What Worship Leaders Need Their Pastors to Know: A Call to Theological Leadership in WorshipThis is an article that I have published in the Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies. Introduction: Admitting a Need Worship leaders (of whatever title) might prefer this article to be titled, “What Worship Leaders Wish Their Pastors Knew.” That article gets to dance through all kinds of subjects from the perspective of a worship leader. It already exists, by the way, as a series of excellent and highly recommended blog posts by Bob Kauflin on his website, worshipmatters.com. This article approaches that general idea from the perspective of the needs of the local church. Churches need more from their pastors in worship than a decent working relationship with the so-named worship leaders. Churches need their pastors to understand the nature of their relationship with all the worship ministries—and the worship leaders need that as well. This relationship is vital to a healthy church but misunderstood by many and flatly abused by some. In their defense, many pastors have not been given a proper model for their role in worship, so they do what pastors always do in such situations—make it up as they go. Unfortunately, pastoral training often does not provide the tools necessary for pastors to evaluate their intuitive approach to their worship ministries. They develop an approach to their worship ministries from any number of sources, having a hard enough time deciding if it works to worry if it is right. Consider these analogies:
[Read the rest of this article at jbtsonline.org.]
What Worship Leaders Need Their Pastors to Know: A Call to Theological Leadership in Worship
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By this, I'm referring to the book of Numbers in the Old Testament and a debate that has a long and complicated history. (The debate is not nearly as complicated as that over the definition of the Bible's "inerrancy" but is often used as an example therein.) So let's walk through all of the concerns that some people have with the numbers in the book of Numbers and see what we can make of them. Let's start with the primary numbers in the book--the narrative driver--the census. And let's just start compiling numbers. We start with a list of the adult males eligible for military service in each tribe in chapter 1 (I'll also include the generational census of chapter 26):
The "Problems" with Those NumbersPeople bring up various complaints when it comes to the numbers in Numbers. Although they tend to overlap, I believe they require separate categories.
The Total Population of Israel Is Too Large for This Trip to Make Sense If the potential military force of Israel is 603,550 (not including 22,300 Levites), that would imply that the total population of Israel is greater than 2,000,000 at the time of exodus. The world population is estimated to be 41,000,000 then (of course, nobody really knows); mighty Egypt's being maybe 3,000,000. (Sadly, most ANE groups did not keep census numbers, and if they did, I'm sure we would have the same complaints about them that people have about the Israelite's.) The Roman Census reports between 200,000 and 300,000 between 300 and 100 BC (assumed to mean adult males). Some historians estimate that the Roman Empire was comprised of as many as 65,000,000 in 150 BC; the city of Rome itself may have had 1,250,000 living in it during the time of Augustus (with an extremely high population density). According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the population of Israel/Palestine in 1800 was only 275,000(!). In 1915 it had grown to 690,000. It took the post-WWII immigration to push the population back to 2,000,000 in the 1950s. (Of course, today Israel is in a bit of an overpopulation crisis, having about 9,000,000 people in it with no slowdown of growth). In other words, based on these potential circumstances, some believe that there is no possible way Israel had a population of 2,000,000 at that time and place. Marching Logistics. Moses offered to pass through Edom by means only of the King's Highway (Num 20:14-19; he made the same offer to Sihon king of the Amorites in 21:21). Roads would have been constructed by hand and paid for out of the king's treasury, so they would not have been larger than our highways today! Our 4-lane freeways (with median and shoulder) are about 80 feet wide. Carrying everything they own and being accompanied by lots of livestock (let's use the 4'-wide wagon from American history just as a model/a family of 8 people, 20' in length), let's do the math...20 columns...100,000 per column...8 people per 20 feet...that's a 47 mile column of people, Indeed, even those scholars who don't worry about the possible width of an ancient freeway still come up with a column length of 22 miles. Traveling at 2 miles per hour, it would have taken more than a day just to arrive at or embark from a location, and they would have arrived at most of their destinations before everyone had left camp! (see below). The complaint is that they did not have the technology to maintain control over such an immense procession (particularly if only 2 trumpets are