REAL debate thread for RELIGION

[Valandil]

I prefer hymns myself, but let's put all this in the context of history.

Many of Charles Wesley's great hymns simply changed the lyrics on old drinking songs. They met much the same response from the church. Wesley did this because they were reaching un-churched people... so by putting new words to a tune they knew, they were able to learn it quickly.

I believe the organ was considered inappropriate when first introduced to churches.

Don't know church music history that well... but I've heard those and a few others. Best not to look down on or deride something that someone else may find beneficial.

In my church, we're using a lot of those choruses (including the one posted just a bit above). I'd prefer more hymns myself, but it's not about me. It's about reaching people we're not yet reaching.

[Janny]

Pardon my ignorance Merc, but what are the general beliefs of the Lutherin Church? I mean, what are the practising differences... last year I went to a Singwoche in a Lutherin chruch in Germany, but I'm not going to pretend I knew much of what was going on, besides the music and sports we played. What did strike me too was how nice the people were. I digress.

[Rían]

Originally posted by Mercutio
"Contemporary worship" is turning a God-focused religious service into entertainment. The reason it exists is because our entire culture is based on entertainment and emotional response. It's all they see, so it's all they want.

I see what you're saying, Merc, but I know that all "contemporary worship" is NOT "entertainment". Some of it certainly is, perhaps even the majority. In fact, that's one of the reasons why we left our old church after 15 years (one of many reasons, and only after several years of consideration, prayer, and attempts to help fix the problems). Our current church uses many of those songs, but is very NON-entertainment oriented. In fact, even tho we've been going there for 6 years now, when I saw our worship leader at a local coffee shop, I knew I had seen him somewhere, but just couldn't place him - they are NOT up there performing at ALL, so I didn't even recognize him until I asked him his name!

I think you need to be extremely careful about saying only certain types of songs are pleasing to God. God tells us over and over that He looks at the HEART of a person, and that's what important. Personally, I love the hymns, and wish we would sing more than we do, but the teaching in our church is fabulous, and it has an incredible community and world outreach with not only money but people, and in general, the leadership has a heart for God, and people's lives are being challenged and changed and blessed. I think those are more important things than how many hymns we sing or what instruments are used.

Good point about the drinking songs, Val.

I think the "pour out my life" is a reference to being a servant like Christ was and like Christ instructed us to be, and also a reference to giving up our own control of our life and submitting to the Lordship of Jesus, also as He commanded us. We sometimes sing that one. In fact, most of the words in that one are in obedience to the command that Jesus gave us to take communion in rememberence of Him - the words are clearly obeying what He said to remember what He did for us.

[Arien the Maia]

Originally posted by Mercutio
If you want to read something for awhile, here is a nice article published in "First Things" (I mentioned that journal earlier) about Lutherans, which includes a history, what the different organizations/synods are, their differences of opinion, etc.

"The Lutheran Difference"

thanks! that was informative

[Nurvingiel]

Originally posted by Mercutio
It seems like the "contemporary" stuff turns the worship service into something totally about your personal/emotional experience rather than focusing on God. And also, many of the "contemporary" hymns have no depth to them. Its just "I love you Jesus" "You saved my soul" repeated a thousand times.

I agree that some contemporary hymns are fluff; some haven't been "weeded out" over a test of time. However, there are many beautiful new hymns being composed. I don't think we should necessarily ignore them just because they're new. At the same time, some traditional hymns are no longer relevant. "Battle Hymn of the Republic" anyone? Many traditional hymns are extremely beautiful and meaningful, and have stood the test of time. All this is to say I feel that people should sing whichever hymn lets them express their love for Jesus the best. (Even if it's "Battle Hymn of the Republic".)

P.S. We are in a Lutheran church, so communion is extremely important. At first, the contemporary folks wanted to not have communion every week! The heresy! Our pastor has done all he can to tone it down, but still...

No communion! That's a shame, I think communion really reinforces a sense of connunity. Hence the name, right? This is also why I feel no one should be required to attend, but it should be there for those who like it.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Nurvingiel
[BNo communion! That's a shame, I think communion really reinforces a sense of connunity. Hence the name, right? This is also why I feel no one should be required to attend, but it should be there for those who like it. [/B]

do you mean "a sense of community"? And in the Lutheran faith, communion is considered a "means of grace" (the other two are Baptism and...oh great I can't remember! Fail me Sunday School teacher! ) It's sort of necessary/required, yet it is not the saving grace (Jesus Christ). And that was the simplest explanation I can give without a few pages of writing.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Valandil
I prefer hymns myself, but let's put all this in the context of history.

