our voice known when we are angered at something, what if we started writing letters to our government leaders about what they are doing right? What if instead of (or as well as) a petition, we also wrote a thank you for our health care system, for our arts bursaries, for a police service that protects our homes and lives? Could this make us a more fair people? This plays out in all industries that we live in. I recently read a book called “Behind the Screen”  about Christians in the film industry in Hollywood. I was strongly impacted by a paragraph in which they write:

“I sympathize with viewers who are disgusted with foul language and sexual content on many television shows…But viewers who never tune into NYPD Blue because of the controversy over its subject matter missed out on one of the most redemptive (and specifically Christian) story lines on TV. Think of the impact that could have been made if ABC and the producers of the show had received as many compliments for that story line as they did negative letters and threats of boycotts when the show first came on the air.”1

I want to make my voice known. Not only about injustice, but about justice. About what is going right in the world. I want the people in our government to know that I appreciate when they do something righteous and good. If they know that we wholeheartedly support some of the choices they make, then will they not continue to make choices in that same vein? 

Maybe I could call it a “pro-tition”.

1. Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film and Culture,  Spencer Lewerenz and Barbara Nicolosi, Baker Books, 2005, p. 16

On the outskirts of the Advent season, I was inspired to throw myself into the meaning and understanding of the season. However, when I discovered from the first moment that it would require searching my heart and repenting of sin, I have to say I wavered.

Until now, Advent has simply been a calendar with a picture of the Nativity or Santa on it from which I could retrieve chocolates at will, simply closing the little doors so no one would see if I was cheating the dates. It was a countdown to Christmas. A word I heard but of which I had no understanding. My ignorance was blissful in the way that I needed not put any effort into this, no soul-searching, no intellectual or spiritual process. All that was required was the last-minute gift shopping, a trip to Wal-mart and the taste of waxy chocolate. 

With knowledge comes responsibility, though, and with responsibility can also come a great wealth of understanding and beauty. I now have the opportunity to become blissful in my understanding, and I am going to enjoy it fully, whether or not I have to repent.

The first thing I needed to know was what advent actually meant. So I looked it up. The definition is “a coming into place, view or being. Arrival”1 This clearly has nothing to do with shopping. It does have everything to do with the coming of Christ. And what found most enlightening was that is is not simply a season of remembering what was done at one point in time, but it is also a time to anticipate what is ahead. In identifying with history and the future, God comes into view in the present moments of redemption and conversion.

We are not simply remembering His coming once, but His continual entrance into our everyday moments of our lives. It is not just thinking toward His second coming for all the earth, but His redemption of our sin each day and hour. It’s the Kingdom again – the now and the not yet. The immediacy of the incarnation in our lives. 

We long for the Messiah to come, and to break through our lives, just as He did 2000 years ago. 

I was struck by the part that Isaiah plays in this. The message that he send to repent and turn to God, that the worship of Israel was empty and dead. 2 How often have I been frustrated when sitting in a worship service (or more often leading one) and wondering why the words seem so empty. Some days it is simply what we do together, and that is the reason I sing. But my desire was never to sing songs, but to worship with my whole self. As Isaiah is reminding Israel, I need to be reminded that when I turn to Him, He will bring deliverance. Of course, this is where repentance comes in. 

No one wants some Isaiah or John the Baptist calling them a brood of vipers. So in this case, repentance on my own initiative seems a good idea. In this I know that I am asking God for a breakthrough. I am now expecting Him to come again in this season in my life how He has always come into time. And I expect that He will change me if I let him, and continue to change me as I remember Him and anticipate Him.

I have never known this season with such exquisite beauty as I do now. As Webber says, “Christmas spirituality acknowledges that your life in God is a gift of union with Jesus Christ and the calling to bring your life into His life.”.3

That is a gift I would rather receive over any other thing. Especially cheap, waxy chocolates.  

1.advent. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc.http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/advent (accessed: November 14, 2008).

2. Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time, Baker Books, 2004, p.41

3. Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time, Baker Books, 2004, p.71

For many years the church has lived in a divided world. We have been taught and many of us believe that holiness, or being set apart, means to live in perfection, or in ministry, or in a magical place where we only think about God and how wonderful He is. The sacred realm. The secular world we have been told is the dirty or ungodly world around us, a part of the world void of God. 

How startled was I when I read that secular came from the word “saecularum”, meaning that God is indeed in our temporal time and space, as well as in the “sacred” eternal space. 

