In his seminar on service planning, Mark Dever speaks about his Capitol Hill Baptist Church’s use of hymns. It seems some of the attendees wonder if he gets many complaints about his use of hymns. He says,
The people who I know who tell me they don’t like it are other evangelical Christians who want something . . . –the word that’s used again and again with me is light. They want something light. “I want something lighter.” Well, that wouldn’t be here. But I’m not really worried about that, because . . . so many other places they can get that. So that’s what so many people are telling them will actually bring people in. What I would say about the whole culture of the church we’re trying to establish is that . . . we are not meaning to be catering for nominal Christians. We’re catering for people who are sort of dead-out and willing to follow Christ or non-Christians who are spiritually curious. If they’re people who just want to be kind-of entertained or cajoled in, then that’s opposite of the way we’re trying to teach them about following Jesus.
Then someone asks him about RUF tunes.
“Brian asked about the RUF tunes and there are some good things being done by RUF and we certainly have all their CDs and we have the books. I leave some of that musical stuff, as far as that, I’ll give things like that to . . . two guys in our church who work with the music, and if they think a tune is good enough to use they’ll push it through to me. I can’t remember if we’ve used any of those RUF tunes or not. My one kind-of problem with the RUF tunes–I do like them–but I generally like the tunes that they’ve replaced even better. Those RUF tunes are done for people in the South, conservatives, college students, who want the content of the hymns, which is great, but they can’t deal with the music. I think that that’s because–sometimes it’s just because the music is old fashioned–but other times I think it’s because they’ve gotten used to a top-40, you know, guitar, or . . . electric kind-of style, which is fine, but there’s no singing of parts in there, it entirely gets into a unison singing, and you’ve become entirely dependent upon the accompaniment. So all you get is this melody line that you’ve got to have a thick accompaniment for. What we have is deliberately, the electricity could go out and the Holy Spirit’s still here. You know, it’s the humans in the room singing together, that’s the unusual thing. So we deliberately go after music that’s going to capitalize on the congregational nature of the singing, so we actually like good parts in the songs. We think that will encourage people in their singing.
I appreciate what he is saying here, though, with respect to Dr. Dever, I would go a step further in wondering if these tunes are so “good.” In fact, the RUF tunes should be put in the same category as the “lighter” fare Dever laments in the previous paragraph. RUF is just the trendy (or more recent) update of what the lighter stuff was in previous generations; they hold in common the desire to merge entertainment and worship. Dever himself comes close to saying this when makes the apt link between this stuff and top-40 music. I do not want to diminish the force of his critique, which I think is good and courageous. What is the modern church to do when the electricity goes out?
Dever later speaks on the importance of the service leader:
A good service leader can be almost as edifying in communicating God’s Word to his people as a good preacher. So that’s an important thing. The last thing we want to communicate is casualness. Casualness as a kind-of stand-in for intimacy with God is not a good idea. You know, “the more casual you are, the more close you must have a relationship with God. That is not good. The last thing I want is a service leader who has not thought about it, kind-of quickly look down and see it’s hymn 143, and just come up, “Let’s pray–Dear God, we just want to thank you we’re here today. Hymn 143! Let’s stand and do hymn . . . um . . . do the first and second stanzas today!” . . . As far as just that service leading itself, I would rather have more pauses between things, and him having well-known what hymn was being sung, and prayed about it in his own soul, thought what about what would be an edifying one or two brief sentences to say beforehand to call the attention of the congregation particular matters to help lead us even better in our meditation.
I wonder how many of us wrongly connect any spirit of sobriety and seriousness in worship with “liturigcal” worship. What does it say of our day when so many nearly automatically make that connection?
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“I wonder how many of us wrongly connect any spirit of sobriety and seriousness in worship with “liturigcal” worship.”
The word “wrongly” snagged my attention. I’m assuming that its use here signals that you think the following:
1. Liturgical worship is invariably marked by a spirit of sobriety and seriousness; and
2. It is possible (maybe desirable?) to worship in a spirit of sobriety and seriousness without liturgy.
Am I reading you correctly here?
I’d offer a clarification …
“Order of service” and liturgy are not the same things. Any service of worship can have an order as invariable as an atomic clock, with no liturgy at all. Or, one can have a worship service chock full of liturgy, but there be no order in the service.
“Order” is the name for the sequential arrangement of events in the entirety of a worship service. In my Baptist days, the Order was this:
Call to Worship
Opening Hymn
Announcements
Musical selection by the choir
Pastoral Prayer
Hymn
Offering (often w/accompanying musical performance)
Sermon (w/invitation at the end)
Invitation Hymn (sung during invitation)
Introduction of those who walked the aisle (if any)
Concluding Hymn
If a service had no order at all, any of the events in the list above (plus many more not listed, such as baptism, communion, testimonies, etc.) might be strung together willy-nilly from one Sunday to the next. Orders of service can be created for Sunday to Sunday worship services, or for special occasions (baptism, communion, weddings, funerals, ordeal by boiling water (http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/source/water-ordeal.html for one of these!), and other religious services.
