More Communion, More Roots: David Crowder's Final Album and the Trajectory of Modern Worship

Worship Leader Magazine recently published an interview of David Crowder shortly after the release of their final album, Give Us Rest or (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys]).  (Even the title carries with it our modern generation's characteristic mixture of reverence and irreverence, being a requiem with a not-so-subtle reference to Spinal Tap...I know that's not everyone's cup of tea, but it sure is mine.)

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The Right and Wrong Kind of Ancient Future Worship

As Holy Week rolls around every year, our worship senses are heightened toward tradition.  Evangelical churches who once adopted a more "low church" model for worship are returning to the value of worship expressions which typically have characterized "high church" environments--Holy Week noon-day services, celebrations of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Saturday vigils, etc.  Ancient future worship--blending old forms with creatively new expressions--is something many churches are now seeking, perhaps in reaction to the hyper-now-ness and contemporaneity of the of worship models being held up in the 1980s and 1990s.

But there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it.  Fifty years ago, theologian Jean-Jacques von Allmen parsed ancient future worship quite well:

When we perform Christian worship, we are part of the Church of all places and all times, and this community binds us.  To respect liturgical tradition implies...a feeling of gratitude for what God has taught the Church in the past, for the way in which He has inspired and guided it. That is why there exist in Christian worship and its unfolding certain classical forms which have...such a theological and anthropological plenitude, are of such monumental liturgical importance, that the Church never exhausts their vitality, never wears them out, in spite of constant use. They are transmitted and occur from cult [another word for "worship"] to cult, not so much out of filial piety or lack of imagination, but because to abandon them would not be a liberation but a loss.  For [most] Protestants this is something far more difficult to understand than it is for Anglicans, Roman Catholics or, especially, Greek Orthodox.1

So, on the one hand, a proper appropriation of "ancient" in ancient future worship is to seek out those lasting traditions and expressions that have "a theological and anthropological plenitude"--a potency that seems so fitting that it's hard to imagine improving upon them.  Such potent traditions include the call to worship, confession, and the benediction, to name a few.  (Bryan Chapell's Christ-Centered Worship is a great resource to sniff out potent traditions.  See my review and summary.) 

Von Allmen goes on:

If a fine doxology of Christian antiquity is golden, it is a gold coin rather than a gold chain.  That is to say, that respect for the traditions of worship does not fetter liturgical expression, but on the contrary, enables us to repeat today in a new way what the Fathers said when they assembled to celebrate the mystery of Christian salvation. It is not a question of saying or doing something different; it is a question of not being bound to what is obsolete. Although it is legitimate to have in one's worship some ancient items (just as one has an antique armchair among one's furniture) the cult is not a museum, and if it facilitates access to another world, it is not to a world that has gone by for ever, but to a world that is to come.2

This is a golden nugget of advice for rightly dividing ancient future worship.  Bad ancient future worship has the feeling of a kind of "worship museum," where we're all gathered around to stare at some beautiful old liturgical artifacts.  Engaging in that kind of ancient future worship has folks coming away saying, "Wow, that was very thought-provoking," or, "Wow, I learned a lot about [x] in that service!"  It's always wonderful to provoke thoughts and to educate people about church history, but that simply isn't the goal of Christian worship.  The goal is to encounter the living God with the people of God.  So, utilizing "ancient artifacts" in worship is only as good as they accomplish those ends.  

Von Allmen gives us another helpful tool to find whether or not our incorporation of the ancient has been effective.  Ironically, good ancient elements will end up propelling us forward, not backward.  A good element of worship will point us to the coming kingdom just as much as it pointed back to a previous era of worship.  The Lord's Supper is the pinnacle example of this reality.  If, in our Communion, as we remember Christ's death, we are not propelled forward to long for that future Feast with our Risen King, then we've lost something.  Every good element of worship has an echo of this quality.  By the way, this is why "ancient future" is a better term than ancient modern, because "modern" only implies the present, which is something on which our culture is way too fixated, anyway.  

The "Gloria Patri" is an example of an ancient element that is loaded with futuristic inertia.  In it, we sing:

Glory be to the Father,
And to the Son,
And to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning,
Is now, and ever shall be:
World without end. 

Look at it.  Trinitarian.  Historic ("as it was in the beginning").  Relevant ("is now").  Future-looking, kingdom-oriented ("...and ever shall be: World without end").  I would love to see more local worship leaders and songwriters incorporate this short song into their worship.  Maybe it's time some of them set this gem to new music that fits their local cultural and church context.  We have done that, ourselves.  We've sung it as a stand-alone song, and we've incorporated it into our new setting of the ancient song, "O Splendor of God's Glory Bright" on our album, Without Our Aid.  