mentioned as the only summoning instruments! see Numbers 10). Greater Nations. I'll address this more in the next section about the military. God told the Israelites that they would encounter greater nations in their exodus (He said this to them multiple times in Deuteronomy, specifying 7: Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, 7:1). That certainly does not have to mean larger in population, but there must have been enough of them to be frightening to a group of 2,000,000. In Numbers 13, when the spies report back on the Canaanites, the 10 say that the people in the land are too great and powerful to be conquered. Each one of those separate groups being too great? That would put the population of the Near East as nearly 1/3 that of the entire world! (Today, the entire Middle East and North Africa contains approximately 6% of the world's population.) Those numbers simply don't make sense. Indeed, some historians put the population of the entire region of Canaan at about 500,000. That would make the largest people groups of the region no more than 50,000. How could a nation of 2,000,000 be afraid of someone 2.5% their size? That would be like America (pop 324,000,000) fearing Switzerland (pop 8,300,000) by virtue of their greatness. The Military Force Is Inconceivably Large A related problem is the simple description of the army. If they had a force of 600,000, how could so many nations have a "greater" army than that? In the passage in Numbers 20 I mentioned above, it says that the Edomites came out with a large and powerful army and scared the Israelites away. Let's dive into that. China produced the first army of 10,000+ around 2000 BC; at that time, an army of 4,000 Uruks was able to completely dominate the entire Near East. Ramses the Great (Egypt) supposedly fielded the first army greater than 100,000 in 1250 BC (this would be after the Exodus; some historians peg Egypt's army at only 20,000 during the Exodus era). Cyrus the Great put 500,000 men on the field at the height of the Persian Empire in 500 BC. The Roman army never exceeded 475,000 men. And yet seven nations in the Ancient Near East would be greater than the 600,000-strong Israelite army. Some Bible readers are skeptical of that. And then let's play that forward. Mighty Jericho was a few acres large--maybe a few thousand people in it when the Israelites attacked. How could that have been so daunting? In the attack on Ai, the death of 36 men was treated as catastrophic and disastrous. That's 0.006 of 1% of the so-called army. There's no way the army could have been so large for that loss of life to have had the effect it had. Then, just a generation later in the time of the judges, Dan could only muster an army of 600 (Judg 18). That's a shrinking of 99% in a generation or two! Were things that bad under the judges, or was the army not that large to begin with? The Campsite Would Be Impossibly Large This concern is similar to the length of the marching column. 2,000,000 people would take up so much space as to make any logistics inconceivable based on the technology of the day. And the modern explanations that point to the population density of large cities is inapplicable because there would be no high-rises or infrastructure! (As an aside that follows the previous argument, the current population density of Israel is less than 1,000/sqmi. For groups like the Hivites and Jebusites [which had far less than 1,000 sqmi in territory] to be rivals in strength to the Israelites, their population density would have to be significantly higher than what it is today in the region, and the technology of the day could not sustain that; remember that God supernaturally provided for Israel). So let's consider another temporary, transient group that can be measured today: refugees. The UN Refugee Agency offers a student activity based on their observations from the refugee crisis in Tanzania in 1996. They pointed out that the world's largest cities have a population density of 145 people/ha (Tokyo), 95 people/ha (NYC), and 69 people/ha (Mexico City). (FYI: ha=hectare; 258 ha/sqmi. In other words Tokyo = 37,410 people/sqmi; NYC = 24,510; Mexico City = 17,802.) The refugee camps they studied had population densities ranging from 14 - 273 people/ha, with two big ones being in the range of 80 people/ha. Of course, their primary exercise is to try to make students imagine living in an area more densely populated than Tokyo without high rises or utilities. Yikes! I found a map from 2013 of a camp just inside the border of Jordan south of Syria which had a large area of 500 people/ha. (If you're at all interested in this topic, there are lots of UN resources. One I found particularly useful gives an overview of the entire process from setup to optimization: http://www.dam.brown.edu/siam/2015/Syrian_Refugee_Camps.pdf.) So let's arbitrarily pick 80 people/ha as a population density, realizing that they would have possessions and livestock, so it would be intensely crowded and uncomfortable. We can round that off to 20,000 people/sqmi, which gives a nice round number of 100 sqmi, or a campsite 10 miles by 10 miles. (Remember, I haven't been an engineer for many