Many of Charles Wesley's great hymns simply changed the lyrics on old drinking songs. They met much the same response from the church. Wesley did this because they were reaching un-churched people... so by putting new words to a tune they knew, they were able to learn it quickly.

true

I believe the organ was considered inappropriate when first introduced to churches.

I'll look into that more...its something I never heard. Have to ask my organ teacher about it. Or was this a case of all musical accompniament was considered inappropriate (sort of how the Amish people are today). Any musical instruments made people self-righteous, therefore only human voices were ever used.

to be continued...

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by King Val
It's about reaching people we're not yet reaching.

Please Me, O Lord: the Roots of Romantic Worship

S. M. Hutchens

After the collapse of the Episcopal Church our family returned to the Evangelicals whence we came. During our years away, however, they had been undergoing their own changes. An electrotheatrical liturgy seems now to be the common and expected manner of worship—spectacular when the budget can manage it, and imitation-spectacular when it cannot.

On a recent visit to a fairly typical Evangelical church, we were treated to one of its regular features. A handsome young woman, attractively dressed, stood before the congregation with an eight-inch microphone, the head of which she held gently to her lips while she writhed and cooed a song in which she, with closed eyes and beckoning gestures, begged Jesus, as she worked her way toward its climax, to come fill her emptiness. The crowd liked it.

Her song had a different effect on me than I suspect she thought it would. It did, perhaps, bring me closer to Jesus, but by bringing me closer to the sinfulness of my own heart, the kind of heart that would be excited to lust by a pretty woman begging to be filled, and that would be instructed by its conscience to avert the eyes until she was done with her performance.

It also made me wonder if her husband, sitting by while she went through her show, was doing his duty by her, since she seemed to have a large surplus of the sort of womanly energy that husbands like to see. (One can only account for these displays by Christian wives and daughters by the unquestioned acceptance in Christian homes of feminist assumptions about obedience not owed to husbands and fathers.) These are not particularly pious thoughts, but I rather doubt that I was alone, and as I write am in no humor to pretend otherwise.

The Next Phase

Upon reflection I had to conclude that the song was not un-Evangelical, not foreign to the tradition. It was the “In the Garden� tryst of the old hymnbooks carried into the next phase of intimacy and excitement. Jesus has been walking and talking with the revivalists and telling them they are his own for many years now, and it is not surprising that, given his romantic propensities, they should be expecting him to move to the next phase of the courtship ritual.

Many of Evangelicalism’s most beloved verses are off-putting to men (at least those who are paying attention to the words) because they seem to be proper to women, or even homosexuals—or because they force them to lie to God about their intentions or state of mind as though they were under the influence of some kind of religious excitement. These hymns are largely the products of a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of American religion (see Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture ), of an era that has borne most of its fruit in the last hundred years or so, when evolving Christianity in the West (Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative) has come to be regarded by a great many men, and not without reason, as an almost exclusively affective domain—something for women, children, and unmanly men. Much of the new Evangelical music—and I have heard the same in Catholic churches under the influence of “liturgical renewal�—is of the same ilk.

The display that provoked this writing is the product of development shared by the mainline and the Evangelicals. The latter, still largely in the feminized stage, have not yet moved wholly into the emasculations of the mainline. The Evangelical academy, while for the most part egalitarian now, has managed to avoid the bleak, militant feminism now in unquestioned control of the mainline schools. The influence of the academy is further mitigated by Evangelicalism’s congregationalism and its strong populist and anti-intellectual streaks. The professors have influence, to be sure, but they do not become bishops who can force their will on congregations, or fill commissions having the power to change a church’s lex orandi over the course of a few years.

Nor do churches that may elect their own pastors without interference from the denominational intelligentsia favor the women that have been forced on mainline congregations. The Evangelical churches, in accordance with their tradition, can remain “merely feminized�: “soul-winning,� now in the sense of gravid with “seekers,� full of the warmings sought by Evangelicals, and marked by preaching and music that present no particular challenge to the mind or tastes of a child of ten—a child that in traditional cultures has not yet, as Leon Podles observes in The Church Impotent, left the society of women. The church feminized is not only the church demasculinized, but inevitably the church infantilized as well.

The excuse for this is that to “reach� people, the churches must operate on this level, but this becomes suspect when it appears that nothing deeper is available in these congregations for those who have for many years been “reached.� There is no move from soft rock or campfire chorus to Bach or Mendelssohn, from melody-line singing back to the four-part harmonies from which most of these congregations have fallen in a single generation. (Children in the Evangelical church where I was raised learned to read not only their Bibles, but also soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, from singing the parts with Mom and Dad. Now they just accompany, singing melody only, the principal musicians, which they once themselves were.)