At some point in the history of the church, the word “secular” has had it’s meaning altered entirely. Where and why do we have this division? Is it because in our searching we have looked to man to show us holiness? That we have put people and ministers on a pedestal and look at those on stage or behind pulpit’s as the ones with the answers while we are simply the sinful ones? I think we often have seen or understood the Spirit of God to be near only when we are doing right, when we have somehow earned His presence. Is this where we have become afraid to share in God’s glory in each space and therefore have relegated Him and all of Who He is to the sacred realm, then causing the secular to be where we live our day to day striving but still sinful lives?

This may sound harsh but it seems plausible to me. We have separated God from us because of our shame. We are afraid to acknowledge His presence in the mundane. Do we think more will be expected of us? 

However, we will have to at some point admit that if time is not a hinderance to God then He exists both in the sacred time and the truly secular time. In the eternal and in the temporal. The now and the not yet. The familiar teaching of Kingdom theology. So now we must re-align our thinking to understand that our secular lives have always included the God of the Universe. 

I have often come across a block in the mind when I suggest using my gifts in ways other than in a church setting. The words “as long as God is the one who is glorified” or “as long as you remain holy” come to mind. But if Christ is in me, and holiness is in Him, then I am holy. Wherever I go and use my gifts, God will be glorified. For me to play music in a bar as opposed to a church service is not an example of me choosing a “secular” vocation. It is a vocation. There is no division or distinction. It is a gift. The sacred and secular dwell both in me at the same time.

Many of us choose to divide music this way. Christian (or sacred) music and secular music. But it is simply music. Is a doctor a Christian doctor or a doctor who happens to also be a Christian? 

It is simply the misuse of a word. 

When we understand that God is in the everyday mundane tasks and exciting passions of life and everything in-between, but also the creator of eternity, we can be more free. To know that there is not a label that we must live up to, but simply to be allowed to be who we are and know that God is with us is exhilarating. To know that God is not divided from us and in a space we cannot reach, but in every moment, present and listening, is rest.

In the end it all comes back to God. It began with Him and ends with Him. He is the sacred and the secular. He is with us and beyond us. The now and the not yet.

Creation and the Kingdom

The message of creation worshiping has been very clear in the teachings of N.T. Wright in Simply Christian (1) and in Dan Wilt’s teachings on Essential Worship Theology (2) and incredibly impacting. It has given me words to express how I have long felt about creation being such an integral piece of our worship experience, and also how I meet God in the midst of that beauty so often.

The idea that Wright gives about our role as reflecting creation’s worship to God and reflecting God to the rest of creation is a beautiful image of our purpose in this life. (3) What could be more rewarding than being a messenger to and from God to and from the world. This opens up how we see the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God is heaven breaking through into earth at any given moment. (4) When we see the glory of God in the smallest things, that is the Kingdom. 

In the song I have written, it was important to me to show the integration of our worship with the rest of creation. The way that creation groans in anticipation for the sons and daughters of God to be revealed (Romans 8).

I also wanted to show the fullness of God as the Trinity and how each person of the Trinity plays as role in creation and it’s redemption.

I realize that the piece I have written is more of a hymn than a chorus. It is more full of theology and more “wordy” than many choruses I have found. But that is the style that I seem to write in most, and although I will take more time with it in the future to re-write and re-work a few things, this is the basis of how I want to portray the idea of Trinitarian creation and the human response.

1. N.T Wright, Simply Christian, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006
2. Dan Wilt, Essentials in Worship Theology, Essentials Blue, 2008
3. N.T Wright, The Creation Integration, Video, 2008
4. N.T Wright, Simply Christian, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006, p. 59

Just a note – the song is still a work in progress…I think it would be best for the timing of it if the verses and pre-chorus are played in 4/4 time and the chorus slowed down slightly and played in 6/8. It mixes well and given a little more time (and the help of a drummer!) it would really enhance the feel of the song.

Anyhow here it is on my myspace page  http://www.myspace.com/mysistercrystalmusic  

And here are the lyrics:

