Hot Sticky Worship Sweat

When I arrived at church on Sunday morning, I had only the vaguest idea what the day would look like.  There was stuff on the schedule, of course.  We had a Youth Mission team headed off to Kentucky who were going to be blessed.  It was a communion sunday.  There was a post-worship Bible study on the docket.

But with the entire region walloped by a massive derecho, none of that was certain.  Communications were critically compromised.  There was no power, and it was the middle of a heat wave.  My phone was a pretty but almost useless brick.   In the few moments the overburdened 3G network had let me in, I'd managed a few emails and texts with our stalwart worship and arts elder, in which we agreed to keep it simple and play it by ear.  Maybe just a prayer, some lemonade, and a sendoff for the Mission team.   We'd see.

I arrived early, wending my way through debris, and stopping at one point to clear a country road of a fifteen foot branch that was blocking most of it.   Things at church were better than I'd expected.  The huge graceful tree sheltering the fellowship hall was undamaged.  The not-quite-as-huge tree next to the manse was also intact.  There was no power, of course, which meant that the sanctuary could have passed for a brick easy-bake oven.

More and more souls arrived, as did the communion elements, followed by more souls.  Though I was ready to do just a prayer, the Spirit felt there for a shortened service.    Chairs formed an impromptu semi-circle in the fellowship hall, which was at least 10 degrees cooler than the sanctuary thanks to the sheltering wings of that old tree.   A bustle of folks snagged stacks of hymnals.  A folding table received the elements.  A lectern slid into place.

And so my wee kirk worshipped, blue bulletins fanning all a-flutter.  The hymns I'd selected were...thank the Maker...all well-known and easily sung, and though we were a cappella, the room filled with strong voices and harmonies.  It was hot, but the room was filled with good cheer.

As I preached from the handwritten text I'd recreated by candlelight the night before, the sweet-salty taste of sweat touched my lips.  I lacked the necessary kerchief, so instead of mopping my brow with a South Georgia country pastor flourish at opportune pauses, I just let it run down my face.  The flavor of a good honest sweat was still there as we shared the Lord's Supper, mingling favorably with the sweet of the juice and the slight tang of the sourdough.

Afterwards, the cool of shade trees, watermelon, and lemonade made the lingering a pleasure.

Worship is always better when it's honest, real, and requires a teeny bit of sweat.

Projectors, Images, and Imagination

This last week, a pastor from a church in my area dropped me a message, asking if she might be able to come by my little church and see how we used Powerpoint and our projector in worship.  My predecessor at Poolesville had been really creative in her use of multimedia in worship, and the word had been spread through the old-girl network of pastors in my area that maybe it was a good model for churches thinking about adding visuals to the mix.

I'd made extensive use of multimedia at my prior congregation in worship, integrating visuals, frequently preaching from Powerpoint/Keynote,  and even occasionally streaming a Youtube.  

But to this query, I had to somewhat sheepishly admit that for the last six months I haven't used the projector at all.   It's been used, of course, by members of this small and tech savvy congregation.  Not by me, though.  I've not even been tempted...yet.

Part of that might have been contemporary worship fatigue.  I can get spiritual meaning and uplift from a praise team and big-screen driven worship.  But that's because I'm easy.

I can also find God's presence in a Greek Orthodox service, or in a Catholic Mass.  God is there for me in the High Holy Days at my wife's synagogue, as the soft minor key yearning of the Aveinu Malkeinu rises from the gathered, who rocking and davit like live coral in the sea.   I can find God in silent contemplation, and in the practice of walking meditation that I learned from Buddhist monk Thich Nat Hanh.

Eventually, I'm sure the visual element of worship will be made a part of the life of my community again.  Visual media can be potent as bearers of meaning.  The ferocity of Picasso's Guernica, the deceptively simple depth of Rothko, the languorous intricacy of Klimt, or the fleshy, folded shadows of Rembrandt all speak, yet have no words.  Similarly, the stark mysticism of films like Ron Fricke's koyaanisqatsi or the sublime Baraka, the visceral tonality of Kurosawa, or the voiceless elegance of a game like Journey all give voice to the power of image to convey both emotion and symbolic meaning.

