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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Irreverent
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Is a person duped if they go expecting euphoria and experience it.
How in that case does it differ from someone expecting to get "an experience" from the Eucharist and they get it?
Jengie
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
All I was suggesting was that SA worship both mirrors and 'enacts' SA theology in the same way that Pentecostal worship does, or Reformed worship does or Orthodox worship does ...
[...]
If that makes sense.
Fair enough, but where does 'irreverent' worship fit in?
Take that Hokey Cokey church dance. Seems rather cheesy from this side of the computer screen. Doesn't have the nostalgic charm of the SAs, the majesty of the Orthodox or the rough and ready aura of a tarrying meeting at Azusa Street. But neither does it seem out of place when you consider the history of American popular religion. Certainly, in this video the worshippers, worship leaders and environment all seem to be aligned, and there's no sense of a reluctant group of people being coaxed to do something that they feel is alien to their religious culture. This kind of worship seems authentic in the context.
Your problem does seem to be with inauthenticity in church worship. But in a denomination like the CofE that prides itself on its breadth, and is willing to borrow ideas from various sources it can't be straightforward to establish what counts as inauthenticity, and hence irreverence.
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I'm not sure the CofE has a great deal of bearing on this issue any more than any other church or tradition has ... the same kind of issues apply it seems to me ...
@Jengie Jon - I didn't say it was any different. Although, I would say that in a more eucharistic or sacramentally inclined setting there would generally be less of a motivation to seek euphoric experiences in and of themselves ... if someone does have an 'experience' in the celebration of the eucharist then that would be seen as an added bonus, as it were, not the primary motivation ...
Does that make sense?
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not making value judgements here about what forms of worship are 'better' or have more value than others ... but I would say that certain traditions do - inherently - carry a greater danger of hype and manipulation ...
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
The Hokey Cokey thing probably does derive 'authentically' from the collective experience of that particular gathering, SvitlanaV2 - in that they would be expecting things to go a bit 'off the wall' occasionally ...
They did seem to be enjoying themselves ... part of the enjoyment, I submit, would come from a sense of frisson at doing something rather bizarre in a collective way ...
They'd enjoy that aspect of it as much as anything else.
As I've often said here before, citing the sociologist Andrew Walker - that in charismatic circles it isn't so much the 'messages' or content decoded or extrapolated from the 'tongues' and prophesies that are important - what's important is that they have these things in the first place as they reinforce and bolster a sense of identity and distinctiveness ...
In the Hokey Cokey case it'd be, 'We are free in the Spirit ... so free that we can risk making fools of ourselves with a Holy Ghost Hokey Cokey ...'
I can see something apparently 'liberating' about that even though it's not my bag.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
We all seem to have come to the conclusion that worship style is fairly unimportant, so perhaps the focus should be less on what our worship leaders provide for us, and more on what we bring to worship. Bringing hearts of stone could be where irreverence really lies.
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I wouldn't say it was unimportant ... simply that there are more important issues, such as the attitude of the heart - as you've identified.
I would still maintain that certain practices can and do lead to irreverence ... and I'd suspect our friends with the Hokey Cokey malarkey to stray into that territory.
Equally, I would suggest that there is a danger of formalism and dryness with some of the more formal and ritualistic traditions ...
There are equal and opposite dangers at both ends of the spectrum.
The only variable, it seems to me, is where we ourselves are prepared to draw the line and that will depend on a whole raft of criteria to do with culture, background, churchmanship etc etc etc.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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S. Bacchus
Shipmate
# 17778
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Posted
My experience would seem to suggest that irreverence is a course of MOTR Anglicanism, on the part of the congregations rather than the clergy (for the most part). Certainly, it sometimes seems that the biggest difference between churches that identify as 'Prayer Book Catholic' and those in the MOTR choral tradition is that in the latter the congregation chat before the service, sit during the Eucharastic prayer, etc; whilst in the former one can reasonably expect something like silence before the service, and people kneel in devotion.
I have been to some very reverent MOTR Anglican services, but they've tended to be smaller affairs, often weekday Eucharists or early-morning BCP services.
It's not a matter of the 'higher the church, the more reverent the people', though. Evangelical Anglicans and Non-conformists also have their own traditions of reverence, and the Church of Scotland in particular could teach most Anglicans a thing or two about it.