(If you want to see a great compendium of ancient future worship music, check out Cardiphonia's post for a lot of helpful resources.)

************

¹ Jean-Jacques von Allmen, Worship: Its Theology and Practice (New York: Oxford, 1965), 97.
² Ibid., 97-98.

More and More are Returning to Tradition

In case you haven’t seen the 2007 US News article, "A Return to Tradition," it's worth a read.  It corroborates a lot of what this blog has been saying over its short life-span.  Retrieval and recovery is something that evangelicals are becoming more and more interested in, but it's not limited to evangelicals.  Check out the article.

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Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Worship, Idolatry, and the Heart

Part of the reason Lent exists is for us to confront our sin and idolatry head-on... 

"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition." - Jaroslav Pelikan, U.S. News & World Report, June 26, 1989

When God called me to my church almost four years ago, I sensed that a primary call of mine would be to help pastor our congregation, both corporately and individually, away from traditionalism and toward a Christ-centered embrace of tradition.  I'll be candid in my analysis of the situation. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we are one of the last standing evangelical churches with vibrant traditional worship.¹  To be sure, there are churches in Denver with strong traditional worship, but most of them do not have evangelical pulpits.  And certainly there are churches in Denver with committed, orthodox preaching, but almost all of them are “contemporary,” stylistically.  This puts us in a very peculiar place because, as evangelical churches have swung away from traditional worship, we have become a haven for what I call “evangelical traditionalist refugees”—people whose hearts most intimately connect with traditional worship who have no other place to go for evangelical preaching.  (There are, of course, many things to lament about how deeply embedded consumerism is in the evangelical psyche, such that we find ourselves in this place, but that is for another time and another post.)

The net effect of our church being a Traditionalist Refugee Camp is that, left unchecked, this has a hardening effect on the ethos and mindset of our people.  Our worshipers have often left their previous churches scarred, alienated, and hurt.  They therefore enter our doors with pain and sometimes a chip on their shoulder.  They find like-minded commarades—a community which shares their values and sensibilities—and they tend to, often in private conversation or small groups, disparage other forms and expressions of worship.  The deep wounds feed fear of change.  Fear of change begins to grip the heart, and a healthy appreciation of tradition is corrupted into a worship of tradition.  This is traditionalism.

The difference between tradition and traditionalism is an issue ultimately of the heart.  Tradition is a beautiful thing.  In fact, tradition is necessary to truly be the Church.  The Church, at any point in time, must recognize that it is a trans-temporal community.  Saints who have gone before and saints who will follow are, ongoingly, our brothers and sisters.  One of the reasons we embrace Church tradition is simply because it is part of what it means to truly be the Church.  To ignore tradition would be to cut ourselves off from a huge part of the body of Christ, the “catholic Church” (in the words of the Apostles’ Creed).  But, as Tim Keller has said time and again, idolatry occurs when we take good things (like tradition) and make them ultimate things. 

How can one know when tradition has been corrupted into traditionalism?  It’s all about symptoms which betray the root disease.  Symptoms can include:

• reaction of fear, defensiveness, or anger when any deviation from the norm takes place
• an unloving or judgmental attitude toward those who do not embrace tradition as you do
• a persistent need to speak your mind about the matter to and with others
• a strong penchant toward defending tradition at every turn
• comments which use possessive and personal pronouns: “what speaks to me,” “what I love,” “my preferences,” etc.

What is the cure?  The cure is only apparent when an adequate diagnosis is given.  We could encourage traditionalists to “be more loving” or to, in the words of Philippians 2, “consider others better than yourselves.”  We could preach against the sins of bitterness, fear, and wrongly-expressed anger.  But none of these things get at the heart of the matter.  The issue lies at the throne of the heart.  If tradition reigns on the throne of your heart, you will defend it at any cost.  You will find fault with anyone who challenges it.  You will protect it as a loyal servant would his or her lord and master.  You will judge those who do not equally revere it as you do.  Lords, masters, and kings demand that kind of allegiance.  The diagnosis, then, is ultimately misplaced affection.  You love tradition more than you love Jesus.  No, you would never say that, because, theologically, you know that’s wrong.  But your actions betray what’s truly in your heart.