That, and you can show pictures of puppies.  Aawwww!  So kewwwtttt!!!

Where I struggle is with the assumption that you NEED to use the forms of contemporary worship.   Oh, sure, that makes worship familiar.  You need a screen, because, well, we're comfortable with screens.  Screens are how we understand the world.  Our lives are screens.  The screen I'm seeing this appear on as I write it.  The screen you're reading this on.  The big-bahonkus Fahrenheit 451 screen in your rec-room.  The little screen in your pocket that you check compulsively everywhere you go.  If you don't have a screen in front of you, then it's boring.  Old.  Irrelevant.  And if we don't have a screen, we also feel a little lost.  A little anxious.

This bugs me.

It bugs me because I love the written word, and the word spoken.  My teacher was a storyteller, and the idea that we have lost the ability to appreciate a well-woven tapestry of words would speak ill of us as a culture.  It bugs me because while visuals can and do add another creative option to worship, if we become reliant on them, then it feels like we've added nothing.  Worse, that we've somehow regressed, as the post-literate era dazzles us into believing that it is not, in fact, just as prone to distraction and manipulation as the preliterate era.  Worse, even, because at least preliterate humanity knew how to listen and imagine.

Authentic worship can take many forms, and if you must have multimedia to experience it, then you're no less limited than the ardent traditionalist, who sniffs and clucks at any worship that doesn't involve a choir and a hymnal.

I'm interested in being open to the new.  We have to be, if we're to leave space for the voices of the young and the creative.  But I'm also interested in being open to the ancient, to the rituals that still can bear meaning, to the music that reminds us that authentic faith does not begin and end with our moment.

With A Stranger's Ears

As I sat in DC rush-hour traffic on my way back from a visit with a church member yesterday, I found some comfort in listening to one of my more centering iTunes playlists.

Like most folks, I have a variety of lists, each of which serves a different purpose.  For working out, I tend to listen to one of two playlists.  "Wide Rhinestone Lapel" is a collection of 70's disco greats, and makes for great driving cardio background.   "Pomp and Bombast" is a collection of blaring loud overblown martial soundtrack music, the perfect ubermensch aural backdrop for chest presses and squats.

But there are others, for other moments.  "Mighty Dorkus" is a collection of the most delightfully overblown music for those times I'm feeling goofy.  "Mr. Wistful" is for when I'm up for a good cathartic emo wallow.  "Nicotine Cloud" is a collection of less-accessible Tom Waits works, which I mostly use to discipline the children.   "You stop pestering your brother NOW, or I'm putting on Frank's Wild Years again!"

In dense traffic, I make a point of staying away from my "Redneck Rampage" playlist of honky-tonk and southern rock.   Instead, I drop into a playlist called "Golden Radiance," most of which is music that reminds me that Jesus Christ isn't just something I say loudly when someone cuts me off.

Yesterday, I noticed something about much of that music.   A significant minority of that list comes from encounters with Jesus music outside of worship, and in the soundtracks of edgier cinema.  Three of the songs, for example, are drawn from Cohen brothers movies.   From "O Brother, Where Art Thou," there's the sublime Down to the River To Pray.  From the recent and quite solid True Grit, I have a pair of songs, both of which were used to reinforce mis en scene, and which play off the old American hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."

Now, the Cohen brothers, well, they ain't Jesus folk.  In a recent interview, it was clear that they also weren't really practicing Jewish folk, either.   As with so many folks, it was Bar Mitzvah and out for them, pretty much.  

But the aesthetic sensibility they bring to their film-making seems to also give them something of a knack for identifying that which is most sacred or most evocative.  Perhaps it's something in their blood, some genetically ingrained temple-keeper way of knowing that gives them an instinct for the sacred.  Once a Cohen, always a Cohen.

But it may also just be 'cause they know the good when they hear it.

