What God are we worshipping?

I mentioned some of this thinking on Sunday morning in church, but I've been pondering it a little more so figured I'd finally getting round to putting something new up here.

I've been re-reading Rob Bell's 'Velvet Elvis' lately and there is a point in it where he says:

If there is a divine being who made everything, including us, what would our experiences 

with this being look like? The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, 

we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. 

And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, 

we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.

Between Bible College and church services (which take up a fair portion of my time) I have quite a few people telling me about God; His character, His will and what He wants, and of course this is beneficial. But I wonder at what point do we become complacent by assuming we know all about God?

A while ago, I was part of a discussion with a few people about a very touchy subject, that of whether babies who die automatically go to heaven. As you would expect it was quite emotionally charged, and at one point a girl adamantly insisted: "Well the God I know would not send a baby to Hell." I like to think that through our prayer lives, through our worship, and through our study of the scriptures that we gain an understanding of God. The fact that He is a relational God implies that He wants us to know Him intimately and vica versa. But can we really base a conclusion which (as far as I'm aware) has no scriptural basis entirely on who we think God is? To me that seems dangerously close to moulding God that He might fit our needs and beliefs.

Try thinking about this...

God is a perfect being. He cannot be near sin, or even look upon it Habakkuk 1:13a. We, on the other hand, are gold medallists in screwing up. We defy the commands of God every day in a thousand different ways, and it is only by the power of Christ's sacrifice that we have any hope of being in unity with Him.

Now, given those two statements, ask this: When was the last time you felt challenged in church? It stands to reason that when we come before God, we are doing so having fallen far short of what He requires. We should be coming to Him, hat-in-hand, needing forgiveness and the strength to change our lives, the passion to become more like the example Christ sets in the gospels. And yet (and I don't think I'm the only one) I go to church ever week, sing the nice songs (all of which seem to revolve around forgiveness, unconditional love and the happy God...not the angst, desperation or the suffering that populates so many of the Psalms) and leave with the warm, fuzzy feeling of having been in God's presence. Surely if I was truly coming into the presence of God, I would be ashamed! I would struggle to stand His holiness in light of my own misgivings. I would leave church with the thirst to do better, not leave every week with 'it's all going to be okay' tattooed on my heart.

If I am honest, I am guilty of dumbing God down and ensuring that He fits comfortably around my own failings, rather than washing over them. I have made up a version of God who drives me, but not too hard. Who loves me, but not so much that He changes me. And this keeps me happy. But the thing I want to remind myself of is the belief that there is far more joy to be had when in total communion with God than when blissfully ignorant of His call.

But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Matt 7:13

Many of us find the happiness that comes with complacence and comfort, but I want to be one of the few striving for the greater joy of a life lived with God. The God who is beyond and bigger and more.

Smartphones

About three years ago, I bought my first iPhone. It was the 3G model and I was very excited about it, drowning in the Apple hysteria that has held the world hostage ever since. And up until about a month ago when the phone packed it in I was very happy with it. I used it for Twitter, did all my emailing with it and had the Bible on it which is always handy.

Now, when it broke I was gutted, I mean, how do you exist in the modern world without all these things and much more in your pocket at all times?

Well, I am currently using the phone I had previously, a Sony Ericsson which does none of the things previously mentioned. It texts, it phones and it has a reasonable camera, but this is about it (except for a truly addictive mini golf game). And I have to say that I haven't missed the other things one bit. Not only that, but on Saturday night I decided that I was done with smartphones for the foreseeable future. 


You see, I have just returned from Summer Madness (tenth year...depressing thought, no?) with over fifty young people from our church, and it was an incredible time of fellowship together. There was incredible worship to take part in, some wonderfully gifted preachers brought challenging and through-provoking messages, and most importantly God sent His Spirit down and touched a lot of people. Lives were changed. Brilliant, yeah? And yet, people didn't get as much as they could have. Why? Because of smartphones. Over the four days spent at Glenarm Castle there were eight main meetings. Each of these meetings lasted maybe two hours. Within this time there was a talk, probably thirty to forty minutes long. In every one of those talks I looked round at different points and saw at least half of the young people in our group sitting with their iPhone or their BlackBerry in between their knees trying to be discreet, checking FaceBook or something else. And as you looked over the rest of the crowd of people there, it was exactly the same. I stood up at one point and there was a sea of little lights, a couple of inches in size, as people sat on their phone while the person on the stage tried to reach them with scriptural message. 