years, so I am happy with round numbers.) As you can see from the map below, that would be a very large camp--large enough to encompass multiple cities. (By comparison, Jericho was about 6 acres, or 0.01 sqmi.) (By the way, I understand that the camp would not be a perfect square. If for some reason we get to a point where it makes a difference if one of the sides of the camp is 9 miles wide and another is 11 miles wide, I can be more precise.) With all of the talk stirred up by Black Lives Matter and National Anthem protests and counter-protests (yes, that is a picture from a KISS concert), I think that some evangelical Christians have been caught up in the rhetoric and perhaps lost sight of some of the original questions related to being a citizen of America. In more than a few episodes of debate, it seems fair to say that the role of the "patriot" has been taken by conservative Christians (if you think about it, that is part-and parcel with what "liberal" and "conservative" have come to mean in today's politics). That's not out of step with American history. I recently had the discussion with my son about how the First Great Awakening was the truly galvanizing force behind the American Revolution, and I recently held a lecture explaining the role of Christianity in the Civil War. There hasn't been a whole lot of scholarly work done specifically on Christianity and American patriotism, but I would recommend the books America's God by Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis also by Noll, and A Cautious Patriotism by Gerald Sittser. My purpose here isn't a history lesson, though. I simply want to re-cast the discussion of Christian patriotism in terms that make sense in our current political climate. At this moment, I think 1 Peter 2 is the best place to go.
Peter was writing to a fledgling church in a hostile culture. I take the view that Peter wrote these words either just before or just after Nero blamed the Christians for setting the Great Fire of Rome (64 AD). Nero found Christians good targets because they were disliked in social terms. They would not worship Rome's gods. They would not participate in the Roman pagan festivals. Worst of all, they would not acknowledge Caesar as Lord. They had distanced themselves from Roman society and culture and were feeling the heat therefrom. Peter wrote to encourage them to stay true to their calling because the prize (salvation) was infinitely more precious than anything they could give up on earth. He also wanted them to stay true to their church because they were stronger together.
This passage marks the transition from Peter's introduction (a primer on the purpose of salvation in this life) to his main point (how a Christian should live in a hostile culture). Consequently, they are pretty key to understanding the whole letter. Peter gives a few commands in here:
Think of this as a kind of dictionary article for "Storms." When skimming through my Bible dictionary, I found entries for "wind" and "rain" but not for "storm." Clearly I'm just OCD, but I want to see all of this data in the same article with the entry title "storm, storms." Weather PrimerMy guess is that a lot of people who stumble across this article are somewhat familiar with the weather of the Ancient Near East. If that's the case for you, feel free to skip ahead! Otherwise, here's a brief description of the kind of weather ancient Jews would have been familiar with. For the most part, the region is subtropical with cold winters and hot (dry) summers. The cool wind blows off the Mediterranean from the west, while the hot blast-furnace blows off the desert from the east. The mountainous region along the Jordan provides a natural barrier to all but the most severe phenomena and creates an unstable patch within. The drop in elevation from north to south also creates disparity in weather conditions. The Sea of Galilee is a particularly unique place in that it is surrounded by mountains; cool, dry air sinks down the mountains and meets the milder, wet air on the lake, regularly creating windy and violent conditions. The rainy season is basically October through March when the west winds prevail and the season is much cooler (even cold). Those rains fill the streambeds and cisterns that keep the area live during the dry summers. Rain is scarce in the coldest months of December and January, but snow falls regularly in the higher elevations. The Jordan valley is relatively mild, while the coastal plain is cold and windy. Once April hits, the east wind prevails and things turn terribly dry and hot. Just about all of the vegetation turns brown. At noon, the winds turn from the west. Sometimes they are strong enough to bring enough moisture and cold to create conditions for storms, but very rarely. Temperatures in the southern part of the region can stay about 90 for weeks. Harvest was influenced by weather conditions. Olives were harvested from late September to early November; barley from April to May; wheat from May to June; summer fruits from August to September. Harvest generally took place during the dry season. There are obviously going to be many different words related to a storm found in the Bible.