This, I would suggest, is a powerful measure of the value of a piece of Christian music.   If it's musical and aesthetic purchase does not extend beyond the doors of the sanctuary and the hearts of the already-faithful, then it's probably not the best vessel through which to connect to folks who aren't already inside the doors.

Doing Nothing Special for Easter

As I prepare to transition out of my little congregation, and it tries to figure out what the next stage of it's life will look like, certain things in the life of the church are notably and visibly changing.  As the last of the old stalwarts begin to detach themselves from the congregation they've attended for decades, attendance has dipped a bit.  The transition over to a wholly Christian Contemporary style means that the old beloved hymns are just no longer sung, and the old prayers aren't being said, and the fellowship life is young and mostly monogenerational.  There is no place for the old guard in the life of the new church, something that in moments of unpastorly irritation makes me think of the new church in the same way I think of that boy in Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree."

But then I remember, shoot, this is what folks wanted.  They were exhausted.  They were ready to move on.  It was what they hoped for and needed.  So I smack down that grumpy little meme.

Still, with things in this in-between place, and the relationship with the dying 1.0 Korean church functionally nonexistent, Easter this year will be different. 

In previous years, in fact, every year, Easter worship has been a Big Deal.  But the church is, now, just a seed of what will come.  So there'll be no riotous multilingual smorgasbord of skits and songs and choirs and bell choirs.  There simply aren't enough people.  There will be no lilies, or bright white on the parament, because the folks who are here now really couldn't care less about those things.  No-one even knows what a parament is...which is fine, because honestly, I'm not sure Jesus would have known if you asked him.

For this Sunday, what we're doing liturgically is pretty much exactly what we do every Sunday.

There will be some difference, of course.  The music will be Easter-themed.  The sermon will focus on resurrection.  There will be a scaled-back Easter egg hunt for the handful of little ones, because not to do that would be such a serious bummer.  There will be a potluck.  More folks will be wearing ties.

But it's not going to be a particularly unusual day in the worship life of the church.  And perhaps, as the former moderator of the PCUSA recently suggested on his blog, this might not be a bad thing.   Perhaps having folks show up, and telling them, you know...this is what we do every week...well, it might not be a bad thing. Why raise people's expectations?

Then again, I like the extra effort that goes into the special events in the life of the church.  I like the festivals.  There is a spiritual point, I think, in marking certain days as more significant, and in cranking up the rejoicing a notch.

Which is why there's one more thing we're doing this Sunday, oh, about 15 minutes from now. 

It could happen any day of the year, but we're doing it today.  A half-dozen new members are joining, all young, making their commitment and profession of faith before the church.  There's not a bunch of hoopla.  Just hope, and the promise of new life and new gifts and new things in the ministry.

So I guess we are doing something special.  It's hard not to, on a day like today.

Breaking Through the Pastoral Fourth Wall

Over the last several years, I've been a part of the gradual transition of my worship service. When I started at my church, a-ways back in 2003, we did things in an entirely traditional way. We sang from hymnals. The service followed a stock-standard Presbyterian format. I stood behind the communion table, and preached from a written text whilst wearing my Geneva robes and a stole and some Jesus-bling around my neck.

Things have changed, because they had to change. As our incarnational worship has taken the more contemporary form that our young adult majority church prefers, we no longer sing from the hymnal. We don't have a regular paid accompanist any more, choosing instead to rely on an all-volunteer praise team for a significant part of the liturgy. I ditched my robe and stole a few years back, for all but special occasions. I preach almost exclusively from presentation software.

The basic structure of the worship is the same...but the way we do it and the style in which we approach it is utterly different.

As of this month, as we began the transition to using presentation software to guide the congregation through every element of worship, I no longer even bother sitting behind the table. I am no longer physically separated from the congregation during worship. I'm sitting in the first pew now, next to our lay pastor. He works the sound system. I keep those Keynote slides popping up to lead folks through prayers and praise.

