John Piper answers that question here.  It’s a great reminder of what ought to motivate us as worship leaders.

Jim and Casper Go To Church is another iconoclastic book from the Barna Group (What’s with the scary red covers?)  The book details the journeys of Jim (a longtime Christian) and Casper (a longtime atheist) on a Homeric odyssey through several different churches – from mega to mini, from emergent to mainline.  It chronicles Casper’s reactions to each of these different experiences.  It is essential reading for the church leader who cares about how church is perceived by those outside of the North American church sub-culture.  Here are my quick hit thoughts:

• Casper responds very positively to when the church is involved in the community or working for justice in the world.  I think it belies an assumption on Casper’s part that churches are more interested in helping themselves than in helping others.  As church leaders we need to be constantly asking ourselves who we’re interested in helping
• Casper is only one guy with one opinion.  I’d love to see a sequel to this book that took a busload of atheists around to different churches and surveyed their opinions
• I experience church differently now.  I hear Casper in the back of my mind asking “Is this really what Jesus wanted you to do?” It’s a sobering question
• Casper saw through anything that was fake.  I also suspect he saw some things as fake that were actually quite sincere.
• Biggest surprise of the book?  Saddleback and Willow both get pretty low marks from Casper.  Makes you go “Hmmm” doesn’t it?

Well, that’s it for now kids.  See you in church!

Have you stopped laughing yet?  Now the question is… is it for real?

I don’t think it is.  It’s just a little too funny, if you know what I mean.  Some of the double entendre are a little too rich to be unintentional in my opinion.  So… It’s a fake.  But what an exquisite forgery!

The songs on “Jesus Only” are now officially registered with CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing Incorporated).  If you’re using any of the songs at church you can search the CCLI database for the song number, or download an updated chart of the song from here.

Let me begin on this (the first day of school) by making a typical bloggy self-referential comment:  I can’t believe that I’m doing a book report for fun.  I used to hate these things!  OK – on to the book report:

Frank Viola has teamed up with George Barna (czar of evangelical statistics) to write a scathing polemic against the modern institutional church.  “Pagan Christianity” is a summary of all the ways that our modern churches have departed from the New Testament church.  Viola argues forcefully that all the ways in which we have altered the idea of “church” since the first centure have pagan roots and that we ought to get back to the purity of the first century.  Viola’s ideal of church is what he calls the “organic” church – which meets in homes with no paid clergy, not permanent building, no set order of worship, etc – just as the NT church was.  In each chapter he takes an element of modern church life (paid clergy, church buildings, etc) and explains when and where the innovation came from and how these things are harmful to the church.  What I liked most about the book was the historical data on the origins of many church practices.  These are laid out in an easily digestible format and are meticulously footnoted for those who want to dig deeper.  It is eye opening to see the origins of many our our church practices.

However, Viola is consistently unsympathetic in his explanations of why these innovations occurred.  For example, when writing about baptism he excoriates the 2nd century church for creating a 2 to 3 year catechetical process which was required before baptism.  Viola doesn’t tell us why this was done, other than that it was to transform conversion into a salvation-by-works scheme.  I certainly don’t think we ought to put barriers down for people to become baptized, I am sympathetic with the reasons the 2nd century church did this.  They were under intense persecution.  Christians were being brutally executed and tortured by the Roman government.  One motive for a long and thorough catechetical process was self preservation.  The church was very wary of allowing Roman spies into the fellowship who could then inform on all the church members and their activities.  A long and strenuous initiation process ensured that converts were genuine and wouldn’t inform on church members and activities.  I don’t know that those early church leaders made the right choice, but I’m sympathetic to their situation for sure.  Those early church leaders also worked without the benefit of the canonized New Testament.

Viola also speaks little about the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding the church through the centuries.  He seems to paint a picture of the early church as the perfect ideal and all innovations in church life since the first century simply pollute the purity of that ideal.  Surely innovations in church praxis have been guided by the Holy Spirit to adapt to a changing world.  Viola argues otherwise.

I found that part of me was tempted by the thought of going “off the grid” and joining a simple “organic church” that Frank espouses.  However, I find that I still believe in the church, in my church (I suppose that now is a good time for full disclosure – my church pays my salary!) and in the way we do a lot of the things we do.  I certainly think there are lots of problems, but they come from sinful, fallen people (more disclosure – I’m sinful and fallen too) and not from the fact that we own a building or have paid clergy.

