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My wife and I have become increasingly dissatified with the form of worship within our church and are thinking of trying others.

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might-be-don: At the moment I'm just taking some time completely off from "church" to purge myself.

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But, seriously, one of several tracks to investigate is when services are and what takes place in them. I get a lot out of going to a Saturday "Vespers" service where Christ is worshiped as Lord of all Creation as one day ends and the next begins (Jewish concept of day), and He is praised as King and conqueror over death in the Resurrection. Point being, that a lot of churches have ended up leaving their historic routine as actively a body, and ended up with just one service. The church I grew up in had a Wednesday night Prayer service. Again, the point is that if Church is just for Sunday, then what do you do with the rest of the week. Final point: The whole week is for preparing for Sunday, and Sunday is for preparing for the whole week.

Good luck.

PoW

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I get a lot out of going to a Saturday "Vespers" service where Christ is worshiped as Lord of all Creation as one day ends and the next begins (Jewish concept of day), and He is praised as King and conqueror over death in the Resurrection.

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My wife and I have become increasingly dissatified with the form of worship within our church and are thinking of trying others. I was wondering if any of you out there would like to share your experiences of the positive kind about your home churches, what you like about them, etc. While I do not want to dictate what you say, I would that you not use it as propaganda for a certain denomination, or post links as such, but rather I was interested in a personal responses to local congregational experiences as to why you like a certain way of worship. Thanks!

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John Earp

What I would absolutely LOVE to find would be a church that had a good balance of contemporary music as well as choice selections from the classic hymns.

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Its called "blended." We've been doing it for about ten years now at the Christian Reformed Church were I am a member.


Something else exciting, is to get and read "Beyond the Worship Wars" by Long.

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Candler professor looks 'beyond the worship wars'
Sept. 10, 2001 News media contact: Thomas S. McAnally· (615)742-5470· Nashville, Tenn. 10-71BP{378}

NOTE: A photograph is available for use with this story.

By Elaine Justice*

ATLANTA (UMNS) -- Congregations across America may be grappling with traditional versus contemporary worship styles, but faithful followers don't have to choose between centuries-old hymns and the latest Christian chart-toppers, says the Rev. Tom Long of United Methodist-related Candler School of Theology.

In his recent book, Beyond the Worship Wars, Long says he discovered "a third way" of worship that can't be classified as traditional, contemporary or even "blended."

"There are congregations who have discovered how to be faithful to the great liturgical traditions of the church, but do it in a way that is alert to the new cultural environment," says Long, who is the professor of preaching at the school of theology related to Emory University. "These churches have created a new thing in the earth, a form of worship that is authentically Christian, theologically rich and magnetic to a seeking, restless, individualistic, de-institutionalized culture."

Starting with the thesis that every congregation in America is struggling with the issue of how to worship, Long went looking for a variety of churches that are successfully negotiating the so-called "worship wars." Included in his study were churches large and small, some predominantly black, some white, some Hispanic, some urban, some suburban. The congregations encompassed both Catholic and a variety of Protestant denominations. What they all have in common, he says, is an ability to remain both vital without catering to pop culture and faithful without clinging to the past.

Long identifies similarities among "vital and faithful congregations," and features those qualities prominently in the slim volume, which is meant to serve as a resource book and discussion catalyst for pastors and laity alike.

"In the last decade or so, church leadership consultants have noticed that when a congregation is in crisis, the problem often is not that the minister and other leaders are at loggerheads," says Long. "The problem is in worship."

Yet he doesn't approach the worship issue from a standpoint of diagnosing what's wrong. "We have built our understanding on the basis of sick congregations that are dysfunctional," he says of the traditional approach to church leadership and worship studies. "My thought was, let's study healthy congregations and see what they are doing that can be replicated by other congregations."

Long notes that he and other colleagues studying religious practices are finding that "the creativity and energy in American Christian life has moved out of the seminaries and the denominational headquarters and into the local grass-roots parishes." This creativity is embodied, he says, in imaginative pastors, who have responded to the drastic and often negative changes in American church culture by stepping back and rethinking what it means to be and do church.

In the congregations Long studied, virtually all of these leaders were strong, which came as the biggest surprise of the study. "I wanted to find democratic pastors who honored the ministry of laity by sharing power. This is a myth I carry with me from the '60s of what good congregational leadership is like," Long says.

What he found was a new kind of leader. "They are strong and aggressive, but they don't use these qualities in self-serving ways, but to empower people," Long says. "They're also willing to generate some hostility; all of them did. None of them avoided conflict."

Long, named one of the nation's top preachers by Newsweek magazine, didn't find many similarities among sermons and preaching styles in the churches he studied, nor did he experience any fiery oratory. "It's much more like the host at a wonderful dinner party of friends who stands up and says the right thing in the middle of the process," he observes.

