←

Diary of a (Maybe) Retired Pastor

Tag: worship

  • People Of The New Song

    mayberetiredpastor

    People Of The New Song

    And they sang a new song, saying:

    “You are worthy to take the scroll
        and to open its seals,
    because you were slain,
        and with your blood you purchased for God
        persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
    10 You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
        and they will reign on the earth.

    Revelation 5:9-10, New Testament, The Bible.

    An outraged Daily Telegraph headline sometime in the summer last year demanded to know why a church had decided to drop the word “Church” from its name. At about the same time, one of the congregations I had initiated at my last church had set about renaming itself.  This set me off on a train of thought concerning the significance of names, particularly in relation to churches. Why do people choose the names they do for their churches or congregations? What does it mean for them and why does it matter? I tend to lean towards the functional and utilitarian with a quirky twist, hence, simply using the time at which the new congregation met on a Sunday as the name (7:15!) seemed perfectly adequate to me and when it started meeting at a new time it simply added a little quirkiness and mystery to the congregation! Clearly, this did not sit so well with others who, well, need something more approachable and human? (My wife thinks the Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon and I bear some remarkable affinities, although not, perhaps, in brain power!).

    Names are to do with identity and, so, outraged of Tunbridge Wells above presumably felt some attack on their communal identity when the local church decided to drop the word “Church”. When it comes to groups or organisations, names need to communicate something about what they are, and people need to be able to identify with these groups or organisations. What should a church or congregation seek to communicate as it describes itself? What should Christians seek to communicate about themselves? For good or bad “church” and “Christian” are themselves names deeply embedded in our culture  and loaded with thousands of years of meaning – some of it not very flattering – but once, they were new, freshly minted, communicating something vibrant and fresh and unexpected to the wider culture. The Bible itself testifies to this newness in its very division into the Old Testament and the New Testament. The “New” Testament is the book about the church, about the Christians – something new and unimagined. Is there a way of re-capturing this freshness and newness?

    The book of Revelation – the last book of the Bible – has, as one of its threads, the depiction of worship in heaven. It is about the songs that thread eternity and underpin the fabric of creation. In this sense, it is nothing new in the literature of the Bible. Worship in heaven is timeless and universal, never ending and never changing, but then Revelation introduces something quite remarkable, quite stunning: a new song is heard! The timeless, unchanging worship of heaven is changed! What has brought this about? It is Jesus Christ, His death on the Cross and His resurrection has caused heaven to break into new song, new worship, and the writer of Revelation leaves us in no doubt as to the significance of this as he ends his book with the description of a new heaven and a new earth – a new creation taking the place of the old because a new song is sung.

    In choosing names for themselves, Christians have not, as far as I know, ever chosen the name “People of the New Song” but that is what they are, and it is an identity that perhaps would help them to be as new and as fresh as they were all those centuries ago.  What song will Christians sing going on into the New Year?      

  • Supermarket Communion

    mayberetiredpastor

    Supermarket Communion

    When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” …

    Luke 22:14-15

    In some churches these days, Holy Communion is celebrated using a small disposable plastic pot about the size of a coffee creamer. Opening the pot reveals a small wafer for the communion bread in a top compartment over a small quantity of communion wine in the lower compartment. As I have experienced it, these pots are usually placed on or under the seats to be used by the congregation at the appropriate point in the service. On one occasion, the pots were placed on a table in the reception area for individuals to collect if they intended to participate in communion. Being strangers to the church and unaware that communion was to be celebrated, we completely missed the fact that we were supposed to collect a pot and so were unable to celebrate communion.

    I had heard a few years ago that this practice was spreading amongst mega-churches in Singapore. I was unimpressed at the time although I could see how they might be attractive to churches wishing to speed up the administration of communion, but still, I felt that the use of these “all-in-one” do-it-yourself pots rather missed the point. Experiencing their use in practice only confirms and strengthens my distaste for the concept.