If I had to come up with a rule, it would be that reverence stems from a community that prioritizes worship. Its absence is most evident in situations where churchgoing is treated as entirely or predominately a social or musical activity. That's one of the reasons why choral Evensong at King's Cambridge can feel like a concert (and frankly the Eucharist is only a little better), whilst the same music sung at Corpus Christi at St Mary's Bourne Street is clearly part of highly reverent worship. It's the attitude of the congregations that differs. Not that everyone at King's just comes for the music, but enough people do to shift the balance.
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'It's not that simple. I won't have it to be that simple'.
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I would still maintain that certain practices can and do lead to irreverence ... and I'd suspect our friends with the Hokey Cokey malarkey to stray into that territory.
But you haven't really explained why. That's what I'm trying to get at.
I thought that inauthenticity was your issue, but that doesn't quite seem to be the whole story. We've put mere snobbery aside. Maybe you're concerned that manipulative worship is irreverent? I tend to feel that all worship is manipulative in some way, but no doubt some forms, whether positive or negative, have a more dramatic outcome than others.
Some commentators do highlight the theological problems inherent in a certain kind of revivalistic religion and their arguments are interesting and persuasive. But theological problems are two a penny in Christianity, so I'm not sure why these are more 'irreverent' than any other.
Irreverence is described in The Free Dictionary as
1. Lack of reverence [which is a feeling of profound awe and respect and often love; veneration] or due respect.
2. A disrespectful act or remark.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/irreverence
Somehow this doesn't seem particularly relevant to what we're talking about here.
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South Coast Kevin
Shipmate
# 16130
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Posted
I suppose if a church's services were always like in that Hokey Cokey clip then that would strike me as irreverent - with the lack of acknowledgement of God's call to turn away from wrongdoing and live a holy life.
But if some services have that sense of unrestrained joy and (apparent) freedom and others have a sense of awe and humility, that would seem fine to me.
Otherwise are we just using 'irreverent' to mean a practice that we personally find embarrassing?
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My blog - wondering about Christianity in the 21st century, chess, music, politics and other bits and bobs.
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leo
Shipmate
# 1458
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by S. Bacchus:
My experience would seem to suggest that irreverence is a course of MOTR Anglicanism, on the part of the congregations rather than the clergy (for the most part). Certainly, it sometimes seems that the biggest difference between churches that identify as 'Prayer Book Catholic' and those in the MOTR choral tradition is that in the latter the congregation chat before the service, sit during the Eucharastic prayer, etc; whilst in the former one can reasonably expect something like silence before the service, and people kneel in devotion.
I share your misgivings about chatting and sitting BUT how far back goes your experience.
'Prayer Book Catholic' is a label that died out in the mid 1970s, given that the 1662 BCP is rarely used these days.
PBC churches have morphed into AffCath churches.
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I think the issue I have with the Hokey Cokey example is the impression it gives that the Holy Spirit is some kind of impersonal faith-force that is there to 'zap' us on demand ...
Rather like some kind of impersonal electric current or 'Force' (as in 'The Force be with you') rather than the Third Person of the Trinity - God the Holy Spirit ...
That's where the irreverence comes in ... coupled with the jokiness, which isn't wrong in and of itself - as Jengie Jon observed, it's fine to laugh ourselves, not take ourselves too seriously - but which 'jars' somewhat in this context.
Sure, I'm happy to acknowledge a certain amount of prejudice against groups like that - partly because I've been involved with them myself and I know how the cues and the suggestibility works ...
If someone posted a clip of a less 'outrageous' charismatic service I wouldn't object to the same extent. I may actually enjoy it to some extent. Or I might say, 'Well, that's no longer my bag particularly, I've been there, done that ... but I don't find it particularly irreverent either ...'
Does that help/make sense?
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
To me, the Holy Spirit issue might represent theological disagreement or error, but not necessarily theological 'irreverence'. Is asking for greater Holy Spirit power more irreverent than asking for guidance from our 'Heavenly Father', or asking to be a better follower of Jesus? Each one of these requests seems to target one aspect of the Godhead rather than all three at the same time, so if one is irreverent so should they all be, presumably.
As for jokes, we all have our own personal taste, true. If good taste is in the eye of the beholder perhaps the same must be said of irreverence, to some degree. So we're back to subjectivity.
I hope Almighty God himself accepts our various forms of worship.
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I'd say it was both, SvitlanaV2 - both theologically suspect and irreverent in tone.
For a kick-off, it suggests that God the Holy Spirit is at our beck and call ... like some kind of impersonal faith-force or genie.
Ok, I know the same thing could be said about invocations of the Holy Spirit in more sacramental and eucharistic forms of worship - the 'epiclesis' and so on - the invoking of the Holy Spirit to fall upon the elements and 'make' them into the Body and Blood of Christ.
