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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Performance Christianity
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
It does seem to me that much of Christianity has become a bit of a performance. I was brought up on the ideal of rhetoric - the great sermon performance as the central act of a church service - and, later, the performance of the act of worship, meaning, of course, music.
Then, of course, there is the measuring of "Christian achievement": how many lives have you changed, saved, touched, reached etc...? What are you doing for the Lord? What is your ministry and the fruit of your ministry? How committed are you? Etc etc...
I'm not sure that the ways of Christ were ever supposed to be a performance. Right from the start, God rested on the seventh day (whether you take that literally or symbolically, and I am not going down that DH route here). Note that "God rested". It doesn't say that "man rested", although that is, of course, assumed. We take the Sabbath idea as signifying a day of rest for man, but actually it's about both God and man resting (hence the wording of the fourth of the Ten Commandments).
It occurred to me today that, as Christians, we are supposed to relate to a relaxed God, if the concept of grace relating to the Sabbath idea is anything to go by.
But some of my experiences of Christendom have taught me that, for some Christians, God is anything but 'relaxed'. There is a drivenness and absurd obsession with achievement and performance which makes a mockery of the Sabbath concept that lies at the heart of grace.
In practical terms, how can we actually serve "a relaxed God" in our churches, fellowships and lives?
Any ideas?
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
Posts: 3625 | From: South Coast of England | Registered: Sep 2009
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But some of my experiences of Christendom have taught me that, for some Christians, God is anything but 'relaxed'. There is a drivenness and absurd obsession with achievement and performance which makes a mockery of the Sabbath concept that lies at the heart of grace.
In practical terms, how can we actually serve "a relaxed God" in our churches, fellowships and lives?
Any ideas?
Tis the spirit of the age, sadly.
I gave up going to church meetings. That helped a lot. The stuff I do still gets done, with much hot air saved.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
You raise an interesting point, EE.
I suspect a lot of the hyper-activity comes out of insecurity ie. look what's happening, churches are in decline, sin and apostasy are thriving ... quick, quick, quick, let's do something about it ...
Plus there's the whole management/performance culture with the obsession with measuring results etc.
I think this accounts for much of the eventual burn-out that seems to accompany revivalism and certain more fraught forms of charismatic evangelicalism. There will be versions of this in the other traditions too, no doubt.
Personally, I think the contemplative and reflective traditions can help provide an antidote on this. From within the charismatic evangelical constituency Ian Stackhouse in 'The Gospel Driven Church' makes out a good case for a more 'relaxed' and leisurely style of Christian ministry.
Mind you, am I the only one who finds the term 'relaxed' annoying in the extreme when applied to worship styles?
I cringe whenever I see evangelical charismatic Anglican parishes (or even Pentecostal ones) describing their services as 'relaxed'.
At one time they would have used terms like 'lively' or 'vibrant' - 'our vibrant Gospel hour' as the Pentie church back home in South Wales used to put it ...
I don't like these terms either, but 'relaxed'?
It sounds all laid-back and sloppy.
The other term they use a lot is 'informal' - an 'informal time of worship'. Yeeucchh!!!
I know what they're getting at, what they mean is no robes or bells and smells and a laid-back soft-rock sound ...
I can think of some other epithets which might describe all of that more rudely and more effectively ...
So, it seems to me, we're stuffed always round.
Any form of public worship is a performance to some extent. The only choice we have, it seems to me, is whether to go for a style that promotes individual expression and appeals to extroverts and show-offs or one that promotes some kind of corporate dignity ... however that might best be achieved within the particular tradition concerned.
I s'pose, though, that it's ultimately the intention that's important, irrespective of the style adopted. You can have showy-off bells and smells and showy-off Hillsongs and soft-rock - but you can equally have either done with integrity and truth.
But I take your point, the whole comparisons/performance/targets thing is a pain.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Grammatica
Shipmate
# 13248
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Posted
For some of us (in certain traditions) liturgy is performative, not performance. Liturgy isn't something done in front of an audience; the doing of a Eucharistic liturgy brings it about that, as God has promised, something necessary for our lives happens to the bread and wine we offer and then consume.
The presence of members of the congregation is a necessary part of this performative. Certain persons (priests, deacons, servers, and son on) have defined roles in the liturgical performative; these persons are called and consecrated to their offices, and those who have not been so called and consecrated cannot perform their actions.
The whole is called a "service," and should be entered into in that spirit; the focus should always be on Him Whom we serve.
By long-held tradition, vestments, processions, candles, crosses, incense, and church music are part of the liturgical performative, though they aren't the essential point. Doing our service to God well is important; aesthetics matter. The physical discipline of a well-organized liturgical performative forces people to stop thinking about themselves and merges them into the service everyone is offering, as a part of the Body of Christ. Or at least that's the ideal.
I agree the focus can seem to be too much on impressing the congregation, knocking their socks off with a really well-choreographed procession (with a trumpet!). But on the other hand, I do think people should organize services as well as they can, sing as well as they can, and so forth. It's the effort to do so that calls us out of ourselves and into the service of God.