Perhaps I simply can’t be objective because I’m too much a part of the problem that Viola describes, but I won’t be giving up on the “institutional” church just yet.

Watching the Olympics on TV sure makes China look like a wonderful place.  We need to remember our Christian brothers and sisters who are brutally persecuted by the Chinese government.  Pray for the persecuted church in China.

So have you read “The Shack” by William P. Young yet? I haven’t and I probably won’t any time soon (I have too many textbooks to read for the course I’m working on right now). However, in the spirit of those Christians who will picket a movie they haven’t seen, I’m still going to blog about it.

**** SPOILER WARNING ****

I’ve read a few reviews of the book. It is creating quite a buzz. The book is largely a conversation between a man and God who is represented in three persons and God the father is represented as a large black woman. Zoinks! Therein lies part of the controversy. Not having read the book I can’t really say much, but the reviews I’ve read seem to be divided between those who say “let creative people create!” and “HERESY!”

However, those reviewers can hardly be objective since they actually read the book. Here are my unbiased thoughts. Part of me fears it will be a modern equivalent of Jonathon Livingston Seagull -  a wildly popular “spiritual” book written in the 70s. However today most agree that Johnny Seagull was a zeitgeist of 70s hokey self help, up-with-people, power-of-positive-thinking pap.  I just think that anything as popular as “The Shack” is can’t possibly be truly profound.  I know… I’m a bad cynical person.  Sorry.

Another fear I have with this book is that it will be like another Left Behind.  Millions of Christians read that series and accepted carte blanche each one of its eschatological assumptions.  I hope the readers of The Shack will remember that Young is but one voice of many and not confuse his fable with the Gospel.

is from above.  Proof of James 1:17.  I always knew it was good for me!

People who worship in liturgical churches are familiar with a type of prayer called a “collect” (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable). A collect is a brief summary prayer. They’re used in many liturgical services. The book of common prayer contains collects for the various services of the year. Often we non-liturgical types struggle to pray with depth and purpose when we pray extemporaneously. In his book “A Generous Orthodoxy” Brian MacLaren skewers the shallow prayers of many of us. “And we just ask that you just bless us and just be here with us and we just want to just thank you for just being such a good God who just loves us and we just…” One thing that has helped me pray with more purpose is to use the structure of the collect in my prayers when leading worship.  Here is a collect from the Book of Common Prayer which we’ll use as our example:

“O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The collect has five parts:

1. The Address – This is simply where we address God.  In our example the address is simply “O God”
2. An Attribute or Description – here we say something about God.  From our example: “whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread”
3. A Request – This is what we are asking from God.  “Open the eyes of our faith”
4. The result – the expected outcome of the request or why we’re asking “that we may behold him in all his redeeming work”
5. Closing doxology – this can be as simple as “In Jesus name, amen” or like our example: “who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

Once you are familiar with the structure it isn’t difficult to compose your own collect “on the fly”.  It may not be as eloquent and erudite as the collects in the Book of Common Prayer, but it will give depth and purpose to your prayer. I use this form in my own personal times of prayer and I’ve begun to use this form in leading worship.  It helps when using this form in leading worship to give some thought beforehand to the five parts of prayer rather than trying to come up with them totally on the fly.  It will take some work, but the rewards are worth it.  Often we musician-worship leaders are more than willing to work on our musical chops.  We also need to work on our praying chops.

And now, a closing prayer:

“Almighty God, who gives wisdom to all who ask for it: Help us to pray to you with fervency and clarity, so that we may see your goodness and mercy as you answer us.  We ask it in the name of Jesus, who lives and reigns with you the Holy Spirit, now and forever.  Amen.”

I had a paper due this week in which one of my sources was Vatican II document on worship, also known as Sacrosanctum Concilium. You can read up on the Second Vatican Council here. One of the four “constitutions that the council delivered was their statement on the “Sacred Liturgy”. The council write thats the the clergy must be “thoroughly imbued with the spirit and power of the liturgy”. That phrase “thoroughly imbued” was echoing through my mind as I rehearsed on Thursday night for our service this Sunday. How thoroughly imbued have I been this week?

What a challenge to us as worship leaders. The document also talks a lot about “full, active, conscious participation” in worship so that the people may be “enriched” by it. Many of the reforms instituted by Vatican II – most notably the movement away from the use of Latin to the vernacular – were motivated by this consideration. Sacrosanctum Concilium contains much fodder for the evangelical worship leader, and I encourage you to read it. It is less than 30 pages and it is available online here.