But I'd suggest that this represents a deeper and richer theology, for one thing - and also isn't to be understood in the kind of 'let's pass the Holy Spirit around' kind of way that you sometimes get in some charismatic circles.
Equally, I wouldn't say that asking for more of the Holy Spirit's power is particularly irreverent in and of itself, any more than the other examples of prayer that you've cited to one or other of the Persons of the Godhead, the Blessed Holy Trinity.
But I want I think we see happening here is a kind of 'dismantling' of the integrity of the Trinity and - yes, at the risk of sounding snobbish - a certain dumbing-down and almost mechanistic approach.
What the worship leader, it seems to me, is trying to suggest is that there is a Holy Spirit 'zone' as it were into which we can put our right foot in, our right foot out ... etc.
In charismatic circles, you'll often find tropes and analogies of water and bathing - the river flowing deeper and deeper etc etc as in Ezekiel etc. Which is all very well and good and perfectly biblical. But it seems dislocated from a more holistic understanding and very reductionist ... the work of God the Holy Spirit is reduced to the acquisition of particular gifts and experiences.
I could go on ...
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I don't find any problem at all with the idea of people praying to God the Father, to God the Son or to God the Holy Spirit in an 'individual' way - if we can put it like that - so I don't think anyone is being irreverent if they address their prayers to the Father alone, or to Jesus - without reference to the Holy Spirit explicitly on every single occasion.
No, that's not what I'm getting at. But I would say that one of the safeguards provided by the more traditional liturgies which explicitly invoke and highlight the Trinity is that it guards against an overly Christocentric approach or an overly pneumatic approach or an overly God-the-Father centric approach ...
All that begins to break down in certain forms of charismatic worship and praxis and people can be poorly catechised in this respect or even nominal in their Trinitarianism.
That said, I would maintain that the experience of most charismatics is Trinitarian in nature but that they sometimes lack the vocabulary and theological framework in which to express it.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
You set great store by the ability of liturgies to redeem individuals from the consequences of any defective theology that may be floating around. It's an interesting idea. Maybe it informs worship in almost all the historical churches, but it's hardly ever enunciated.
If you believe that liturgies have this power then I can see how you'd find it disrespectful for a church not to use them. I've never really understood liturgies in this way, although I always remember our organist once saying she appreciated liturgies because they helped her to establish what she didn't believe.
(Of course, you're assuming that the church in the video makes no use of liturgies and their redemptive power. Maybe crazy church dancing and liturgies simply don't go together? I wonder why not. I'm sure they say the Lord's Prayer, if nothing else.)
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
You set great store by the ability of liturgies to redeem individuals from the consequences of any defective theology that may be floating around. It's an interesting idea. Maybe it informs worship in almost all the historical churches, but it's hardly ever enunciated.
If you believe that liturgies have this power then I can see how you'd find it disrespectful for a church not to use them. I've never really understood liturgies in this way, although I always remember our organist once saying she appreciated liturgies because they helped her to establish what she didn't believe.
(Of course, you're assuming that the church in the video makes no use of liturgies and their redemptive power. Maybe crazy church dancing and liturgies simply don't go together? I wonder why not. I'm sure they say the Lord's Prayer, if nothing else.)
I do think that liturgy preserves and conveys sound doctrine - but that's no guarantee, of course, that the people using it are going to be 'sound' or going to believe everything that the liturgies express.
Dr Andrew Walker, the sociologist - a Pentecostal turned Orthodox and a 'Canon Theologian' in the CofE - makes a case for this in his book 'Telling the Story'. I agree with him - with some caveats.
As to whether this group uses the Lord's Prayer ... my experience of independent charismatic groups and even of some Baptists suggests that collective use of the Lord's Prayer in a liturgical sense is rarely found in these quarters.
They would tend to regard it as a 'pattern' or model for prayer rather than something that people recite together during a service - of course, it can be both ...
Both/and not either/or ...
But these types of churches are rarely both/and ... on any issue.
I didn't say that non-use of set liturgy was irreverent in-and-of itself - far from it. I have clearly stated that I don't believe Salvation Army worship to be 'irreverent' in any way and that won't correspond to the kind of set forms and patterns familiar to those of a more liturgical or sacramental inclination.
What I am saying, though, is that the further we remove ourselves from the 'historic tradition' - of which liturgy forms a part - then the more likely we are to get into whacky forms of worship that can indeed be irreverent.