In fact, I think it would be difficult for a new visitor to tell upon entering the sanctuary that I was even the Minister of Word and Sacrament in the house. I'm just another guy in the pews, right up until I pick up the laptop, move to the lectern, and start in on reading the scripture and delivering the message.

I'm not sure how many other pastors do this in my denomination. I'm not sitting up on some throne-like chair coolly surveying those who have gathered to hear the authoritative words I have to deliver from on high. I'm not waiting behind the curtains of the Jesus MegaCenter, ready to come before the adoring throngs as spotlights and fanfares announce my arrival. I'm making myself useful.

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it when we started doing it this way. But honestly, I kinda like it. It gives my role in worship more of a Mark 9:35 feel.

No Worship Today

On a typical February Sunday morning at about this time, I am walking the halls of a cavernous contemporary building with a fistful of bulletins and my keys. I move systematically from room to room, turning on the heat in the library and the kids room and the choir room, in the parlor and the Youth Room. I unlock the secondary doors with my key, then go to the primary entryway and plug in the 16 digit passcode to unlock it. The bulletins get put in place, and I kick on the lights in the sanctuary.

This would all have happened between nine and nine fifteen. But today, I'm at home.

On that same typical Sunday, right about at the instant I'm writing this, I'd be rehearsing my message, thinking about wording and the slide transitions in my Keynote presentation. As a sudden realization of a new and necessary slide popped into my head, I'd drop it in after googling an appropriate jpg. A few minutes from now, I'd do some worshiper recon. I'd check in with the praise leader, pass some pleasantries with an early arriver, and take a quick look to be sure the wireless mike still had juice. I'd set out my laptop and my bible. I'd return to my office to pray and meditate...or to scamper around trying to resolve some last minute problem.

Not today. Today, my little car can go no farther than the end of my driveway. There, a full two feet of snow sits. My neighborhood is utterly impassable, with the exception of full sized four wheel drive vehicles and human beings walking down the tracks those vehicles have left. Beyond my immediate locale, the city itself is floundering, as helpless as a cat tossed into a snow bank. I ain't goin' noplace.

If my church were within a mile or so, I'd walk there. But it isn't. Even our local Jesus MegaCenter, which runs worships with the precision of a Special Ops mission, has canceled all activities for today. So today there will be no service of worship.

Do I miss it? I do, for a variety of reasons. I miss the rhythm of it, the pattern of it, the "time-set-apartness" of it. Lots of folks, particularly amongst my fellow progressives, are fond of saying that anything can be worship. We progs can worship sitting around talking about social justice and Thich Nat Hanh and the Green Party while we drink strong coffee or home-brewed beer. Lots of other folks, mostly evangelical-ish, also like to say that you can be a Christian 24/7. Just keep the contemporary Christian music crankin' on your nano. You can worship sitting on your barcalounger watching Joel Osteen on the TBN at 2 in the morning with a Bible and a Red Bull and a bucket of Double Butter Blast popcorn. It's all worship, baby.

But I'm not sure how true that is. Ritual sometimes gets a bad rap among both the emergent and the contemporary evangelical crowd, but it's a part of human existence for a reason. Patterns of ritual behavior help change our awareness, to set us into a frame of mind that is different from our standard patterns of being. It is those patterns that give us a sense of the sacred and the holy. They signify for us that this time is not normal. That's why we set aside both time and space for worship.

We can do this on our own, of course. We can practice mindfulness, and engage in prayer and patterns of awareness that can change the character and flavor of even the most mundane task. But those rituals are better and stronger when they are not just a reflection of us, but a community. Very few of us are called to a hermit's faith, even though our culture of isolation often drives us into that challenging spiritual place. Even introvert I needs the witness and presence and engagement of others to pull me beyond myself and into a deeper relationship with the One who made me. The ritual that affirms that...well...it just can't happen today.

Instead, I'll find a few moments to pray. I'll stay mindful as I shovel, and as we check in on neighbors, and as I watch the morning sun sparkle a thousand diamonds across the snow. And I'll look forward to next week.