They rarely move from skits and anecdotes to Augustine or Calvin, from entertainments to prayer and fasting, from “come to Jesus because he’s attractive� to “obey him, his apostles, and his apostolic ministers, because he’s Lord,� from affection for a cosmeticized Jesus to the fear of God. (What I am saying here applies to mainstream Pentecostalism as well.) The only difficulty I would see for our ten-year-old is making sense of all the sexual heat and energy of the liturgical performers, with their thumping rhythms, their body motions, their phallic microphones, and the increasingly erotic overtones of the “personal relation with Jesus Christ.�

Tradition Gone Awry

The young woman displaying herself before the faithful with her sexualized—and hence secularized—religion is not simply an example of unfortunate excess, but, I believe, a symbol of a whole tradition gone awry, caught now in the glaring intensification of what it was in its beginning, and what wiser heads, in those beginnings, often warned it against. It is a tradition in which religious affection is the measure of faith, where preaching is paramount not because it teaches but because it “blesses the heart,� where the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is not the center of the gathering of Christians on the Lord’s Day, but rather is minimized in favor of replenishment of emotional capital, where the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are not customarily repeated, not because they are not believed, but because they, being “rote,� like written-out prayers, contain not a minim of the spontaneity alleged to characterize true worship.

[Mercutio]

con't.

It is a faith in which the value of worship is measured principally in terms of its ability to excite the worshiper rather than give glory to God, and in which it is assumed that what satisfies the jaded church-attender, always seeking new and heightened religious experience, is what pleases the Lord. It is a faith in which the Scriptures are honored in word, but in which they have always been freely altered, distorted, or ignored to meet the changing requirements of an unstable religious culture, the sons and daughters finding egalitarianism and toleration of their divorces using the same exegetical tools their fathers used to find the prohibition of wine and dancing.

The churches are large, but because sin is barely mentioned—it depresses the celebratory atmosphere—one suspects they are run by unjust stewards who fill the pews by encouraging their Lord’s debtors to minimize their accounts. It is a faith in which all too often the good pastor is rejected in favor of the talented one.

I now doubt that the faults of churches like this can be avoided by fleeing to others that are better, for having spent my own time sojourning in the wilderness, I am now skeptical that the “better church� we once sought is available on the terms we sought it. I do think that these churches, and all churches, whatever their faults, can be saved (else they will most surely die, however large and noisy the corpse may be) by serious self-examination and reform, doing what must be done to correct the flaws in their histories, such as the Lord calls the churches in Asia in the prologue to the Book of Revelation to do.

This means admitting that a good number of what are regarded as church distinctives are simply wrong, and that the fathers of the sect were wrong so far as they were fathers of a sect. And of course, it means the division of churches, so that those who are obedient can now find each other’s fellowship, unencumbered by the burden of old lies. What evil calls the scandal of schism is, from the perspective of good, the removal of diseased tissue so the body might be healed.

If the Lord commands these changes of his churches, they are possible. They are not begun by telling young women to behave themselves with greater modesty, but by the admission of the old men that the chain of events that brought her to expose herself before the congregation is of their forging. The errors are in constitutional matters, and the burden of amendment lies at their feet far more than hers.

Does that help at all? Or...here is the original article: http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/is...17-04-013.html .

One more quote to support my thoughts:

From Christ-Centered to Self-Centered Worship

A lot has changed in the past twenty-five years. Back then...contemporary meant youth ministers had to play the guitar, and we got away from Thee and Thou, but in the end the historic liturgy was preserved and some aspects were recovered. Today contemporary worhip is no longer about getting away from archaic English and using guitars, but rather about being user friendly, evangelistic hospitality, inclusive non-offensive language, and entertainment; it is about the worhiper and not the object of worship...

Richard E. Boger, Jr.
Pastor, St. Michael Lutheran Church
High Point, North Carolina

[Rían]

Originally posted by Mercutio - quote from an article
Today contemporary worhip is no longer about getting away from archaic English and using guitars, but rather about being user friendly, evangelistic hospitality, inclusive non-offensive language, and entertainment; it is about the worhiper and not the object of worship...

Again, as long as he's not saying ALL contemporary worship is this way, I can agree with him. The contemporary worship in our church is NOT this way, but I've seen plenty examples of what he's talking about.

from an article
The churches are large, but because sin is barely mentioned...

In ours, it's mentioned without any apology or trying to make it anything other than it is. You should have heard when we covered the bit about marriage and adultery.