We Praise You

Great Creator we recognize Your love in this world surrounding us

Gentle Father we see Your countenance shine in the beauty alive in us

Oh how we love to see Your glory pouring through all the brokenness of life

Oh how Your resurrecting power lifts us to all the fullness of Your life

We praise You with all of creation

We praise You in all it’s frustration

In longing to see Your kingdom come

We praise You, Your sons and Your daughters

We praise You, for freedom You promised

When heaven breaks into earth

Your kingdom comes

Gracious King we see Your authority here in the order of all You’ve made

Holy Spirit lead us to justice to walk in Your righteousness in the earth

Oh how we love to see Your glory pouring through all the brokenness of life

Oh how Your resurrecting power lifts us to all the fullness of Your life

We praise You with all of creation

We praise You in all it’s frustration

In longing to see Your kingdom come

We praise You, Your sons and Your daughters

We praise You, for freedom You promised

When heaven breaks into earth

Your kingdom comes

Holy Saviour You have shown mercy in death and in life You have rescued us

Jesus You have come for redemption to every nation, renewing us

Oh how we love to see Your glory pouring through all the brokenness of life

Oh how Your resurrecting power lifts us to all the fullness of Your life

We praise You with all of creation

We praise You in all it’s frustration

In longing to see Your kingdom come

We praise You, Your sons and Your daughters

We praise You, for freedom You promised

When heaven breaks into earth

Your kingdom comes

For: The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt”

Time is of the Essence

A phrase in a contract that means that performance by one party at or within the period specified in the contract is necessary to enable that party to require performance by the other party. (1)

It means we must do something in order for the other party to do something in return. In our case, God has brought us redemption. We, in turn, can worship Him for that. He in turn again, will transform our hearts and align them with His.

It is also demonstrated in nature. As Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (2) There is a cause and effect.

So time actually is of the essence. It is a consistent change and transformation.

We often look at time as a person: an enemy, a fast mover, a slow mover, a healer. Time is actually a gift to us if we can recognize it. Our use of this gift in our worship and understanding of the seasons of time can be incredibly helpful to us in our own lives and in the life of community around us.

In nature around us, we see the importance of seasons: The consistent repetition of death, growth, life, and the waning of life. This same series of seasons is reflected in our own individual human lives and in the lives of humans as a community, be it a small church community, a city, or our world as a whole. The small “we” continuing on to each greater “we”. (2)

In observing creation alone, we see that God enjoys these seasons. As Chesterton speaks of, God does not consider calling the flowers to bloom over and over again something that is mundane. He delights in this constant flow of order. (3) Flowers begin their growth in the spring after a dormant winter, they bloom and then die away and seed once again. The sacred order of time. And so we see that God has ordained a way of walking through time.

This is reflected in our own seasons of worship. Even in the major and minor themes of the gospels this is presented. On the one hand, joy, on the other, darkness. (4) God is not shying away from either of these themes, and neither should we. As time marches on, we discover in our lives the mystery of death bringing life. Brokenness to resurrection.

It is important for our growth to have these periods of time. But the acknowledgement of this must also be accompanied with authenticity. (5) Without an honest and vulnerable relationship we can’t commune in true intimacy with God or with those around us. . The more open we are with our brokenness, the more truthful we can be with our healing. Ironically, this is the safest place we can be when we are afraid. To be with our friends in relationship with God.

As a corporate community, we go through times where as a whole we are grieving, growing, living fully and enjoying life. We have to allow time for these things to take place and not rush each moment. Our worship as a church should give this time also. The time we take in our music to address our shared season, but also to give place for communion, healing, and transformation. (6)

Time allows us conscious movement through each stage of life.

This repetitive force also allows us the time to remember. To recall the transformations from death to life, but also the ongoing struggle with our faults and fears. It gives us the opportunity to remember and retell the story of redemption. (7)

One of the beautiful things about the nature of seasons is that we can celebrate and remember each one as they come again. The Christian calendar gives us great opportunity to hear again and revisit the life of Christ throughout history, from initial creation and the observance of festivals, to the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the life of the church. (8) Our observance of each season in each year gives greater depth each time it comes. We layer our new revelations onto our old beliefs and gradually discover a new intensity and strength of theology.

The repetitive nature of time also gives the extension of time that we need to understand, to let new thoughts sink in and form in our minds and hearts. With each recurring theme we have the opportunity to grow, nurture the past discoveries, and find new profundities. We are given time to see all of God’s colors and find a way to incorporate his full nature into our worship.

In this awareness we embrace the seasons of worship that we share on every level; with ourselves, with all other human beings, with nature, and we reflect the beauty of each season back to God, the creator of time.

1. West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc
2. John 12:24, the Bible, NIV
3. Dan Wilt, Essentials in Worship Theology: The Nature of the Human Being, p. 1
4. Dan Wilt, Essentials Worship Theology: A Theological Synthesis For Worship Leaders, Video           
5. John Eldridge, Voices, Inside Worship Magazine, Vol. 52, p. 10
6. Peter Fitch, Inside Worship Magazine, Vol. 45, p. 4
7. Dan Wilt, Essentials in Worship Theology: The Nature of the Human Being, p. 9
8. Robert Webber, The Christian Year: A Primer, Inside Worship Magazine, Vol. 60, p.4