Where Mclean Bible Church Could Use A Little Help

To begin, a caveat. Mclean Bible Church is, by every worldly standard of success, an immense and glorious triumph of a church. My tiny, tiny church hangs on to existence by its fingernails. What MBC does, people want. It is big, prosperous, and diverse, and offers a cornucopia of ministries and services that fully meets the perceived needs of those who attend it's many worships and groups and studies. If you're looking for best practices for building a successful faith organization, you ain't gonna look to the revitalization struggles of Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda. You'd be well advised to look to MBC. They've got a tried and tested business model.

So with full recognition of my utter unworthiness, let me offer up the primary critiques I have following my visit to this great golden Jesus behemoth.

First, Mclean Bible Church is not a community. It is simply too vast to serve that purpose. You are as acquainted with the people around you as you would be at the Multiplex, or as you wend your way through Black Friday crowds at the mall. Observing the behavior of most of the folks in attendance, that's precisely what was going on. There were little clusters of folks who knew one another, but there was no sense of connectedness between the clusters. It's an easy place to disappear, to be both nameless and faceless. That is, quite frankly, the challenge in any megachurch. MBC's leadership knows this, and relentlessly pitches small groups and study groups and ministries to help folks connect to a sub-community within the church. But it is easy, oh so easy, to move through the church like a shadow. Or, more significantly, to have nothing meaningful to do with folks who are different from you or don't share your particular interests. That's a problem in smaller churches too, of course. But a ministry that is intentionally structured around appealing to particular demographic categories or areas of affinity...and provides little opportunity for transforming relationships in the broader life of the church...runs the strong risk of being "diverse" in the way a high school cafeteria is diverse. Or, again, as a mall is diverse.

Second, and this is a matter of aesthetics, MBC's facility really doesn't present like sacred space. It is an unquestionably utilitarian building, and well-designed for it's purpose. But it's also essentially secular in appearance. There is no significant design feature in the building itself that contributes to a sense of being on holy ground, unless you consider Nordstrom to be holy ground. Ultimately, this doesn't bother most folks. Being American and all, we like the practical and the useful and the immediate. You can worship anywhere, and God is present whereever you seek God's presence. It is, as they say, what's inside that counts.

And that brings us to a third and more significant problem.

Mclean Bible Church...in the worship I attended...did a kinda meh job of teaching the Bible. The message wasn't badly delivered, mind you. The full-head-of-silvery-hair pastor who preached (not their iconic senior pastor, but the pastor of one of their satellite campuses) was clearly comfortable and at ease with his delivery. His slice-of-life description of googling an old buddy was very engagingly presented. He spoke clearly and confidently, and with exactly the right level of emotion. He repeated the sermon title catch phrase over and over again, just like yer s'posed to. It did not bite. It was, occasionally, quite uplifting in a motivational speaking kind of way.

But if the message is meant to significantly deepen our understanding of scripture, then..ah..this weren't it.

He was nominally preaching out of the Book of Esther, chapter four. Meaning he never actually read it, but instead meandered through a paraphrase of the text. As he cranked through the message, a few factoids were dropped into the paraphrase.

Like, say, the fact that Mordecai, the uncle who adopts Esther, was a bachelor. He repeated this several times. I've read, studied, and taught Esther, and know it well enough to know that this"fact" does not occur in any translation of the Protestant Bible. It also doesn't ever show up in the expanded and far more entertaining versions of Esther produced by first century Greek-speaking Jews, which we now find preserved in the Catholic Apocrypha. Having done a bit of googling myself afterwards to figure out where on the web this factoid came from, I found that there is within Jewish Talmudic debate a line of speculation that Mordechai might have been single. I found a previous sermon by the senior pastor at MBC that uses the "bachelor uncle" phrase. But the text itself makes no such claim. Um...guys? Aren't you the ones who claim to be sticking to the plain text of scripture? Hellooo?

