Inspired by a True Story

Worship in the Context of Abortion: A Clarification

My previous post about worship in the context of a culture of death generated quite a few responses. Unfortunately, a number of them seemed to miss the point to varying degrees. So, I wanted to toss up this post to help clarify.

Some people seemed to get caught up in the examples, rather than focusing on the more substantive point I was making. I’m not sure why that is. For example, Dean H. accuses me of making “the vast sweeping assumptions you have that churches with screens or churches with contemporary music or churches where people clap, etc. are not doing anything to help the culture, not helping babies, etc.”

It’s a charge of which I am innocent. Near the top of the post, I said, “Most evangelical services at churches of any size tend to run together, having been stripped of all their denominational and historical distinctives by trends at play in the larger evangelical movement.”

I fail to see how I am guilty of making a too sweeping generalization when, from the beginning, I made it clear that I am not talking about every evangelical church. I am talking about MOST churches, the bulk of churches, the majority of services. Most is not all. I don’t doubt those of you who wrote in to say that your church is an exception to the general trend. “Most” means 51 to 99 percent. By using that word to qualify my description, I left room for just such exceptions.

Now, that being said, it seems undeniable to me that there is a trend in the evangelical movement toward services that have “fun” as their distinguishing mark. The Christians behind them seem to want to draw people in with a promise of good times and an adrenaline rush.

The fact is that this mindset is always manifest in the presence of rock bands, big screens, and clever skits and sermons designed and delivered for maximum entertainment value. That doesn’t mean that this shallow thinking is behind EVERY contemporary service, but wherever this mindset exists, it gravitates toward a very contemporary way of doing church.

Some people questioned the abortion connection. One long-time friend wrote in to say, “the abortion TRAGEDY is in no way relevant to the praise and worship chorus, or the worship structure of the post-modern church.”

Here is the way I see it. Very few churches would have dared to have an upbeat, pleasure-oriented service on the evening of September 11, 2001. The events of the day were too dire. A service that failed to acknowledge those events and to respond to them with appropriate decorum would have been offensive.

What most of the church does not realize is that since legal abortion was forced on this country every day is September 11. We must remember the children who will be murdered during the hour we spend rocking out at church. When we stand and clap or laugh at the drama team’s clever skit, we should remember we stand ankle deep in their blood. We should act accordingly.

A Shocking Moment at the University of Florida

Via Drudge today comes the story of Andrew Meyer, a 21-year-old University of Florida student.

Meyer attended a town hall meeting with Senator John Kerry on campus Monday night.

Meyer asked Kerry several aggressive questions and apparently exceeded his alloted time. So, university police officers did what they always do when a student fails to observe proper protocol: they knocked him to the ground, pinned him, and, once he was on the ground with officers on top of him, shot him with a taser gun.

Watch the incident here.

And more here.

Based on some comments this kid makes in the second clip, I'd guess this kid is a left-wing conspiracy advocate. I probably disagree with him on every point. Nonetheless, I have to say this kind of treatment is outrageous.

What chilled me most about this video is the guy's futile screams for help as he is being mauled by these agents of the state. In the second clip, you can see a couple of young women who begin to scream at the officers to let him go. That's it. Otherwise, no-one even rises from his chair to protest these officers' heavy-handed tactics.

We can understand, of course, that the kids were scared. They don't want to be arrested. They don't want to tangle with a passel of cops who've already shown they are willing to use violence against unarmed teenagers.

But, students weren't the only ones in the rooms. Where were the college's administrators? These officers were employed by the university. Presumably, the university's administrators have authority over them. Why would they stand by while this was happening?

There was, of course, someone with even more power than a university official present. There was a United States Senator on the platform at the front of the auditorium. Kerry's failure to come down from the stage, march up the aisle to where the tussle was taking place, and demand, in front of the cameras, that this travesty be stopped, reveals his cowardice.

To be fair, Kerry can be heard in one of the videos saying he wants to answer the question, but his protestations are weak and ineffectual in light of what is happening in the aisle a few yards away.

Had Kerry taken more action, the officers still might have carried through with their abuse of this man. But those officers would have been much more moderate in their use of force, if only to avoid harming a U.S. Senator. Also, Kerry would have been on tape standing up against the forces of political oppression. He would have looked like a hero.

It is the nature of conspiracy theories that they cannot be disproven. To deny them is, in the minds of believers, to prove them. If this kid is a conspiracy theorist, if his heart and mind have been captured by dark tales of collusion among our governing officials, he should not be surprised by what happened to him. We can't control his mind, we can't keep him from believing the government is moving us into a police state or is out to get him personally. We should hope, however, that those with power would have enough sense not to act in ways that give him more ammunition for his paranoia.

Let's Take This Thing to The Previous Level

My grandmother had a beautiful funeral. In her tiny church bordered by cornfields ready to yield their harvests and the endless ribbon of a mostly silent Indiana highway, her friends and family remembered. In the basement afterward, we gathered together. The table was spread and we celebrated in spite of the loss.

What impressed me most was the simplicity. Her former pastor had come from Ohio. He preached and sang a solo from the pulpit. The room was modest; decorated, but not extensively. There was no ostentation, just the straightforward recollection of one who had, for a time, dwelt among us and gone.

The meal was not catered. What fare there was fell from the laboring hands of farmwives and the grandmothers of others who had relinquished their chores when they heard a neighbor was dead. They showed their hearts in deviled eggs and baked beans and slow-cooked ham.

We ate from paper plates on collapsible tables. We took our meals as a gift because we ate before the mystery of the grave into which we must all one day sink. Such knowledge has a way of making all things dear.

The simplicity of my grandmother’s funeral was part of what made it profoundly Christian. Nobody wanted a show. A sense of propriety permeated everything. There was a sense that what our family had drawn together, though in some ways meager, was good enough.