Does this not worry us? Is it not a horrifying thought that we cannot focus for half an hour in today's society without caving into the need to check our phone? Worse still we readily give the phone a priority over the Word of God. 


The irony of it was that the theme of the week was Fashion Gods, with focuses on consumerism and being countercultural. And yet almost every member of our group had paid the high cost to have one of these phones in their possession, just the way society tells them they must. And don't get me wrong, I had one for years, but this week has changed my view on them in a big way. 


As usual, all opinions welcome!

Old versus New

Going into overdrive with these posts here...I'll make this a quick one though.

A few weeks ago when I was leading worship in church we were singing Before the Throne of God Above. I asked our powerpoint guy to put up the original words instead of the new updated ones. You know, 'graven on His hands' instead of 'written', 'bid me thence depart' instead of 'force me to depart' and all that caper. This led to a debate with a team member as to whether we should update songs lyrics and the Aaronic blessing etc.

I always like to strike a balance when planning a service between modern songs and older tunes/hymns, and this isn't for any congregational reasons (keeping the peace between younger and older members), it is because of the lyrics. First of all, as Graham and I were discussing recently, the words of hymns like Before the Throne are incredibly deep and powerful. They paint pictures with a descriptive quality that is largely absent in modern contemporary worship. For example, 'graven on His hands' is a far more striking image that 'written ion His hands'. Graven is a permanent mark, carved forever leaving a scar, whereas as to write something is temporary or removable. It sits in harmony with the pain and sacrifice that was made for us. This is true of many hymns. Not that I don't think there is a place for simpler expressions of worship; one of my favourite modern worship songs is David Crowder's 'Rain Down' which contains only fifteen words. I love that worship is deeper than lyrics and so much can be expressed without relying on language the way everything else in our life does, but there is certainly much to be said for the way hymns move us by their words.

The other reason behind a wide range of songs is that we worship a God who is outside of time. The God who we will worship this Sunday morning is the same God who met with Moses on the top of Mount Sinai. He remains unchanging, and I like that our congregational worship can reflect this through the words we sing. Older language speaks of a time that has past, yet the words that were written then speak of the same God we now serve. I think by modernizing everything we can lose this aspect of God from our services.

Give me thees, thous and thys any day :)

A Continuation...

Okay, following on from the post I put up a couple of days ago. Our prayer cell met up last night and we spent a little time on the subject of worship, and some more thoughts are brewing which lead on nicely from the last ones.

A while ago I had a chat with someone who questioned me as to the amount church has moved forwards over the last number of years. Now, this is an interesting question. In my time at Orangefield things immediately seem to have moved on in a huge way. I have been there for twenty-four years, taken part in the leading of worship for eleven years and been leading worship for about six years. Jump back with me to the turn of the millenium...

There is a set team of musicians who lead every service, along with a praise group (choir) of around twenty-five singers. The songs we sing are from the Presbyterian hymn book with some additions from the Mission Praise collection. These books are found in the pew in front of you and most of them are simply led by piano/organ and voices.

Now we move forward through time and things begin to change. We jump from one set group to four different worship teams, people happily sign up to take part in the leading of the congregational worship. Each team is bursting with eleven or twelve participants. We move into our new building where instead of hymn books or acetate sheets we have powerpoint and cameras on screens the whole way through the service. We have a hugely updated repertoire of music, with filing cabinets full of modern worship songs including the latest tunes from the CCM charts. Our worship on a Sunday is louder, more energetic and freer than ever before.

Things have come a long way, right?

Well, I'm beginning to wonder if our attitude of worship has come the same distance that our exterior aesthetic has. All of these changes, while important and exciting, are much more to do with the way our worship looks and sounds than to do with the heart behind it. And it begs the question, if that is all that changes then is it worth anything? Don't get me wrong, I think steps are being taken. We are starting to include times of corporate prayer and lead in a more personally focused way; things which would not have been present in the past and which encourage a greater focus upon God during our time gathered together. But this small step forward is miles from where we could be.

