Referencing Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna
Barna, Tyndale House, 2002/8
2
The Order of Worship:
Sunday mornings set in concrete (Pagan Christianity, chapter 3 title)
The Protestant ‘order of worship’ has its roots in the
medieval Catholic Mass. Schaff’s History of the Christian Church suggests
that the word ‘mass’ means dismissal and refers to the dismissal of the
congregation from the worship service that celebrated the Eucharist – the
service of the wine and bread.
Viola and Barna (referencing Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church) make
the point that “The medieval mass reflected the mind of its originator. It was a blending of pagan and Judaistic
ritual sprinkled with catholic theology and Christian vocabulary”. Will Durant, in Caesar and Christ suggests the Mass “was deeply steeped in pagan
magical thinking as well as Greek drama”.
Under Luther, preaching came to be central rather than the
Eucharist; Zwingli transformed the altar into the communion table; Calvin and
others created their own liturgical orders of worship; the Puritans forsook
many – perhaps most – of the Reformers’ adaptations preferring what they deemed
a more biblical model; a tiny few continued to meet in homes with none of these
accoutrements. And as Viola and Barna
note, there were “Many adjustments, no vital change” from the institutional
model once it was established.
Our study of the liturgical history of the
Lutheran (sixteenth century), Reformed (sixteenth century), Puritans (sixteenth
century), Methodists (eighteenth century), Frontier-Revivalists (eighteenth to
nineteenth centuries), and Pentecostals (twentieth century) uncovers one
inescapable point: For the last five hundred years, the Protestant order of
worship has undergone minimal change.
In the end, all Protestant traditions share
the same unbiblical features in their order of worship. They are officiated and directed by a
clergyman, they make the sermon central, and the people are passive and not
permitted to minister. (p.73)
In 1992, I participated in a gathering of around 100
disciples of Jesus in Canberra Australia.
It was called ‘Leaders Looking to Jesus’ and was a bunch of men and
women from all over Australia gathered together for a fortnight essentially to
worship and listen, with no ‘conference program’ and no daily run-sheet. Away from our ‘home churches’, with no
impulse to do any particular set things and with no ‘agenda’ but to worship and
listen, one would think it would be a relatively easy thing – it was a real
struggle for many.
We seem to easily
assume two things: that an ‘order of worship’ or run-sheet is essential if
we want to achieve anything; and that, therefore, christian church meetings
must always have had orders of worship and run-sheets. For the first hundred years at least, they
didn’t.
Besides, for many people, it is a moot point anyway: the
mere fact that the first disciples may not have had orders of worship and
run-sheets does not of itself prohibit us from using them. After all, things change and develop;
cultures are different; modern societies are strikingly different from those of
two thousand years ago.
But to my mind, one thing stands out like Uluru in Central
Australia: orders of worship and run-sheets are specifically designed and
implemented to be restrictions on time first and foremost, followed by
restrictions on participation.
Christianity has very much become a spare-time or fixed-time activity,
moulded around complicated, sophisticated and ultra-busy lifestyles. Furthermore, it has come to be critical –
matching our secular lives – that everything we do “for God” must be done with
“excellence and professionalism” and in the hands of suitably trained and
qualified people.
So in this matter of orders of worship and run-sheets, this,
to me, is the ‘gateway drug’: what we do when we come together – whenever that
is – takes second or third place in our busy lives and has to have a start time
and a finish time. We have to ‘get on
with our daily lives’.
To me, this is the striking difference between ourselves and
the disciples of the first century following Jesus: they worked to live; they
didn’t live to work. Becoming a disciple
of Jesus meant precisely that; other ‘essentials’ could and would take their
place around that. And if you believe
the account in the early part of Acts about those first disciples, their
priorities were pretty much inverted compared to ours today.
These days, we assume
two further things: having a job or running a business is an absolute must
and is our first priority; ‘spending time with family’ (usually ‘tight’ or
close family groups) is critical for time-poor people and is priority number
two. ‘Worship’ often comes after that. Jesus had a rather unusual take on both these
issues and taking Jesus’ approach often brings reproach down onto one’s head.
The immediate context of the first disciple-gatherings was
Jesus’ instructions available to us in what we call the “sermon on the mount” –
Matthew 5, 6 and 7. Central to that teaching
is to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and your daily needs
will be taken care of.’
And at a later point in his life (and a little later in
Matthew’s record), as an adult, Jesus demonstrated an interesting take on the
meaning of ‘family’. Jesus was talking
to the crowds and his disciples come and interrupt him to tell him his mother
and brothers are looking for him – to which he replies: “who is my mother and
who are my brothers?” As he gestures
towards his disciples, he says: “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in
heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Jesus’ priorities were vastly different from those in the
surrounding culture; and his disciples were fast learning their priorities had
to adjust to the life of the kingdom of God.
What we found at our gathering in Canberra in 1992 was that being Jesus’
‘ecclesia’ today means a switch of paradigm and a major adjustment to our life
priorities.
When worship flows from these shifts in thinking and focus,
orders of worship and run-sheets are, at best, trivialities and at worst,
distractions from the call of the Holy Spirit to be in that space of true
worship; of being in that zone where God’s mission in Christ in the world takes
pride of place and we do whatever the Holy Spirit gives us to do. And that, friends, fits well with the
descriptions and teachings of the first apostles and the next generation of
disciples they made, recorded for us in the New Testament.
Note to self: Remember, chairs for commoners
date from the sixteenth century and carpets from the eleventh century.
No comments:
Post a Comment