John Meunier

Bishop Willimon stuck his toe in the worship wars again, and has gotten a few comments taking him to task. Charles Wesley wrote new hymns after all, they say. Why not let people write new hymns today?

I’m with John Wesley – for the most part – on questions of worship style. We should never let differences in worship style get between us and the crucial things. If someone finds it spiritually uplifting to drone on over and over the same two lines about how fabulous God is, hey, more power to them. I won’t be there, but I pray the Spirit will be.

I say we should let people write new hymns. I’m all for people setting old hymns to more contemporary melodies.

But I agree with Willimon’s critique in part.

I was recently at a church of my own denomination, and I came away frightened, thinking, have I seen the future of the church? The hymns (songs really), anthems, everything had jettisoned the tradition, our language, our metaphors, and our stuff in favor of something called contemporary Christian music. And in my humble opinion, what I heard that day, I just don’t think will lift the luggage in the future. As people were singing, praising some vague thing called ‘God’ who, as far as I could tell, had never done anything in particular, as we were bouncing along praising, I wanted to say, ‘you know there are people out there today who just found out that their cancer is not responding to treatment, or who found out their kids won’t do right, that their marriage won’t survive, or that they can’t keep their jobs, and here we are just bouncing along, grinning, praising God. We’ve got some good stuff for that kind of thing — where is it?

Now, I’m not sure what a rousing chorus of “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” does for the guy who just lost his job compared to praise choruses, but I do share some of the bishop’s reaction after many Sundays in contemporary worship.

I say if you can write a hymn like “Amazing Grace” or “How Great Thou Art” or “Hymn of Promise” or “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” or “The Summons” then please do. Let’s sing it. There are contemporary songs that I think have the kind of quality of spiritual and theological depth that the traditonal hymns have. I find “In Christ Alone” a wonderful church hymn, for instance. But too many contemporary songs – including some I like to listen to – are pretty thin or are clearly better as performance pieces than group singing pieces.

I’ll look for the Hulk at Cinderella’s castle next time I get dragged to Disney World.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Christopher Gudger-Raines has returned to blogging with Seven Day Gospel.

Those of us who enjoyed his Among the Hills blog are happy to see him writing again.

Philip Jenkins’ 2008 book The Lost History of Christianity takes a look at Christianity as it existed in Africa and Asia from the days of the early church until the faith was nearly wiped out and displaced – mostly by Islam.

One interesting passage reflects on the differences that led to the North African church being erased from the map while the Coptic Christian church continues even to this day.

The key difference for survivial is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed. The Egyptian church succeeded wonderfully in this regard, while the Africans failed to make much impact beyond the towns. While the Egyptians put the Christian faith in the language of the ordinary people, from city dwellers through peasants, the Africans concentrated only on certain categories, certain races. Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial.

In the various current American cultural settings in which we find the church, is it mostly a colonial church? Or has it gone native?

I’ve been thinking again about sermon size.

My dad told me this week about a Catholic mass he attended that had a three sentence homily. Three sentences. My understanding is that in Catholic worship homilies are not required except on Sunday and days of obligation, so this might reflect that practice.

At the other end of the spectrum, I know it is not uncommon for pastors to preach 45 minutes or more on Sunday morning.

In license school they told me sermons should be 14-17 minutes long for mainline Protestants.

One important matter to get out of the way. You can have a small sermon no longer how long you preach. Part of sermon size has to do with the subjects that are discussed. And I’m a bit partial to the notion that the sermon has to determine its own size. Not every sermon is going to clock in at exactly the same length.

The Bible is not great at giving us guidance here.

Jesus’ own sermons include the Sermon on the Mount, which frankly reads more like notes someone took than a flowing sermon. That clocks in at nearly 2,600 words. Then you have his first homily in Luke 4, which barely started when he was cut off by questions.

In Acts we have several addresses that sound like sermons, all of them pretty short by modern standards. But then you have Hebrews, which I understand many scholars say should be seen as a sermon more than a letter.

All in all, it is hard to gain much guidance from scripture on this question.

How do you decide how long to preach?

For those who do not preach, how long should a sermon be?

Go to four minutes in on this and listen to the story of a father and son.

I know Ted Kennedy was no saint. But if you can listen to this story without your heart clenching up in your chest, well, I pray for you.

The thought occurred tonight that part of the reason Christians sing together when they gather is because once you have joined your voice with another human being it is hard to treat that person as a stranger or even an enemy.

John Wesley’s sermon on the death of George Whitefield includes this great snippet about the early Methodists.

By them he was convinced that we “must be born again,” or outward religion will profit us nothing. He joined with them in fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays; in visiting the sick and the prisoners; and in gathering up the very fragments of time, that no moment might be lost: and he changed the course of his studies; reading chiefly such books as entered into the heart of religion, and led directly to an experimental knowledge of Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

I love that phrase: “gathering up the very fragments of time.” I’ve been carrying that around for a day or so now and letting it point out to me all the fragments of time I leave laying about all the time.

Kevin Watson has a post about the history of entire sanctification as a Methodist doctrine. He includes a story about having asked his students about it:

Yesterday, I asked the students in my United Methodist History class if any of them had ever heard a sermon preached on entire sanctification or christian perfection. Not one of the nineteen students present had.

Had I been in his class, I’d have to say I have not either - at least none that I remember. But I’ve not heard many doctrine sermons, for which I am grateful.

Just curious though. Has anyone out there every heard or preached a sermon on entire sanctification?

Watson thinks you should.

United Methodists should not become familiar with this teaching only if they go to seminary. It should be preached in every Methodist pulpit, as the result of every UM pastor’s wrestling with what Wesley did and did not mean by “perfection,” and their efforts to present this to their parishioners in a way that they can understand.

My admittedly glib post about John Piper’s latest Job’s friend defense of God has gotten me knocked about a bit here and elsewhere on the Internet. For the glibness, I deserve it, but I really do not understand the stance on God’s sovereignty. For instance, this comment from one reader:

What Piper is saying is true and biblical. If we sacrifice God’s sovereignty in order to absolve God of any responsibility in not preventing someone’s death, then we make God subject to things out of his control, and then we can’t rely on him for anything, at least not with 100% confidence that what God is doing will turn out for good, because you never know if this is one of the instances that will turn out to be a mistake or one of the spots where God loses a risky bet.

First, I notice that Piper and this commenter do the same thing. They say my unwillingness to say God ordained Sept. 11 is because I am trying to get God off the hook for evil. Actually, I am unwilling to say that because I believe God gave those terrorists the free will to reject his grace and love – which they did. I’m fine if you want to say God could have created a universe without free will and is therefore in that sense responsible for evil – even particular acts of evil. But when a little girl asks if God killed her daddy, I say, no, the terrorists did.

Contary to the commenter’s point, I miss the part where saying God killed this little girl’s father is in any way related to my trust and faith in his ability to bring good out of evil or keep his covenants.

Some people may need to say God ordains the rape of children so they can trust God’s ability to keep his promises, but I do not. I trust God will keep his promises even though people often turn their backs on those promises and reject his offer of free grace.

I don’t understand why that is so hard for Piper and other Calvinists to affirm?

They seem to be saying that God’s sovereignty is bound by human logic. If we cannot hold two things in our heads at once, it must not be possible for God. Why?

Why is logic more powerful than God?