When you lead from the front of the church you spend a great deal of time looking out at people during the worship. Sadly, like every church, there are people you see whose minds are totally elsewhere. They don't sing, they don't get involved, they stand up and sit down when they are told and stare blankly ahead the entire time. That is a separate issue down to the individual needing to make the effort to come to church prepared. However, you also see people who are genuine worshipers. You can easily tell when someone is singing the songs not just as words but from their heart. They understand what they are proclaiming, and they are honest as they proclaim it. This is wonderful, but it is scratching the surface of what worship should be. By this I mean that it is all one-way. They pour out their praise to God and make a joyous noise, but absolutely no time is given to allowing God to respond and meet with His people. As soon as the last chorus is sung we are to sit down and something else in our programme immediately starts up. Instead of a time where we meet with God, we write Him a letter and don't bother with the reply.

This strikes me as the major change we need to make but have not yet pushed for.

Yet more worship stuff...

So there's no real singular point to this post, I'm just kind of pouring out a load of stuff that's been in my head over the last wee while and seeing if anyone has any thoughts on it.

Something which has been on my mind quite a bit of late is the issue of how we can gather an entire congregation of people into an attitude of worship. One thing which I find a bit bothersome in my church is the rigid structure most of our services are cumbered with. We would rarely have more than two songs in a row, things are dotted with short prayers, offerings and other such bits and pieces and rather than a smooth flow it always seems very compartmentalised to me. The main reason for this is that I feel much more at home when there is half an hour or so devoted to praise, when you can get lost in it and have time to do business with God. Now, on the other hand there are people in my church who can't stand that. I've heard people say that their focus wanders if we spend too much time on one thing, or that they don't like standing for such a length of time.

For example, a few months ago I led a service slightly differently, in that we didn't pick or practise the songs beforehand. We just began to play and had an extended time of praise where we just played the songs as they came. Now, after this service several people approached myself or other members of the team and said that they had loved it, while others said they felt no sense of worship at all. Fairly polarized results!

So if a church service is meant to be a body of people coming together to worship God with one voice, what do we do? How do we get past the physical things that we like or dislike?

At the risk of sounding like a naive hippy, if we are truly in an attitude of worship, intent on focusing upon only God, then these things should be in the background. The songs we sing and the way we play them shouldn't be a decisive issue on whether or not we will feel able to worship.

After that unplanned service one of the things mentioned was that people struggled to worship because the words were not coming up on the screen fast enough (obviously because there was no list of songs). My immediate reaction to this was to ask why we are okay with the fact that people are rendered unable to worship if they are not given some words on a screen to sing? But in actual fact nothing hinders my own attitude of worship more than when people lead a song differently to the way I know it. If the tune is tweaked slightly or a different word used it totally jolts me out of any form of worship. We all have comforts in our churches which have become crutches.

It seems incredibly clear to me that we must get to a point where we are able to meet with God without relying on computers, tuners and fancy resources. People all over the world rejoice in the name of God with their voices alone as this is all they have. We have been blessed with much more but we must get out of the habit of relying on them, making them the primary element of our worship.

But how do we get there? What is the first step toward letting go of earthly things and allowing God a central place in our service?

Praying for yourself

"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; 

knock and it will be opened to you."

Matthew 7:7, ESV

We recently had a worship night for young people in our church, one which we hold every couple of months. A group of six people (including myself) lead the times of praise at these events, and the usual procedure is that we meet up two or three times before each event to have a run over some songs. Before this most recent event we had three meetings, and at each one we had a short time of prayer to open up the time together. The idea was to pray for three different elements of the event, one at each practise, as follows:

1. Praying for the hearts and attitudes of the young people coming along, for an openness among them to let God work freely.
2. Praying for Ruth Cooke and Jonny Elliot, leading the talk based on the work of IJM.
3. Praying for ourselves and for each other, for personal focus in the week leading up to the event.

I have genuinely never found anything in my prayer life as challenging as the ten or fifteen minutes I spent at our third practise praying for myself. 

Over the years I've been involved in worship groups, outreach teams and youth groups, all of which have involved an active prayer element, and I've always been a fan of it. I get a real kick out of a time of prayer, there's something very reassuring and exciting about calling upon God to involve Himself in what we're doing. But in this moment I became very aware of how rarely I pray for myself. I had no idea where to begin. Ask me to pray for a team that's about to begin, for a friend in need or a situation on the other side of the world and I will have no problem at all, but when I tried to turn the focus on myself, I really struggled.