Our pastor doesn't do "topical" sermons - he just picks books in the Bible and ploughs through them verse by verse (we're in Luke now). He says IHO, it's safer that way, because it doesn't let you avoid the more difficult subjects.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by RÃ*an
Again, as long as he's not saying ALL contemporary worship is this way, I can agree with him. The contemporary worship in our church is NOT this way, but I've seen plenty examples of what he's talking about.

Yay! It's done the right way in your church!

In ours, it's mentioned without any apology or trying to make it anything other than it is. You should have heard when we covered the bit about marriage and adultery.

I can imagine.

Our pastor doesn't do "topical" sermons - he just picks books in the Bible and ploughs through them verse by verse (we're in Luke now). He says IHO, it's safer that way, because it doesn't let you avoid the more difficult subjects.

We have the three readings per Sunday (Old Testament, New Testament, Gospel [usu. NT]), and the sermon (at least when our regular pastor is their, almost 100% of the time) is always on the Gospel verse, which if done correctly ties in with the OT and NT lessons. He doesn't pick a random verse elsewhere to preach on like some do, just because its "easy" or we "need" it. I think the way the calendar works (all ELCA churches have the same readings each week), the entire Bible is gone through before they repeat things. An exception would be Pentecost day, Easter day, Christmas, etc. The major "holidays" of the church calendar have their own readings about them that are the same each year.

[Lief Erikson]

Originally posted by RÃ*an
quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
from an article
The churches are large, but because sin is barely mentioned...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In ours, it's mentioned without any apology or trying to make it anything other than it is. You should have heard when we covered the bit about marriage and adultery.

Our pastor doesn't do "topical" sermons - he just picks books in the Bible and ploughs through them verse by verse (we're in Luke now). He says IHO, it's safer that way, because it doesn't let you avoid the more difficult subjects.

That's probably true. Eventually, I hope that I end up in a church like that, where sin is freely discussed, and the Bible taken in the spirit it was written.

The church I currently attend does do brilliantly with the music, though. My mother is very influential in its organization; probably a reason I like it so well . I just love the hymns. It's all so beautiful.

[Mercutio]

While we are in the realm of Church Music, what's the most moving thing you've heard, your favorite hymn/organ piece, etc.?

[Nurvingiel]

I love the Common Cup Company, a small Christian music band started in my Dioceses. They have great music, very uplifting and spiritual. Even though I haven't listened to them in ages, I still remember part of "She Flies On".

[Lief Erikson]

I've heard so many ancient beautiful hymns it's hard for me to sort one out. I tend to particularly love the ancient Irish hymns.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Lief Erikson
I tend to particularly love the ancient Irish hymns.

They're marvelous.

[brownjenkins]

while i've never had the pleasure of witnessing it in person i've always been overwhelmed by the power of the chants of the tibetan monks of the himalayas... it has that kind of otherworldly harmony to it that almost takes one beyond the idea of 'just listening to music'

on the more local side of things, i have a good friend who belongs to a southern baptist church... and while i've never been religious myself, i find their hymns and spirituals so uplifting they'd almost make a believer out of me

the songs are often the old standards, but the delivery is so rousing you can't help but enjoy it

[Rían]

Originally posted by brownjenkins
... and while i've never been religious myself, i find their hymns and spirituals so uplifting they'd almost make a believer out of me

*starts to hatch evil plot to tie brownie to a church pew in that church until he's a believer! heh heh *

[Rían]

Originally posted by Mercutio
Yay! It's done the right way in your church!

We have the three readings per Sunday (Old Testament, New Testament, Gospel [usu. NT]), and the sermon (at least when our regular pastor is their, almost 100% of the time) is always on the Gospel verse, which if done correctly ties in with the OT and NT lessons. He doesn't pick a random verse elsewhere to preach on like some do, just because its "easy" or we "need" it. I think the way the calendar works (all ELCA churches have the same readings each week), the entire Bible is gone through before they repeat things. An exception would be Pentecost day, Easter day, Christmas, etc. The major "holidays" of the church calendar have their own readings about them that are the same each year.

Sounds good!

What are some of your favorites, Merc? I like so many - hmm, Savior like a Shepherd Lead Us for one .... more later....

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by RÃ*an
What are some of your favorites, Merc? I like so many - hmm, Savior like a Shepherd Lead Us for one .... more later.... [/B]

Hmm...I'll go compile a list!


What Brownie said about the music reminded me of something I mentioned (a few months ago maybe?). Composer John Rutter attended Oxford Colleges in England. He would walk out of a lecture after a perfect arguement for atheism. The professor could've had him believing (or I guess not believing). But when he would go to Mass and hear the music (organ and choir), it would just blow him away. How could this exist and there not be a God?