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.
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I hate to be the lyrics curmudgeon, but sometimes I just get really bugged by a certain Christian song. It's actually been weeks that I first heard this song, but I've been really busy. It's time to talk "VIP" by Manic Drive. It's a catchy, fun-for-kids kind of song if you haven't heard it (the rapper has some annoying tendencies that make it hard to understand a few words), but I'm not sure it's all that innocent in its core theology. Here is the entire lyric from the air1 website, so it's going to be as close to right as I'll probably find on the internet: Ladies and gents, welcome to the rock show, center spotlight and we watch the stage glow Here's what I think the song is going for: God created every human as a unique and priceless treasure in His image. Jesus Christ died so that every such human would have not only access to God Himself but also have abundant life right here. That's the "VIP treatment" from God. That's a message I want everyone to know because it's true. Every single one of us is of utmost importance to God our Creator. That's not my problem.
My problem is the use of the VIP imagery. |
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