Don't get me wrong, I've prayed many prayers over the years for exams coming up and for steady nerves before I speak at something and all that kind of thing, but that's always been in relation to a specific thing. This was new, the idea of just praying that I might be who God needs me to be in order that His Spirit might use me. I've been leading worship in various ways for about five years and this was the first time I'd realised this. I had to be honest with God, accept that He knows all my flaws and that I must acknowledge them before Him if I am to ask for His help in overcoming them. I felt so exposed before God, terrified that if I let my walls come down by mentioning my inner issues in prayer that He would see me for the struggling sinner I really am.

That verse from Matthew is such a widely-known one, a sentence many of us have been able to speak from memory ever since Sunday school. Yet how many of you are like me and have no idea how to take it for what it really is? Am I really the only one who has no problem praying for the healing of the physically sick because I believe God is that powerful, yet can't fully convince myself deep down that he can help me overcome some personal weaknesses?

Ask and it shall be given. Simple as that. Lust stopping you from being who God wants you to be? Ask God to take away your lust. Struggling to maintain a devotional life with God? Ask Him for the determination to keep it up. Job done, case closed. As long as we ask God with the faith that He requires of us, it really is as simple as that.

So let's strive for that faith. The results of those times of prayer we had at our practises was clear. Young folks responded to the movement of God through their worship in ways I hadn't sen in them before. Ruth and Jonny spoke a powerful and challenging message about the world and what Christians need to be doing within it. So if God responded to these prayers so clearly what reason have I to doubt that He will respond to my most personal and desperate prayers? With the assurance God has blessed me with through this last event I am making a conscious decision to pray for myself openly and honestly with God, and if anything here has sounded familiar to you I hope you can do the same :)

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is the

daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer

to have a heart without words than words without heart.

Mahatma Gandhi

Musings on Musical Content

Last year I put up a post about the debate over what Christians should and shouldn't watch on TV or in films, and a similar chat recently emerged between a friend and myself. Essentially this friend was flicking through my iPod and started to laugh when they found music on it by a band who call themselves Holy F**k. (Breathtaking electronica, well worth a listen!) They then said that they would never have such a thing listed in their music library and made a 'what-if-your-minister-found-that-on-there?' kind of joke. So we mulled over this for a while, debating what a Christian should be listening to.

For the record, there is a lot of stuff on my iPod that I wouldn't play at my gran's 80th birthday party. There's some Eminem (I'm somewhat ashamed to say), a lot of Bill Hicks stand-up material (covering all manner of subject matter) and the Team America soundtrack (enough said). Not to mention a wealth of classic bands who ever now and then let a dodgy word slip in there (John Lennon, Pink Floyd, Dave Matthews etc etc etc...).

Now, people are always quick to relate to the passage in the Bible where Peter denies Christ, how he curses to try and convince people he isn't a follower.

He began to call down curses, and he swore to them, “I don’t know this man 

you’re talking about.” Mark 14:71

People then say that from this that to swear is to distance yourself from Christ, and following on from that they say that it is no better to put this stuff into you head through what you watch and what you listen to. While I don't entirely agree with this viewpoint I can understand the reasoning and I have an awful lot of admiration for the restraint of people who discipline themselves this way. My problem, however, is that many people take the idea of 'swear words' too seriously, letting this cloud their judgement.

My view on swearing in a nutshell is that there are no bad words, there are only bad intentions. Now I don't use bad language, but I don't believe God set certain words aside as naughty words that we're not to use. I believe that man has always used words to hurt, and over time this use has stuck with certain words. So for me, intent and nature mean more to me that specific language where listening is concerned. If I were a parent, I like to think that I'd be happier with my children listening to Manic Street Preachers who have the odd curse word, than Katy Perry or Rihanna, wherein the soul purpose of the music is to glorify and glamourize a lifestyle which God finds totally abhorrent. Some of the music on Cool FM genuinely disgusts me and it might not contain a single word which you couldn't say on daytime TV. Therefore I find it difficult when a Christian won't listen to a particular song or watch a particular film because of the verbal content, but they happily pick up the latest compilation of radio chart-toppers.

Food for thought...