Or his strange little aside about Vashti, the wife of Ahasuerus in the story. She's the one who gets the boot so that Esther can come on the scene, mostly because she refuses to be paraded like a piece of meat in front of her drunken husband's friends. Our intrepid interpreter suggested...without getting the expected laugh, I might add...that perhaps she would have been more obedient if she'd listened during MBC premarital counseling. Yup. That's gonna endear ya to the ladies. But then again, this is a church that, while diverse in attendance, is run entirely by men.

As we got to the the Necessary Four Bullet Points You Can Take Home With You, things got odder. From the Book of Esther, the pastor told us from four of the big screens that our takeaway is, first and foremost, bullet point number one, that God is Sovereign over our lives. I'm down with that, being Christian and Presbyterian and all. God is the Creator, and my King.

But...from the Book of...Esther? Esther, which famously and completely lacks any reference to God whatsoever? In which no-one prays, and no-one engages in any discernable religious practice? Yeah, I know, God does get referenced in the Veggie Tales version. In fact, I seem to recall the grape playing Mordechai singing a song about God's authority. But last time I checked, that ain't canon.

Esther, read as it actually presents itself, is so lacking in theology that it almost got dropped from the Bible. It was, in fact, the only book that was excluded from the Dead Sea Scroll collection. As it appears in our Bibles, it's a folk tale. It's an entertaining yarn of a gutsy Jewish heroine, but asserting that one of it's primary messages is God's sovereignty is just too much of a stretch. You can certainly read between the lines to make that point. But honestly, if that's a point you want to make, then preach from a text that actually and directly expresses that concept. There are plenty of those. Plenty.

Several of those text snippets were brought to bear as the point was made, but the connection, quite frankly, wasn't either developed or convincing. It's a common approach to scripture in the Bible-believing world, I know. Perhaps that works for most folks. I'm sure most of the thousands of others in the room had no trouble with it. But it's always felt a little Isaiah 28:13 to me.

Outside of the Bend-it-like-Bible-Beckham interpretive approach, there was also something else that I struggled with, a story shared during the message. Let's, for the sake of the Blessed Bullet Points, call it point number four. It was, on the surface, a cute little anecdote about the pastor's wife and son at a Chik-Fil-A. A little girl was acting out in the munchkin habitrail, and bullying/lashing out at their son. The irate wife went and talked to the woman who was in charge of the unruly girl, and discovered that the woman was 1) the grandmother and 2) a Christian. The grandmother, pleased to find a fellow believer, shared then her sorrow that the girl's parents were 1) having problems and, worse yet, 2) unbelievers. Aha! That must be why the girl is a nasty little piece of work. Her parents are unbelievers! Of course they're having problems. If they were like us, well, then things would be fine.

It seemed a strangely graceless and insular little story, one that seemed...to my ears...to speak to the great challenge facing much of Big Church American utilitarian Christianity. Americans come to church so that we can succeed and prosper...which, of course, is the whole point of Christian faith. We come to Jesus so that we can be strong and feel important and better about ourselves. Isn't that what the Apostle Paul taught?

And what better way to feel better about yourself than to know that you're better than others? Marital struggles and brokenness must be something only endured by infidels and practitioners of "inferior" religions.

Honestly, the message wasn't a total fumble. There was some good carpe diem stuff in there. But for me...well...it just came across as a bit too predigested and a bit too simplistic and a bit too smug.

I came away from my Mclean Bible experience in much the same way I came away from my reading of Joel Osteen's "Your Best Life Now." Meaning, I found in it more that was graceful and good than I'd expected. The essential teachings of Jesus were there, up to a point, most likely in enough quantity that lives are being transformed and conformed to His grace. Westboro Baptist it most certainly is not. But while it made for an interesting and very, very different Sunday, I cannot imagine attending a church like Mclean Bible, nor would I use it as a model on which to build ministry.

Ultimately, it felt too conformed to the world. In skillfully using the tools of the marketplace, it has wildly succeeded according to the terms of the marketplace. But...as the early church learned when it conformed itself to the power of the state and reaped worldly prosperity...sometimes that comes with a cost.