To the American church’s never-ending (and appropriate) obsession with worship renewal, Jamie Smith’s Cultural Liturgies series adds some interesting breadth and depth. Believing that the Christian faith is more than “a set of ideas, principles, claims and propositions that are known and believed,” Smith calls on church leaders to step beyond the categories of form and content to see worship as the thick, formative practices through which churches make and become disciples of Jesus Christ. Rather than isolate the intellect in Christian “disciple education,” Smith sees the whole experience of Christian worship as the necessary counter to the cultural liturgies of consumption and hedonism in which we are immersed every day. He uses words such as “formation” and “imagination” and “gut” and “native” and “second nature” and “habit” to encourage us to think beyond the didactic model of worship used in so many evangelical churches. He wants church leaders to approach Christian formation from a new perspective that “understands human persons as embodied actors rather than merely thinking things; prioritizes practices rather than ideas as the site of challenge and resistance; looks at cultural practices and institutions through the lens of worship or liturgy.” Those principles are best engaged in corporate worship.
Within my own, Baptist, context, “Worship has not traditionally been one of the strengths of Baptist local church practice.” Worse than this, “the denomination which gives its ministers maximum freedom in liturgical practices is the same denomination which offers minimum training in liturgical principles.” Indeed, there are some who would assume that Baptists have no liturgical principles let alone the ability to discourse about them, and there are many who think that Baptists will thus always be at a significant disadvantage in all discussions of the church’s worship. That’s serious. And frustrating. And I lived it for more than a decade of full-time music ministry. And that made me think of Robert Webber. I spend a lot of my time trying to explain what it means to be in a Free Church tradition. There is so much church hopping and so little explanation about ecclesiological principles that many people really have no clue what the difference is between, say, a Baptist and a Methodist. And then we do things like this that make things that much harder . . . For a long, long, long, long time, certain churches have required their leaders to wear special clothing that sets them apart from the regular church members and visitors. "That's not a big deal, is it?" you say. After all, most companies out there require employees to wear some kind of uniform. And is there not great value in that? When you walk into a store, you know exactly who to ask for help. When you walk through a public event, you know exactly who is on security. That's good. So, if you were walking through life and had a spiritual question, wouldn't it be helpful if you could quickly identify an "expert"? Clericals and VestmentsObviously, some people think the answer to that question should be yes. To make that identification, there has evolved a style of dress unique to clergy: clericals (which clergy wear out and about) and vestments (which clergy wear in church services). This goes way back before Judaism, where Egyptian priests wore special robes. This should only make sense in every culture where priests are expected to perform sacred, ritual duties that would have a lot of rules attached to them as to how to perform those duties correctly so as not to offend the associated god. Jews, who served the One True God, were also given rules about priestly attire and purification for the time that they would spend either in the presence of God (with the various offerings) or in the service of God (with the various sacrifices). But with the first exile and destruction of the temple and subsequent rise of the synagogue, a new class of priests arose, regularly populated by Pharisees. Modern Christians tend to cast Pharisees as a caricature, but in this area the truth seems to be that they indeed had a very elaborate system of dress. Everything from the tie of their sandals to the cut and color of their robes was designed to distinguish them. They had a particular beard trim, special rings and bracelets, and the infamous fringes and tassels. They had multiple layers of clothing all very carefully put together. Pharisees also wore phylacteries all the time. Everything about their attire screamed "Rabbi!" and they received due homage for their vocation. There's a big difference between "important" and "great". I'm not denying that the Foundation series