When Christ is on the throne of your heart, tradition cannot be corrupted into traditionalism.  Christ reigns, without peer.  When we love Christ more than tradition, we can say, “Though I don’t go hog-wild over repeating refrains, drums, blocks of songs, and electric guitars, I recognize that some are freed up to engage with God there, and I’m not going to break fellowship over it.  I’m going to sing alongside my sister, giving it my best.” And by the way, this goes both ways.  When it comes to worship, if the gospel is taking root in a community of faith, we will see the kind of mutual submission described in Ephesians 5.  We will see people joyfully laying down their preferences.  The lion will lie down with the lamb, babies will play in snakes’ dens, and traditionalists will worship with contemporary folks.  We will see contemporary folks laying down their idolatries of, in the words of T. David Gordon, “contemporaneity-as-a-value” (i.e. what’s new is what’s best) and embracing tradition because they love all of Christ’s body.   

¹ The label “traditional” is nearly as broad and nebulous as “contemporary,” of course, and I share a grief over the deficiencies of these terms and over the division in Christ’s church that such polarization has caused.  Nevertheless, I haven’t found better terms to use as I seek to speak into this issue.  Our traditional worship, if I can speak in spectral terms, puts us on the 75-mark between “low church traditional” (0; more Baptistic/revivalistic) and “high church traditional” (100; more Anglican/classical/liturgical).  So our service tends to have a Presbyterian liturgical structure, a more classically-oriented stylistic expression with choir and organ, alongside occasional revivalistic expressions.

Contemporary Worship Threw the Baby Out when it Critiqued Traditionalism but Abandoned Tradition

 The latest edition of Neue Magazine contains a great little article* by Chuck DeGroat, pastor at City Church San Francisco.  I’d like to quote extensively from it:

Several decades ago, the Western church integrated new experiments in musical expression, aesthetics, communication and more. Responding to the stagnancy of churches caught in endless intellectual debates between fundamentalism and liberalism, some chose to put the past behind them, creating the contemporary American church. The Church needed renewal, and it needed to engage the demands of modern life.

But the response was extreme. It critiqued traditionalism but threw out tradition in the process. The historian Jaroslav Pelikan has said, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” The longing for a rooted faith re-emerged in young men and women who, in the 1990s, left contemporary churches in significant numbers for Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican churches.  Some in the U.K., New Zealand and the U.S. began experimenting with classic liturgical expressions re-presented in new forms and music. It was the resurrection of the living faith of the dead.

Several thoughts.  First, I’ve never thought of the connection between the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20^th century and the rise of the “contemporary church” and “contemporary worship.”  That’s a fascinating observation that I haven’t heard anyone else make to date.  It makes sense, then, that some of the anti-intellectualism, emotionalism, and experientialism that has shaped and characterized modern worship may be a reaction to the high emphasis on truth and tradition, which evangelicalism held high during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.   It is interesting that those years have perhaps planted a subconscious anti-intellectual bias deep in evangelicalism’s institutional memory.  If this is the case, what DeGroat says makes sense.  For, with a broad brush, it was the boomer generation that shirked the tradition and traditionalism of its fathers and mothers, and it is the children of that generation which are re-discovering this lost tradition.

Second, the Pelikan quote is potent.  As far as I can track it, the reference is to an article found in the June 26, 1989 edition of U.S. News & World Report.  The distinction between tradition and traditionalism is one many have made, and it’s a very important clarification to make.  DeGroat goes on:

Though I’m glad liturgy is “cool again,” renewed interest in traditional liturgical expressions seems to be accompanied by the notion that classic practices like the Eucharist or the Call to Worship are choices in a grand liturgical buffet.  In other words, renewed liturgical expression can come with a lack of good thinking around liturgical integrity—the purpose of the liturgy as a whole.

The elements of liturgical worship are not choices in an ecclesial buffet line. Rather, as a whole, they tell a Story.  And that Story counters the stories we are told in the many liturgies we practice every day.  The elements of the liturgy are not merely cool sacred opportunities. Together, they form (and re-form) us, telling a different Story than we typically encounter.

This is a valuable reminder to evangelicals drawn to liturgy and tradition.  Evangelicals, especially from low church traditions (like me), won’t have the foundation to understand elements of liturgy like those from high church traditions.  They did not grow up with it.  They did not experience its cohesion, its Story.  So, it can be tempting for worship planners and leaders who want to “use more liturgy” to take this a la carte approach, procuring a Book of Common Prayer and pulling prayers, statements, and elements out for more randomized usage.

