Bonhoeffer on Congregational Worship

reformworship.com posted an excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible today, and I think it’s a good passage to think on, so here is the passage:

Psalms 27, 42, 46, 48, 63, 81, 84, 87, and others sing of Jerusalem, the City of God, of the great festivals of the people of God, of the temple and the beautiful worship services.  It is the presence of the God of salvation in His congregation for which we here give thanks, abou which we here rejoice, for which we long.  What Mount Zion and the temple were for the Israelites the church of God throughout the world is for us – the church where God always dwells with His people in word and sacrament.  This church will withstand all enemies (Psalm 46), its imprisonment under the powers of the godless world will come to an end (Psalms 126 and 137).  The present and gracious God, who is in Christ who in turn is in His congregation, is the fulfillment of all thanksgiving, all joy, and all longing in the Psalms.  As Jesus, in whom God himself dwells, longed for fellowship with God because He had become a man as we (Luke 2:19), so He prays with us for the total nearness and presence of God with those who are His.

God has promised to be present in the worship of the congregation.  Thus the congregation conducts its worship according to God’s order.  But Jesus Christ Himself has offered the perfect worship by perfecting every prescribed sacrifice in His voluntary and sinless sacrifice.  Christ brought in Himself the sacrifice of God for us and our sacrifice for God.  For us there remains only the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in prayers, hymns, and in a life lived according to God’s commands (Psalms 15 and 50).  So our entire life becomes worship, the offering of thanksgiving.  God wants to acknowledge such thanksgiving and to show His salvation to the grateful (Psalms 50 and 23).  To become thankful to God for the sake of Christ and to praise Him in the congregation with heart, mouth, and hands, is what the Psalms wish to teach us.

Thoughts?

Contemporary and Traditional

I was sitting here reading a couple more pages from Unceasing Worship.  It seems to be one of those books you can only read a bit at a time, so that you can digest and wrestle with the ideas presented.  Anyway, as I was reading, I had an ADD moment.  I think it’s sad that Pastor Flack, the video guy, the sound guy and I are the only ones that get to worship in both the traditional and contemporary services.  I think it’s such a shame that so many members of our congregation are missing out.  Of course, for me, the traditional service is where I’m confronted by new music with new melodies and new thoughts in lyrics.  I mean really, here at 8:00 every Sunday, we sing the great (and sometimes not so great) hymns of old.  The senior saints gather with a couple of younger folks and we sing together from a foundation a century old.  There’s something nice about that.  There’s a bringing together of sorts.  Then there’s the “contemporary” service for second and third hours.  Oh how I wish that the senior saints could worship with us in the third hour.  A group of people largely consisting of college age and young professionals packs into the sanctuary and sings a new song to the Lord.  We sing old songs too, but sometimes in a new way. 😉  But what I think is the best part of the third service is the volume level.  Not that singing louder is more spiritual, there are just more people in the space!  It’s cool to be in a room with the next generation (of which I’m slightly a part of) that is sold out for the Lord.  Not sure how to facilitate this (space problems), but some time we need to have one service for the entire congregati12pt;”>be the body of Christ.  We need to introduce the hand to the foot, the fingers to the toes!  We need to realize that worshiping Christ is not about meon.  We need to sing out the hymns of old alongside the new songs of this generation.  We need to , it’s about us.

Unceasing Worship

I was reading Harold Best’s Unceasing Worship today and this following passage was so good to read.  It was one of those thoughts I had to chew on a bit, and I hope you agree.  This is from a section where he draws a comparison from the concepts ofin and about. He uses the example of the musician who thinks in music from experience as opposed to someone who thinks about music from a theory standpoint.  Here is an excerpt:

Going even further, my knowing about Jesus does not necessarily mean that I am in Jesus.  I am not even sure that knowing Jesus is the same as being inJesus; otherwise, how can the unbelief of his earthly brothers and sisters or Iscariot be explained?  Certainly one of the greatest obstacles to a sweetened and purified spread of the gospel is explained by the difference between witnessing to people from within the truth and simply stating the facts of conversion with little understanding of how radically extensive conversion is.

So we have this differntiating word in.  It goes as far as any word in describing the richness of continuous outpouring both within the Godhead and from him, toward every particle and person in his creation.  With respect to our ultimate condition, we are either in Christ or outside of him.  There is no middle ground.  Outsideness is not vagueness or ambiguity.  A lost person is not only outside of Christ but also in Satan.  Lostness is not a vacuum, nor does it imply that there is no service, no master, no hierarchy.  Lostness is a choice demanding an exchange of gods as outpouring continues.  The question then is, outpouring to whom?  If I am to evangelize, I will do so knowing that I will be talking to a continuous outpourer, an inverted soul, whose only hope is to find his or her outpouring converted and washed clean by turning from bing in Satan to being in Christ.

There is only one worship war that can be properly described as such.  It is the war between God and Satan, in chich being in Christ or in Satan is the bedrock issue.  Our petty skirmishes about worship, as ignoble, silly and demeaning as they can become, are nothing compared to the violence and tearing of the real and only war.  This war is simply not ours at our dithering local level.  It is the Lord’s and if we were to better understand this one splendid fact, we would be placing far less emphasis on what we do, what style we do it in, what we keep and what we throw out, and what latest poll or societal “insight” we choose to use as our template.

Boy, it just keeps going on from there, but my hand is cramping up.  I would highly recommend getting your hands on this book and pouring over it.  Do so with the Bible next to you.  Dive in, struggle with the text and ideas.  Don’t take anything he says for granted, but rather investigate and wrestle with concepts presented.  Thoughts?

Sunday Worship

I love to worship on Sunday mornings.  In particular, I love third hour. I’m sure you would be surprised, but I love third hour not necessarily for the reasons you might think.  I love third hour for the volume.  Not typically a numbers guy, when you pack a sanctuary seating 500 with well over 400 and then those 400 sing their hearts out, you get an incredible volume from the congregation.  Like the kind of volume where you can hear them better than you can hear yourself.  There’s the best part, with that kind of volume, I don’t feel like I’m leading per say, but rather participating.  Someday, we need to get all three hours together so that everyone can experience what happens with that group.