    In the churches where they were used, the celebration of Holy Communion took less than five minutes and there was little if any sense of unity as individuals opened and consumed the contents in their own way at their own pace with little or no explanation or exposition of meaning and significance. The whole point of communion appears to have evaporated as the supermarket has been introduced into this central act of worship!

    Holy Communion, or the Eucharist or Mass in more liturgical churches, is practiced in two basic forms across churches: either as a supper, in which the bread and wine are displayed on a simple table and then served from there by stewards to the congregation, or, as a sacrificial act where the bread and wine are consecrated at the altar of the church to which the congregation approach one-by-one to receive the benefits of the sacrifice. The two forms reflect the different theological emphases placed on the practice of the sacrament. Both are valid and help the congregation to remember the central, unifying tenet of our faith – that is, the Son of God sacrificed His life on the Cross for our sakes and that all who accept His sacrifice enjoy the benefits of forgiveness of sin, and the unity of loving fellowship that results from the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.   Hence, the celebration is a communal celebration in which the spiritual truth of our joyful salvation and the presence of the Holy Spirit amongst us is expressed in a physical act.

    All of this is lost in the use of pre-packaged pots. It becomes an individual act of convenience in which the underlying spiritual reality is neither acknowledged nor expressed. It is, to my mind, the ultimate yielding of the gospel of Jesus Christ to consumerist mentality and the ideology of individual convenience.

    A visiting minister commented, after I had once led communion, how much he appreciated the time we took to celebrate the sacrament. As the biblical quotation above reminds us, Jesus anticipated with eagerness that last meal He spent with His closest disciples when He inaugurated what we now celebrate as Holy Communion. It seems to me that we ought to do the same, Holy Communion should be given the time and space in our services for us to savour it, as our Lord did when He shared that last meal with His disciples.

  • Jesus Didn’t Make It To Church!

    mayberetiredpastor

    Jesus Didn’t Make It To Church!

    1 Corinthians 14:23 NRSV

    After stepping down from the position of Senior Pastor in a Manchester church, my wife and I visited the churches in our local area. For the first few months, we visited, in rotation, almost every church within walking distance of our home and some within a short driving distance. It was a very interesting time. We placed few, if any, restrictions on the churches to visit so we experienced a wide range of churches representing a broad spectrum of the UK church both in demographic, theology and worship.


    One thing that struck me quite strongly was, no matter what kind of church we visited – and a few were well-established evangelical churches, strong by many usual criteria, the kind of church that would feel that it was strong on “the christian identity” – almost all of them could get through Sunday service with scarcely a mention of the name “Jesus Christ”. I started timing when Jesus’ name would first be mentioned and came-up with 20 mins as the earliest and 30-40 mins on average. One set of leaders (the entire front of house team – minister, worship leader, service leader etc.) managed to get through an entire service without once mentioning the name of Jesus! (It was otherwise a good service).

    What would someone from another faith make of it all? It seemed to me perfectly possible for a devout Muslim or Hindu to sit through almost any of these services and feel perfectly comfortable. God was constantly mentioned, glorified and worshipped, but not named specifically as Jesus. It reminded me very much of the Apostle Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 14 (referenced above), the difference being that Paul was writing about incomprehension brought about by he use of unknown languages in services, whereas, in these churches, it was not an unknown language that was the problem but an unknown, unspecified God. Our Muslim or Hindu friend might well leave these services feeling that they had a great time worshipping Allah or whichever expression of divinity they personally followed.


    I personally believe that Sunday services are public events to which the world is invited to hear the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and His worship. This is what makes it Christian worship. A person of any other faith should feel uncomfortable in a Sunday service but, yet, also attracted, and leave challenged rather than comfortable. Jesus and His work should be front, centre and end of Sunday services and not simply implied or understood.

    Two churches stood out from the crowd during this time. They both managed to mention Jesus within the first 5 minutes and went on bringing up His name at every opportunity. We had a ball! A big shout out for Christchurch4U, Chorlton, and Liverpool Chinese Gospel Church 🙂