I’m one that does this, so I’m not totally against using aspects of tradition where appropriate.  But, we need to understand that liturgical traditions have been fashioned over decades and centuries, and many pastor-theologians have been a part of the crafting of these Gospel Stories. 

Here's one example to put feet on these admonitions.  It's how I process my own denominational tradition (presbyterianism) in light of what has been called the "Great Tradition."  For Presbyterians, we have a way of telling the liturgical Story that has been handed down from our predecessors.  The modern American Presbyterian Story-shape has a path that looks something like this:

New Testament / Apostolic Church
Early Church & Fathers
Medieval Catholicism
Reformers (esp. Bucer, Calvin)
Knox / Anglicanism / English Puritanism
American Revivalism
20^th & 21^st Century American Church

All these factors have shaped the liturgy of my evangelical denomination, and similar factors have shaped others.  The point is that as we “experiment” with liturgy, we must be aware of these greater shaping forces and the Story they’ve been trying to tell over the history of our worship.  If this topic is of interest to you, Robert Webber’s Worship Old and New is a great place to start.  Bryan Chapell's Christ-Centered Worship is a way to go even deeper than that, because it analyzes the common liturgical themes that spread across almost all major Christian traditions (see my review of that book).

*DeGroat, Chuck. “Life as Liturgy: Seeing What Shapes Us.” Neue. February/March, 2011: 22.



The Warrior Baby: A Different Side of Christmas, Courtesy of Benjamin Britten

My colleague, our organist and choirmaster, Douglas Macomber, introduced me to this glorious piece which is a part of Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols (Opus 28).  The text of "This Little Babe" is outstanding, ringing a seldom-heard bell about what Christmas ushers in--the paradox of a baby who conquers through weakness.  Our choir sang this at our Christmas Eve Candlelight Service.  It's a bit feisty, but I wonder whether we couldn't re-tune this text for congregational singing.  Don't get me wrong, the original tune and arrangement are spot-on, but they are meant to be performed by a choir and harpist.  It would be powerful, in my opinion, if congregations could sing it, too.  And, no, those aren't typos.  They're old English words.

This little Babe so few days old, is come to rifle Satan's fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmed wise the gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field, His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need, and feeble Flesh his warrior's steed.

His camp is pitched in a stall, His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes; of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound, the angels' trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight; stick to the tents that he hath pight.*
Within his crib is surest ward; this little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

*"pight" = pitched

The Artistry of the Ancient Won Me Over...I Kept Coming Back

I see this testimony time and again.  It is my own story, too.  I continue to meet young people, attracted to the ancient faith that their parents abandoned and they never knew.  Ritual…liturgy…hymns.  This is the testimony of Stephanie S. Smith at worship.com.  It’s written so well.  Here’s the first half, but you can read the full post here.  It's just another example of why new generations are interested in the convergence of old things and new things: old hymns to new music; new expressions of ancient liturgy.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer pews to movie theatre seats in a church.  One of my favorite things about visiting Europe was the cathedrals.  Hymns are endeared to me, beloved and familiar, and I feel swept up in the liturgy as we worshippers all join together in a common response.  There is certainly beauty and truth in all worship, but for myself I have always experienced a particular sense of awe through older spiritual traditions.

In college I started attending an urban megachurch, the kind with its own podcast and concert lighting, but then gravitated towards a small, liturgical church instead.  My friends and I called it “high church for low people” because the service consisted of formal liturgy and hymns but met in an old theatre where remnants of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” adorned the stage where the altar might have been. 

Worship was a strange medley of old and new: congregants wore street clothes and toted travel mugs into the service, yet sang hymns written by church fathers to the classical consort complete with violin and penny whistle.  The pastor wore a sweater instead of the traditional stole or clerical collar, yet led us through a liturgy of “Thees and Thous”.  The artistry of the ancient won me over; I kept coming back.

I loved this little church because its liturgy offered me something solid.  And you have to understand: I am the kind of person on whom measuring cups and day planners are lost.  Blame it on my creative assets, but I do not do well with structure.  However, I found that the structure of the creeds and prayers actually appealed to me.  Rather than being rote and routine, the liturgy acted as an anchor for me in my transitional college years.  The ancient script allowed me to join the ranks of saints who affirmed these very truths centuries before me, even as I stood: a college student with midterm eye circles and a penchant for picking pennies from the sidewalk.  In this recital of truth, I felt I was participating in the great “cloud of witnesses” spoken of in Hebrews 12, who encourage us to press on in the race they have already won.