Among the "vital and faithful" congregations Long studied, he noted they:

make room in worship for the experience of mystery,

make efforts to show hospitality to the stranger,

make visible the sense of drama in Christian worship,

emphasize music that is both excellent and eclectic,

creatively adapt the worship space and environment,

forge a strong connection between worship and local mission,

maintain a relatively stable order of service that the congregation knows by heart,

move to a joyous festival experience toward the end of the service, and

have strong, charismatic pastors as worship leaders.

"I tried to put myself in the shoes of a visitor," Long says of the churches in the study. "These churches knew me by name, connected me with others and provided an environment in which I could offer myself to God. People are hungry for that."

Long says he has "two levels of hope" for his book. First, he wants it to be useful for churches seeking worship renewal, that would aspire to be vital and faithful congregations. "This is something I want lay folks to talk about in their churches," he says.

"My more ambitious goal," he adds, "is to change the paradigm for ministers."

*Justice is assistant director of university communications at United Methodist-related Emory University in Atlanta.

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• (Describing the problem -- sounds familiar!)
  
  ...it seems as if the axis and aim of the liturgy has been transferred away from participation in Christ's body and the approach to the cup of the unity of the faithful, and now consists in listening to a moralistic sermon offering prescriptions for. social behavior. The sense of mystical unity, that unity which constitutes the Church's mode of existence and the . salvation of man, is often. so atrophied, even nonexistent, that one wonders how far the eucharistic synaxis today still preserves the truth of the universal Church, the full possibility of life beyond corruption and death. Where the parish has been distorted, or substantially abolished and replaced by an organizational, impersonal understanding of the Church (or "Christianity") as a "religious" institution analogous to other conventional expedients of corporate life, this means that the Church loses her identity; there is a dangerous confusion in the preconditions for salvation, and the Church's communal ethos is deprived of its strength.



• (Defining the cnetral goal)
  
  The social and historical dimension of the Church's ethos is not a dimension of moral or ideological influence over the masses, rationalistically planned; it is a change in the way people live together, a change that is real and existential, and therefore defies objective definition. This change has its starting-point and its axis in the eucharistic body of the parish. The truth of the Church, the reality of salvation, the abolition of sin and death, the contradiction of the absurdity in life and in history, the dynamic adaptation of the organizational structures of corporate life to personal distinctiveness and freedom--all these are the eucharist incarnate in the body of the parish.



• (Describing the makeup of the goal)
  
  The liturgical unity of the faithful, under whatever conditions and in whatever institutions, networks and structures, is the starting-point for the transformation of mass coexistence into a communion of persons, a society; for the achievement of social justice and not merely a program for it; and for liberating work from slavery to mechanized necessity and transforming it into a personal relationship, an event of communion. Only the life of the eucharistic body of the parish can give flesh to the formal idea of the "priestly" character of politics, the prophetic character of science, the philanthropic character of economics and the mystical character of the family. Without the parish, all this is theory, naive idealism and a romantic utopia. Within the parish it becomes a historical reality, an immediate possibility and a concrete experience.



• (Distractions by externals, that prevent growth from within)
  
  ...it seems today that institutionalized church organizations are totally subject to the culture of "externals," the culture of utilitarianism and efficiency, of individual logic and individual ethics; but this does not mean that the ethos of eucharistic communion is impracticable within the framework of modem social life, any more than the alienation of sexual love in the same society means that people are quite incapable of being truly in love. The eucharistic ethos is not being put into practice and manifested in society today, but it would be arbitrary to infer from this that such an ethos cannot possibly achieve existential realization. Precisely by virtue of the existential dynamism of the eucharistic ethos, we are enabled to discern the personal weakness of those who represent it today, and their failure to realize and manifest its social consequences.



• (Where to begin...)
  
  If, even in isolated cases ... restructuring the parish as a body with organic unity, then the historical and social dimension of the Church's ethos would not be slow to make its appearance in culture, being realized in quite specific ways. These would be living realizations ... and they would come about even amidst the all-powerful economic and political networks which dominate--modern life. Restructuring of the parish means in the first instance local eucharistic communities of strictly limited size, so that communion and relationship amongst the faithful and between them and their pastor is a real possibility. But this is not all. The eucharistic community is not simply an arithmetical unit of a size which permits direct personal acquaintance and contact. It is first and foremost a community of life; it involves a dynamic sense of being a body, and a certain faith in the truth of the "true life" which is communion in love and self-offering, a realization of the trinitarian prototype of life. Concealed behind the present destruction of the parish through its enlargement is the individualism of the cultural framework of our life, the pietistic concept of individualized salvation.



• ("Fish or Cut Bait"....)
  