I wouldn't expect the worship at Jengie Jon's church to be irreverent, for instance, because I'd regard it as within the broad mainstream and thrust of a particular tradition ... in her case the Reformed tradition.
Whereas I would suspect the Holy Ghost Hokey Cokey crowd of all many of red-herrings, blind-alleys and dubious innovations ... partly because they don't have the ballast of tradition (in its various forms) to keep things in balance.
Sure, I recognise that you are coming at this from a position within MOTR Methodism where there's been a lack of innovation, risk-taking and openness to change. So you're more likely than I am to cut the Holy Ghost Hokey Cokey crowd some slack.
Tom Smail, the veteran renewalist (from the Reformed tradition, Church of Scotland) said that if we have a whopping big elastic band around our waists which secures us to the central tradition then it doesn't matter what alley-ways and by-ways we explore because the centrifugal force of the elastic band will always pull towards the centre ...
I agree with that, too, but also believe that with some of these more independent and out-there charismatic groups the elastic band will snap and send them spinning off into an outer space of their own subjectivity ...
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I didn't say that non-use of set liturgy was irreverent in-and-of itself - far from it. I have clearly stated that I don't believe Salvation Army worship to be 'irreverent' in any way and that won't correspond to the kind of set forms and patterns familiar to those of a more liturgical or sacramental inclination.
What I am saying, though, is that the further we remove ourselves from the 'historic tradition' - of which liturgy forms a part - then the more likely we are to get into whacky forms of worship that can indeed be irreverent.
I wouldn't expect the worship at Jengie Jon's church to be irreverent, for instance, because I'd regard it as within the broad mainstream and thrust of a particular tradition ... in her case the Reformed tradition.
Whereas I would suspect the Holy Ghost Hokey Cokey crowd of all many of red-herrings, blind-alleys and dubious innovations ... partly because they don't have the ballast of tradition (in its various forms) to keep things in balance.
Sure, I recognise that you are coming at this from a position within MOTR Methodism where there's been a lack of innovation, risk-taking and openness to change. So you're more likely than I am to cut the Holy Ghost Hokey Cokey crowd some slack.
I think many Methodists would look at the Hokey Cokey church dance with horror. But the lay response would be visceral rather than theological. The sense would be that such worship was simply lacking in decorum, and would be irreverent for that basic reason. The existence of some sort of liturgy at another part of the service wouldn't make up for that, although it would clarify what these people supposedly believed.
As you admit, the use of liturgies doesn't guarantee that the average Anglican or Methodist is more theologically 'orthodox' than the average charismatic, or whoever. For this reason, I still find it hard to see any direct connection between the use of liturgies and irreverence. The 'Holy Ghost Hokey Cokey crowd' may well be unorthodox in more dramatic, distasteful and newsworthy ways, but I'm not sure that's worse than the more insidious, restrained kinds of unorthodoxy that you might find in a calm Methodist or CofE environment.
So, my POV would be that the various churches may all be irreverent, but not for quite the same reasons, perhaps. Old age and stability may be as challenging as newness and novelty. If the Salvation Army are currently able to avoid all those challenges maybe that's due to the stage they're in on the church life cycle? Unfortunately, we can't all be in that stage at the same time!
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Well yes, that too. My own reaction to the Hokey Cokey video is a mixture of the visceral and the theological ...
Both/and, rather than either/or.
None of these things exist in a vacuum.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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SvitlanaV2
Shipmate
# 16967
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Both/and, rather than either/or.
This should be your motto!
At the end of the day, the issue of irreverence in other people's churches should be between them and God.
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
It is my motto ...
At the same time, though, I do think there are non-negotiables. I'm not a relativist.
Of course how people worship and whether it's 'irreverent' or not is between them and God - I've never said otherwise ...
I rather suspect that I might have been among those who tut-tutted when David danced before the Lord clad only in his ephod ...
I'm more than happy to accept the guilt of that charge ...
But it doesn't mean that I believe all forms of activity in churches to be equally 'valid'.
Nor does it mean that I'd expect the Good Lord to give those of us who are narked by the Hokey Cokey shenanigans a thick-ear and a dusting down whilst he applauds their spontaneous show of emotion and due praise ...
To their own Master they stand or fall - but that doesn't mean that I - or anyone else - aren't within our rights to consider the Hokey Cokey nonsense to be irreverent at best and downright dangerous at worst ...
Poor theology leads to poor practice. Poor practice leads to poor theology.
Both/and ...
![[Biased]](wink.gif) ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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