Hello team/committee/group members,
Whether we identify ourselves as the Worship Support Team, Support Committee
for the Corporate Worship of the Chapel Hill Bible Church or People for the
People, I am thankful that we will have this opportunity to serve one
another and the body of the Chapel Hill Bible Church. May we humbly
continue.
I have a few thoughts to share with you, since our departure.
•Should we prayerfully consider having a representative of the 50/60+ cohort
group join this team?
•I forgot to give you all copies of the following two short essays. This
may be something for the Blog site, but thought to send it now. So, I’ll
recycle the paper and give it to you to print yourselves, if you desire.
Until later,
Peace to you
~debbie
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A SINGING FAITH
Authentic Christian faith is not merely believed. Nor is it merely acted
upon. It is sung-with utter joy sometimes, in uncontrollable tears
sometimes, but it is sung. "Words and music did for me what solid, even
rigorous, religious argument could never do, they introduced me to God, not
belief in God, more an experiential sense of GOD"- that's the way Bono, lead
singer of the band U2, puts it.
What is it about singing that takes us beyond mere belief or behavior?
Think of singing as a language that allows us to embody our love for our
Creator. Song is a means he has given us to communicate our deepest
affections, to have our thoughts exquisitely shaped, and to have our spirits braced for the boldest of obedience’s. Through music, our God draws
us deeper into a love affair with himself.
- Reggie Kidd, from WITH ONE VOICE: DISCOVERING CHRIST'S SONG IN OUR WORSHIP, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, forthcoming in October 2005. ISBN: 0801065917. For more information on Dr. Kidd and WITH ONE VOICE, visit
www.rts.edu/kidd.
[WITH ONE VOICE has helped me to understand more deeply that our songs of
faith resonate most fully, most Christianly, when believing communities draw
on the strengths of high culture, folk culture, and popular culture. As I
grow in intimacy with the Savior, I see more clearly the joys and blessings
of deferring to the needs and aesthetic preferences of my brothers and
sisters within the body of Christ. Highly recommended.]
Have a great week,
Chip Stam
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Sometimes we must think that ours is the first generation to struggle with
style issues in Christian worship. Not so. Today's WORSHIP QUOTE is from
the pen of C. S. Lewis. Here the Oxford don and Christian apologist
reflects on the divide between those who appreciate and prefer church music
from the high art tradition and those who know only the music of the masses
and popular culture. The parallels to our current situations are not exact,
but the important lesson of Christian deference is clear-deference over
preference in the body of Christ.
AUTHOR'S DISCLAIMER: Lewis identifies himself as a layman and one who can
boast no musical education. He says, "I cannot even speak from the
experience of a lifelong churchgoer. It follows that Church Music is a
subject on which I cannot, even in the lowest degree, appear as a teacher.
My place is in the witness box. If it concerns the court to know how the
whole matter appears to such as I, I am prepared to give my evidence."
HIGH BROW AND LOW BROW MUSIC IN CHURCH
There are two musical situations on which I think we can be confident that a
blessing rests. One is where a priest or an organist, himself a man of
trained and delicate taste, humbly and charitably sacrifices his own
(aesthetically right) desires and gives the people humbler and coarser fare
than he would wish, in a belief (even, as it may be, the erroneous belief)
that he can thus bring them to God. The other is where the stupid and
unmusical layman humbly and patiently, and above all silently, listens to
music which he cannot, or cannot fully, appreciate, in the belief that it
somehow glorifies God, and that if it does not edify him this must be his
own defect. Neither such a High Brow nor such a Low Brow can be far out of
the way. To both, Church Music will have been a means of grace; not the
music they have liked, but the music they have disliked. They have both
offered, sacrificed, their taste in the fullest sense. But where the
opposite situation arises, where the musician is filled with the pride of
skill or the virus of emulation and looks with contempt on the
unappreciative congregation, or where the unmusical, complacently entrenched
in their own ignorance and conservatism, look with the restless and
resentful hostility of an inferiority complex on all who would try to
improve their taste-there, we may be sure, all that both offer is unblessed
and the spirit that moves them is not the Holy Ghost.
These highly general reflections will not, I fear, be of much practical use
to any priest or organist in devising a working compromise for a particular
church. The most they can hope to do is to suggest that the problem is
never a merely musical one. Where both the choir and the congregation are
spiritually on the right road no insurmountable difficulties will occur.
Discrepancies of taste and capacity will, indeed, provide matter for mutual
charity and humility.
- C. S. Lewis, "On Church Music" (1949) from CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS, edited
by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971 reprint, pp.96-97.
[I am sure that there are many saints in our churches who would agree with
another statement in this same essay. Lewis writes, "What I, like many other
laymen, chiefly desire in church are fewer, better, and shorter hymns;
especially fewer."]
Have a great week,
Chip Stam