As I recall, the Baptists among whom I worshipped were fiercely resistent to changing anything in the Order of Worship.
In the above order of worship from my boyhood, the only thing that even approaches liturgy is the singing of a hymn, because …
Liturgy is the name for *communal* actions and words that *require* that all the individuals act/speak in concert, so as to create a single body which is speaking or acting as a body, and not as individuals. In practice, “the liturgy” is a term that is casually used to name what is actually an order of service. Liturgical events include singing of hymns, call-response versicles, antiphonal singing or reading of Scripture, communal “amens” or “Lord, hear our prayer” spoken congregationally at the end of petitions, communal confessions of sin, or confessions of faith (e.g. the Creed).
Baptists never do liturgy (unless hymn singing counts as liturgy) But, Baptists usually have an order of service that is as resistent to change as any liturgy (and, for the same reasons).
So, why would liturgy automatically suggest a spirit of sobriety and seriousness? I’d suggest that it does so *only* for those for whom worshiping via a bona fide liturgy is similar to asking them to dance a square dance when they’ve never learned the steps. Yes, it would make one feel particularly serious and sober.
Yes, BQ, that was not stated clearly. I mean Liturgical in the sense of those “high churches” which follow a prescribed liturgy, in the sense that Wikipedia uses it here:
Anyway, in certain sense, even the churches like First Baptist of Hammon formerly pastored by Jack Hyles, have a kind of liturgy, in that they know when to shout “AYMEN” or hold up their KJV at the exact right time. Every church has some kind of liturgy, as you seem to be saying (lest I read you wrong).
BQ-
That is a helpful distinction.
I am attempting to introduce a form of liturgy (as you have defined it) onto our Baptist services. We have added Scripture readings, Doxology or Gloria Patri, and benediction hymns. We also corporately read our church covenant on a regular basis.
It might not be Anglican, but there it is.
I’m sorry, but I am unfamiliar with RUF tunes, and the link is not working for my computer. Is RUF an acronym or a name and what kind of music is it?
Well, Anglican worship certainly has no corner on liturgy! It borrowed all it ever had from the much older tradition of western catholic (note the small “c”) worship.
The confusion of liturgy and order of worship is understandable, as both of them are ordinarily stable over time and resist changes. I simply wanted to put in a plug for the “essence” of liturgy, viz. that it was all those things which render a group of individuals into a unit that acts/speaks as a unit.
A good analogy is an orchestra playing a symphony. What you are NOT hearing is 100 or so individual musical performances which happen to be going on at the same time. No, the symphonic score corresponds to the liturgy: it gives each musician something to do in concert with all the other musicians. Same same with a ballet: it is NOT 50 to 100 people who happen to be doing 50 to 100 individual dances at the same time on the same stage. No, the choreography unite them so that they become a corporate whole, which is then performing “Swan Lake” or “Firebird.”
In all the churches I attended and/or led before becoming Anglican, it really was the case (most of the time) that we were 100 or so individuals who happened to be worshipping in the same room at the same time. There was little or nothing to generate the corporate body. It takes a liturgy to accomplish this. The exception, of course, would be the brief minutes when we would sing a hymn: THAT was a liturgical act. Nothing else that happened ever attained that level of corporate action or speech.
What puzzles me now is the aversion to liturgy when there are so many exhortations in the Scripture to unity of mind, heart, spirit, etc. This kind of unity is fostered, or at a minimum modeled, in worship that is liturgical. Yes, ordinary Baptist practice in worship has fleeting moments of liturgy — hymns, the Amen Ryan mentioned.
In Anglican worship, however, from start to finish there is a “script” and it is chock full of things for *everyone* to do at the appropraite place. Just like the performance of a symphony. And, yes, they are done in an order that has its own logic, so that varying it would result in as much confusion as rearranging the movements of a symphony or (worse) rearranging the elements within one of the movements.
You have my best wishes in your efforts to introduce liturgy in your Baptist setting. There is no intrinsic reason why Baptists should not be far more liturgical than they ordinarily are. I do recall, however, in a Bible Church I pastored, I met with vociferous complaints and charges of being crypto-Catholic when I attempted to introduce responsive reading of Scripture and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Some folks liturgo-meters are Very Sensitive Indeed.
bq
BQ, I have to admit I chucked at that last line.
Jason, RUF is an acronym for Reformed University Fellowship. Think trendy hymns; hymns that sound like choruses. The texts will be those of often good or even excellent hymns.
I was thinking “RUF” might have something to do with charismatic holy barking, but then the context didn’t make sense. :^)
I also must wonder if a great portion of our hymns suffer from the malady of lightness as well–lacking the theological weight to lend our pastor’s favorite Hebrew word lately (kavod) to worship. (please pardon my transliteration if it’s goobered!) Any thoughts?
Amen, Greg. Keep it up!
Bert, it in large part depends on what you are referring to by “our hymns.” I agree that some of the songs commonly considered “traditional” fail in the areas you mentioned.