Not all Christian events have this atmosphere. Indeed, the default mode of operation in much of evangelicalism is rooted not in simplicity, but in ambition. Too many of us are busy asking, “How can we take this to the next level?” rather than “What is enough?”

We have internalized our culture’s love of spectacle and made the church a carnival.

This weekend such an event took place at a church in a city near where we live. You could see the sound stage from the highway. They gave away a car. The blue wagon hung from the end of a crane near the southbound lanes for days with a banner across it that read: “Win This Car!”

The church is relevant to her culture only insofar as she strives to create a true counter-culture based on values other than those embraced by the world. When we reject values like simplicity and propriety and a humble recognition of what is enough in an effort to be relevant, we, paradoxically, cease to capture the world’s attention; we become irrelevant to it. For her witness to continue, the church in America must embrace not the values of an entertainment culture, but what is simple and quiet and proper, so that a world bored with diversions might see a real alternative.

Religious Witness in Contemporary America

A man I once knew described a former co-worker.

“That guy was a real religious fanatic,” he said.

When I pressed him to describe what this guy did that to reveal that he was a fanatic, the man I was talking to offered one telling detail.

"He rides his bike to work,” he said, “so he can have more money to give away.”

That was it. It had nothing to do with having a judgmental attitude, nothing to do with pushing his beliefs on others, nothing to do with holding unsavory theological positions. What made this guy a fanatic is that he rode his bike to work to save money to give to the poor.

America is a land very tolerant of strange beliefs. Most people don’t care what your theories are. The guys in your office are unlikely to be concerned about whether you are a Moonie, a Mormon, or a young earth creationist. Our cultural emphasis on being nice and minding our own business checks any impulse to challenge others' beliefs in most settings.

We take seriously the adage that everyone needs a hobby. We take seriously too the injunction that what people do in their “private time” lies beyond moral judgment. If the guy who works in the next cubicle like to sacrifice cats to Satan on the weekend, we say, who are we to judge?

We have erected a wall of separation between the public and the private. Religious beliefs, perhaps expecially Christian ones, are fine so long as they are something people hold in private, a diversion for their spare time. Everyone, we believe, is entitled to his private beliefs, so long as those in no way impinge on the public order, the “normal” way things are.

Of course, by “the normal way things are”, we mean a culture that rests on the assumptions of secularism and consumerism. Its tacit agreement with religious believers is this: We will let you alone to believe whatever you like, so long as you keep quiet and don’t shake the foundations upon which our lives are built, do not challenge what we take for granted.

Most of the time, this is how it works. Sometimes, though, an action can betray us.

The reason this man I knew labeled his co-worker a fanatic had nothing to do with what this man believed or how he conducted himself in relation to those he worked with. Indeed, the man who called him a “fanatic” also praised him as “a great guy.”

Still, this “fanatic’s” decision to ride his bicycle to work--the embodiment of his serious commitment to the poor--hinted at truths that threaten the very foundations of the philosophical and economic order of contemporary America.

Tossing around words like “fanatic” and “extremist” serves to comfort contemporary Americans. These words help confine the danger; help convince them such craziness is the province of some marginalized group; help to reassure them that "normal" people would never act this way.

What so disturbed this man was not what his co-worker believed but the action to which his beliefs led. In this, he mirrors the modern world, because, in the end, what disturbs the world is not the ideas we hold, but the undeniable realties to which our deeds bear witness.

Abortion: The Context of Our Praise

I’ve been around the church scene. From charismatic services complete with people falling over backward “slain in the spirit” to liberal Episcopal liturgies, I’ve seen most of what there is to see.

Most evangelical services at churches of any size tend to run together, having been stripped of all their denominational and historical distinctives by trends at play in the larger evangelical movement.

You know what I’m talking about: the preference for “praise bands” over choirs, upbeat “praise songs” over hymns, the emphasis on messages that leave you feeling good, and the ubiquitous, enormous screen mounted to the wall.

It’s a comforting environment calculated to soothe. Its designers seem to be working from the assumption that nothing here should disturb an outsider.We must, they seem to think, at all costs keep the sharp edges of our faith from poking through the seamless fabric of positive energy we’ve woven.

Our commitment to warm feelings and cozy promises is perhaps seen most clearly in the songs we sing. Hymns that teach, that take the time to lay out over several stanzas a complete thought, a vision of history, a theological concept, have long been replaced in most evangelical circles with brief choruses whose vapid, often nonsensical words are meant not to instruct but to elicit positive feeling.

This emphasis on the cultivation of shallow but pleasant feelings and a sense of fun in evangelical churches is a large part of why the church finds itself irrelevant to contemporary culture. While we are busy trying to show the world “Christians can have fun too”, the world around us grows an ever darker, more murderous place.

We fail to consider our context. The most significant fact we should carry with us about our culture as we consider how we might design church services that speak to it is the reality of abortion. We should remember that while we fill our services with clever skits and shallow songs and advice on achieving your best life now, the streets of our cities run with the blood of 50 million babies.

Whatever we do in church, it should point to something, indeed someone, strong enough and virile enough, to gain victory over evil of that magnitude. The culture of death is the culture into which we speak. Abortion is the context of our praise. A church dedicated to her own entertainment, to feeling good on Sunday mornings will fail, indeed has failed, to point to Jesus, the one who will redeem and punish the evil of our age.

The devil is a lion and seeks whom he may devour. He feeds without restraint in our time while much of the church shields her eyes from his deeds, from the death of innocents. She turns her eyes instead to seeking a religion as simple and non-threatening as life in the suburbs, a religion that will not challenge her members to take stock of the world and their complicity in its evil, but will, every Sunday morning, leave them feeling special and comforted, with nothing but the sounds of laughter and clapping hands to haunt them.