could arguably be the most important science fiction ever written. But when it is set up as the greatest series of all time? That's disappointing (read: lazy). The truth is, the Foundation series really isn't very good. Interesting at points, yes. Groundbreaking to the genre, I guess. Unique, yes. But it's a literary mess filled with mathematical, social, cultural, political, and historical nonsense. It's a sequence of didactic dialogue whose only plot device is a deus ex machina. Er, Seldon ex machina. No, Gaia ex machina. Um, Daneel ex machina? Seriously, that's it. That's all it has. This isn't a Star Wars situation where we're all kind of in on the joke. People take Foundation seriously. People fawn over this series (just Google "greatest science fiction of all time"). I get that we read science fiction to escape and dream, but you have to turn your brain completely off for this reading experience to work. If it had stopped as a series of related short stories written by a 20something Asimov, it would have still been important, and I would be much more positive about it. But, much like Dune, it became caught up in itself and outstayed its reasonability.
For the sake of space, I'm just going to stick with the 5 primary books of the Foundation-era universe: Foundation through Foundation and Earth. I won't complain in the slightest about the retconning (certainly in his combining the universes of Robot and Empire with Foundation). I have no problem with that at all. I'm much more annoyed with the incoherence of the basic elements of his main plot. (And that's not even approaching it as a theist! The theological propositions presumed with impunity and swallowed wholesale are very . . . oy.) I'll divide my review into these categories. The point is to show that these aren't just personal foibles on my part (even as a Christian) but disturbing injections of a troubling worldview that minimizes humanity and shows a real lack of awareness of the process of history and its writing:
The Ridiculous Oversimplification of History One of my favorite old sayings is "For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail." Yes, this approaches chaos theory/butterfly effect, but it is quite applicable. The premise of Foundation seems to be that history can be controlled by manipulating a few people's decisions at a few key moments. Well, let's explain why that idea is ridiculous. The easiest and quickest way to stick chaos theory into Foundation mythology is Edward Lorenz who summarizes, "The present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future." The idea behind chaos theory is that the slightest discrepancies in initial conditions (including simple rounding errors in observation) lead to enormous changes in the outcome. When one adds the "for want of a nail" saying, it then means that any slightest change in any condition along the way would result in catastrophic changes to the outcome. Asimov isn't a fool. He tries to create plausibility for his main plot driver by turning "psychohistory" into a clever mathematic that is based on the largest possible population sample (in his case, billions of humans across the galaxy). Person behavior is unpredictable; crowd behavior is slightly predictable; mob behavior is predictable. Classic sociology (but that's later in this post). It would almost be forgivable if the entire series weren't based on the idea. As we have with just about every Mythbusters episode, my family recorded and watched the three series-end hours (who can watch anything live anymore with all the commercials?). It was a nostalgia tour as much for us as it was for Jamie and Adam. The show began in 2003 when Micah was a toddler, and there's no question that both of our kids got more than a little science enthusiasm from watching it with us. Of course I have my complaints. The show had the occasional burst of bad language (generally bleeped out), and there were more than a few episodes we didn't let our kids watch because of the adult nature of the myth (but they never billed it as a kids show). Other people have written very nice eulogies of the show, so I just want to share a few lists of things from this show that might encourage you to watch a few segments on YouTube. Also, it helps me remember the things I think I want to remember. The Most Interesting Things I LearnedWhile we can say that the series got more and more gratuitous as the seasons went on (as the obvious myths had been tested and viral videos became a staple), the truth is that Mythbusters gave us regular doses of practical and interesting science. Here are some of the things I learned over the years that I'm glad I know.