What Mclean Bible Church Does Right

Being open to the positive is important, so let's take a look at what MBC does well.

The first moments of my arrival at Mclean Bible surfaced the first thing they do right: parking. They have parking down to a science. They have to. When you're trying to transition thousands of people out of the 9:00 AM service and transition in thousands of people for a 10:45 AM service, things need to go like clockwork. That's some serious believer volume to turn over. I arrived a tick early, so finding a spot was easy. It was a bit of a zoo when I left...I'm not used to sitting in traffic for five minutes just to get out of church...but the whole experience had a "leaving the stadium after the big game" sort of feel. The combination their parking lot volunteers and the law enforcement folks directing traffic for the church out on Route 7 make things work as well as you could reasonably expect.

As I walked into the campus from the two-level parking garage, I noted the next thing they do right: facility. It's highly functional, and very familiar. From the exterior, the building gives off none of the classical visual cues that would make you think "house of worship." Honestly, it looks more like a Nordstrom. When one enters, the interior is instantly familiar to any American. It's like some combination of a Cineplex and a Mall. There are nicely produced displays everywhere. The smell of coffee from the coffee bar fills the air on the lower level. Wending your way upstairs, the large airy lobby has arrays of volunteers sitting behind an elegantly curving information desk. It's like the rental car booths at a nice airport, only nicer. Entering the cavernous primary sanctuary is like entering a theater. It is an immense windowless auditorium, festooned with a half dozen large screens. At the front of the sanctuary, diaphanous scrims were illuminated with simple images of vines. On the walls of sanctuary, crosses were integrated into the sound damping elements. The sanctuary was designed by the same architectural firm that created the Strathmore theater. The firm lists Mclean Bible Church as one of it's "performing arts" clients. It's very well done.

The displays tastefully distributed throughout the building told the story of another MBC skillset: breadth. They do everything. There's a ministry for everyone. There are ministries of service. Ethnic ministries. Cultural ministries. There's a gigantonormous hippity happenin' youth ministry. There are small groups and a "university," there are umpty-zillion support groups and book groups. I suspect they may be lacking a Gay Men's Chorus, but outside of that, there's something for almost everyone. They have a ferociously entrepreneurial approach to ministry...and it clearly succeeds in building up the church.

As I settled into a seat in the upper tiers, I waited for things to begin, and when they did, I discovered the next thing that MBC does right: music. The guitarist who opened up with an acoustic version of a hymn precisely five minutes before the service was really very solid. The praise team that came out to begin the service with several Christian Contemporary tunes was also solid, and not nearly as overbrimming with weepy-emo Jesusness as I'd feared. Unlike many of my Presbyterian comrades, I know this music now. The only song I didn't already know was one that had been written for the church, and it was melodically simple enough that I could follow it even on the practice run-through. CCM is not and will never be my first preference in worship, but I like it well enough, and sang along robustly. It worked.

With the service now cranking into full swing, another MBC strength surfaced: choreography. I'm not talking about dancing, although there was a troupe of multiethnic munchkins who came out and did an It's-A-Small-World-After-Jesus routine that wouldn't have felt out of place at Disney. I mean the seamlessness of the event. Everything worked. The timing of transitions between one element of the service and another was perfect. The transitions between worship leaders was without flaw. The highly complex presentation used to augment the service...which required coordination of varying images across multiple screens...were sharp, seamless and thoroughly professional. MBC openly declares excellence as a primary governing ethic, and it shows throughout their worship. It exudes a sleek competence. As toight as a toiger, as they say.

Related to this focus on excellence is another evident strength: brand identity. The service I attended was running simultaneously with an EXTREEEME youth service in a smaller, 500 seat venue on site. Other services on other campuses in two neighboring counties were also cranking at the same time. But when time comes for the message, it's exactly the same everywhere. Outside of the primary sanctuary, MBC worshippers look up at the big screen at the appointed time, and get the same perfectly produced and packaged message that you'd get at the auditorium in the mothership. It's all MBC...and that's smart branding.