Posts: 1058 | From: where the lemon trees blosson | Registered: Dec 2007
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Jonathan Strange
Shipmate
# 11001
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Posted
This is timely for me. My church is about to hold 'Commitment Sunday' where we are expected to sign up to various rotas or 'get involved' by other means. The vicar nearly crushed my hand in his handshake this morning and said, 'Now you've given up your Churches Together role I am sure there will be lots of things you can sign up for.' He forgets that I was shedding one of many roles to try and make my voluntary work actually manageable. I am left with the impression that my soul is in mortal danger if I don't join the gardening rota.
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"Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bears his teeth, winter meets its death,
When he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again"
Posts: 1327 | From: Wessex | Registered: Feb 2006
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Chorister
Completely Frocked
# 473
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Posted
It's been a failing (or a blessing?) of my church for many years - or perhaps I've noticed it more moving from a village church with limited resources to a town church with many resources. However, those resources are now dwindling, as they are in many larger churches. But the attitude that we must do a lot remains. Many people run themselves into exhaustion as a result.
I see a strange disparity between exhortations for the congregation to do more, and to be constantly busy, and a list - in small print - at the back of church which is full-to-bursting with names of people who already do so much in so many areas. They can't both be right.
Perhaps it's time we all joined the 'Prayer and Stillness* Group' instead.
*which I always read as the 'Prayer and Silliness Group'. But perhaps they're not so silly after all....
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Retired, sitting back and watching others for a change.
Posts: 34626 | From: Cream Tealand | Registered: Jun 2001
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Mark Betts
Ship's Navigation Light
# 17074
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Posted
@EtymologicalEvangelical:
Oh dear! The one thing that stood out in your post seemed to be the way it was all about a person's personal efforts.
eg.
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
...Then, of course, there is the measuring of "Christian achievement": how many lives have you changed, saved, touched, reached etc...? What are you doing for the Lord? What is your ministry and the fruit of your ministry? How committed are you? Etc etc...
With the greatest of respect, I really don't think it is all about your performance. Where's the sense of community? Corporate achievements? For example, If someone has a gift for putting together a good church website, let him (or her) do that and you encourage that person, perhaps suggest an article or two now and again. What's wrong with that?
Church would be far more "relaxed" (in a good way) if we learnt to share our burdens - it really isn't all about the individual. I know that, after I've shed this mortal coil, my church will continue to function perfectly well without me - if they can't, God help them!
[ 14. October 2012, 21:01: Message edited by: Mark Betts ]
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"We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."
Posts: 2080 | From: Leicester | Registered: Apr 2012
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churchgeek
Have candles, will pray
# 5557
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
It occurred to me today that, as Christians, we are supposed to relate to a relaxed God, if the concept of grace relating to the Sabbath idea is anything to go by.
But some of my experiences of Christendom have taught me that, for some Christians, God is anything but 'relaxed'. There is a drivenness and absurd obsession with achievement and performance which makes a mockery of the Sabbath concept that lies at the heart of grace.
In practical terms, how can we actually serve "a relaxed God" in our churches, fellowships and lives?
Any ideas?
Perhaps rather than "relaxed God" you might say "God at rest." To my mind, anyway, that gives the sense of serenity more than just a mood you've happened to catch God in. But that's a small quibble over words.
A Jesuit priest and scholar, Thomas Scirghi, has posed the question: "What does God find beautiful?" In other words, if beauty is "that which, being seen, pleases," then what gives God pleasure? The answer to that question is how we ought to live, I think - and it's more teleological than goal-oriented, if I can split that hair. What I mean is that rather than the type of goal where you have to sell so many boxes of cookies in order to go on the field trip, the teleological approach (as I'm using the term) sees the destination and journey as of a piece. You're not doing x to get y; you're doing x to do x because x is worth doing - it's an end in itself.
I cite Charles Peirce a lot here. He defined "esthetics" (his spelling) as the "normative science of the admirable," i.e., the norms by which we ought to order our affections; and said this science of esthetics forms the basis for ethics because we behave according to what we love.
So I think it's much better to think about what pleases God in aesthetic rather than purely ethical terms - in categories of the beautiful, the admirable, the delightful, the pleasing. Some Christian traditions are really suspicious of those categories because they seem so tied to the body, which is, in those traditions, suspect. But not only did God make our body, God took on a body in the Incarnation, and didn't shed it - at least not according to the biblical narratives of the Resurrection and Ascension.
In a way, "performance" isn't an intrinsically problematic word here, at least not in its dramatic sense. Hans Urs von Balthasar famously described the drama of salvation with God the Father as playwright, God the Spirit as director, God the Son as principal actor, and ourselves as co-actors with Christ. Our discipleship is intimately bound with our struggle to find our role and play it well. But that's a very different sense of playing a role or performing than the sense common in the modern workplace, where you're assessed and rewarded (or punished) according to how many widgets you assembled (or dropped and broke). It's more about being than doing - and ultimately about being-together as the community of God - as my late mentor called it, the Community of the Beautiful.*
[*That's the title of one of his books. He uses that phrase not only or specifically about the Christian community, but to point out the relational nature of beauty itself.]
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I reserve the right to change my mind.
My article on the Virgin of Vladimir
Posts: 7773 | From: Detroit | Registered: Feb 2004
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