2003
If you're at all interested in John Bunyan or William Kiffin or would like to understand what the open-membership debate is really about, I direct you to my article . . . Revisiting an Old Debate between John Bunyan and William KiffinBaptists in America have very strong feelings about the conditions for church membership. In this article, I want to focus on one: believer’s baptism by immersion. My current church constitution lists as a requirement for church membership baptism by immersion on repentance of sin and profession of faith. The same qualification appears in both the Philadelphia and New Hampshire confessions of faith, in Pendleton’s Baptist Church Manual, and in the Baptist Faith and Message. Indeed, many Baptists in America consider believer’s baptism by immersion to be a non-negotiable prerequisite for local church membership—but perhaps not as many as did a generation ago. Some significant Baptist churches have begun accepting members without that requirement, and that trend will certainly continue. Indeed, I broached this subject with some colleagues in Britain, and they were confused by my intention because they have nearly unanimously removed that condition from their constitutions. It is no longer a debate for them. This development raises the question: Should this matter simply go by the wayside, another casualty of the inexorable march toward uniformity (or perhaps pastor fatigue)? I know that my pastor has been through several weeks of this discussion with an individual from a Church of Christ background who is presenting herself for membership. Both my wife and I were confronted (blindsided?) with this matter when, as new Christians, we desired to join a Baptist church for the first time. In America, at least, many churches deal with the matter of “rebaptism” on a regular basis.[2] It is a critical matter worthy of continued attention. To remind us of its importance and perhaps refresh our perspective, I would like to call our attention to one of the first times it was debated publicly in its modern sense—the open-communion debate between seventeenth-century English pastors William Kiffin and John Bunyan—and recast it in the context they considered, as a matter of worship. To Kiffin and Bunyan, the crux of the open-communion debate was whether baptism should be considered an act of individual worship or the church’s worship. They revealed baptism to be a critical intersection of ministry, theology, and worship. Their answers to the question could well inform our understanding of this matter and its significance today. Read the rest of this article on the Artistic Theologian website.
They teach preachers to present their congregations with a choice in each sermon and to make that choice so powerful that no one can ignore it. An effective sermon is one out of which the congregation makes a decision to change; i.e. they've been confronted with a decision that would be too painful to avoid. And they teach preachers to keep those choices simple - either/or if at all possible (the application then comes out of that decision). Make such that the congregation cannot help but see the truth and what they need to do about it.
Most people recognize that Jesus has done just that in what we call the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). But they go to the very end of the Sermon for validation - "choose between the narrow gate and the wide gate" - as if that's where Jesus presents us with His "invitation." What I'm going to suggest is that we look at the entire Sermon on the Mount as one long presentation of a choice (the same choice). This approach will help us understand some of the harder teachings in the Sermon, and it will keep us from missing Jesus' point. But first, a little context. Matthew organized his Gospel in masterful form. Matthew begins his story of Jesus' ministry with a Sermon that would establish His entire teaching ministry (we know from Mark and Luke that Jesus repeated elements from this Sermon in many different settings; yes, this means I believe that this is a real sermon that really happened). Matthew then follows the Sermon with a tour de force of proof of Jesus' authority so say such monumental things (Matthew 8-9, power over diseases, power over nature, power over demons, power over sin, power over the law, power over death itself). Matthew was a sharp man. With help from the Spirit, he saw the grand patterns in what Jesus was doing and so made certain to put all of that into his Gospel. Likewise, he realized that Jesus' words were organized equally carefully, so he made certain to keep them all together as Jesus delivered them (it's possible, but not necessary, that Matthew heard Jesus give this Sermon). As a result, we cannot take the organization and wording of this Sermon too seriously. Let's start with a very simplified outline of the Sermon (I'm grouping the teachings by form and wording): |
AuthorIf I ever say something in here that doesn't make sense, please ask me to clarify. It always makes sense in my head, but that doesn't necessary mean anything to you . . . Categories
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