  . . . without eucharistic communities gathered into a body of communion ... they are then mere(ly) ... a conventional institution which has no essential justification, despite the many "charitable foundations" that they may organize.
  
  Having eucharistic communities of limited size inevitably means that parishes multiply, and may mean the gradual disappearance of the professional priesthood. A suitable member of the eucharistic community can receive the grace of priesthood and take on the duties of pastor, while continuing to make his living from his private profession. Undoubtedly the professional priesthood has certain advantages for church life; but especially in today's social environment of secularism, the departure from it might help us significantly in extricating ourselves from the idea of the Church as a conventional institution with a professional hierarchy "to serve the religious needs of the people." The loss of a professional clergy, so far from hindering a return to the eucharistic basis of church life, is actually of primary importance for the social dynamism of the Church today. It would help to free the church organization from the mentality and the restrictions Of an "institution" subject to relations of economic dependence and canons of professional behavior. Once the presbyter of the eucharistic synaxis ceases to make his living from serving as a priest, then he expresses nothing other than the truth and experience of his liturgical community; he is not the professional representative of an institutionalized organization which gives him financial support. Priesthood rediscovers its charismatic character, and the eucharistic community its missionary dynamism.*
  
  There is always, of course, a host of ready objections based on the practical difficulties of returning to the eucharistic hypostasis of the Church and reconstituting the small parish. But our attempt to deal with the problem cannot stop it the difficulties, whatever they may be, since this is a question of the truth of the Church, of man's salvation from the tyranny of the irrational and from death. Restoration of the eucharistic community as the central axis of the Church's life undoubtedly means repudiating the centralized institutionalization of the Church as an organization which today is taken for granted, and this is no easy task: it means that we really have to abrogate the facilities afforded by the "Vaticanization" of the Church.** The reconstitution of the eucharistic community, however, is not just one of the many problems facing the Church, albeit the most serious. Prior to any problem, it is the very precondition for the true existence of the Church; it is faithfulness to the gospel of salvation, the practical proclamation of the truth of salvation. Once it is understood that the eucharistic theological self-awareness of the Church and its incarnation in the parish community are thus absolutely primary, then no difficulty can prevent the problem being faced and solved.


...and so...


• (!!!!!!!!!!!!)
  
  The communal ethos of the Church is not an abstract ethical theory, nor a system of values codified into commandments. It is the fact of the eucharist and its extension to the universal dimensions of life, the dynamic realization of personal distinctiveness and freedom in the context of the encounter between human effort and divine grace.

(Christos Yannaras, http://www.jbburnett.com/yannaras/yannaras-program.html)

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Its called "blended." We've been doing it for about ten years now at the Christian Reformed Church were I am a member.

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John, Some of us believe God does know the future, all of it in fact. To us, this is nothing near being nonsense.

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I believe God knows the future, "all of it in fact." (as do all OVTers who have fully thought through the implications of the OV).

The only difference is that OV teaches there are real contingencies in the future and that God perfectly knows all of these, too.

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Once the presbyter of the eucharistic synaxis ceases to make his living from serving as a priest, then he expresses nothing other than the truth and experience of his liturgical community; he is not the professional representative of an institutionalized organization which gives him financial support. Priesthood rediscovers its charismatic character, and the eucharistic community its missionary dynamism.*

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Honorman, I'd be searching for a church with a 'flat' organizational structure. If the head guy is refered to by title, be it "pastor" , "father", "headguy" or "king of the hill" , pass that one by. The leadership sets the tone for all that passes for worship, and if they are diverting any of the worship to themselves by thinking of themselves more highly than they ought, skip them.

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The ones that bug me are the firstname only types, "Pastor Dave", "Pastor Bill", etc.

"We'll have to run that by Pastor Ron", they say, because this guy with the fifth grade education is the spiritual leader of our flock.

PASS ME THE KOOLAID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!






Even though the skies are blue, don't they let the sunshine through?

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Its all about money. Follow the money trail.

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Er, if you don't copyright this, do you mind if I do?





Even though the skies are blue, don't they let the sunshine through?

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I think what we will hear more of in the future is thinking of church in terms of community. We need to have a real sense of relationship between us. Not only with ourselves but with God. What this will mean is that we will value others and their uniqueness, which means we will value their gifts, which means they will have something to contribute, which means certain special persons will not do ALL the work of ministry, which means less control and power, which means a healthier church, which means the advancement of the Kingdom, which means, "Yay God."

I guess I should stop because this area touches a nerve with me and I'm starting to have "A Brandon moment."

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What kind of ministers are we talking about with 5th grade educations here?

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Of course I was only talking about your ministers. That's the ONLY conclusion you could draw.





Even though the skies are blue, don't they let the sunshine through?