As the service progressed, I looked around at the now-packed sanctuary. Here, I saw yet another strength, one that's a serious kick in the ovaries for progressive Jesus people: diversity. MBC is a poster child for the multiethnic church. The largest group in attendance was Anglo...but just barely. There was a large Asian contingent, many African-Americans, and an impressive array of families that mixed ethnicity. There were young adults, young families, and middle-aged folk. The only group that seemed underrepresented were old white people. Guess we oldliners have to have some niche. It was as diverse as the throng you might see milling about in a mall in a major metropolitan area.

Let's see. Hmmm. Anything else? Possibly...but those are the primary strengths I observed. Next up:

Where Mclean Bible Church Might Need A Little Help.

Christmas Ego

As my congregation lurched and fuddled it's way towards another Christmas Eve service, things felt...well...more complicated than usual. Since I've been at my tiny kirk, our services have been held jointly with the Korean congregation with which we share space. Many years, it's been a great sprawling buffet of a worship, crammed to bustin' with skits and songs and music, all cobbled together at what seems like the last minute. The message I'd deliver would be prepared and delivered jointly with my Korean counterpart, blended and woven together over several sessions of mutual study and preparation. It was a joyously sloppy whirlwind event, a hoaah Jackson Pollack celebration of the Christ child.

This year, though, things going in were messier, and not in a good way. The Korean congregation fell into conflict and imploded catastrophically, and is now in the churchy equivalent of receivership. The mostly Korean young adults who now make up the bulk my still-tiny congregation tended to side with the pastor who has now left, and have a tense relationship with those who remain.

And yet...and yet...we were still to have joint service together.

As I worked to prepare for the service with the retired Korean pastor who is now overseeing the remains of our sister congregation, it became evident that the buffet was going to be a bit leaner this year. No Korean choir. No guest musicians. Even the brilliant pianist who incongruously leads music for the remnant of their congregation required some gentle suasion to participate. From our side, no young adult choir. No bell-choir. No dancing Asian-Santa-girls. Just a small pageant skit. I was ready for this.

What I wasn't ready for was not delivering a Christmas message. While we met to plan, it became clear that for a variety of reasons, the retired Korean pastor expected to deliver the message this Christmas Eve. Not jointly. Not in dialogue. Just him.

I struggled mightily with this. This year has been a hugely hard one for the church. If things don't start trending differently, this could be my last Christmas in this ministry. It's also the service to which my extended family comes every year. And I'm not going to be able to take this opportunity to lead worship? My pride snarled and yanked at the chain.

But as my irritation increased, so too did my irritation with my irritation. It was Christmas Eve, dagnabbit. What possible right did I have to be proprietary or egocentric? It seemed...well...a bit self-absorbed. A bit stunted. A bit small.

I took a spiritual deep breath, and got myself over it.

The service itself was smaller, but both lovely and a bit chaotic, as always. The music was beautiful. The kids in the pageant were endearingly cute. And the message was low key, thoughtful, and on the good side of fine.

iPhone Scripture

In the midst of the whirling chaos of cascading failures that was our worship this last Sunday, I found meself with a conundrum.

As the anthem faded and our Youth/Lay Pastor came up to read the first scripture, I was scrambling to get my MacBook to communicate correctly with the little Dell projector that had been brought in to replace the failed Sony projector. A few tweaks and twiddles were all that needed to happen, and when it was done, things were more or less copacetic, even if the images weren't quite working well. The Keynote was good to go.

With the first reading almost under way, I looked to my right for my old worn well-loved study Bible. It was at that point that I realized that my old worn well-loved study Bible had not accompanied me into the sanctuary. It had remained on my desk in my office as I spent the morning frantically trying to figure out why the church didn't have any heat.

Erk.

Not having memorized the passage for the day, I had...well...forty seconds to find a Bible. I looked around for another Bible, but the extra I'd left behind the lectern for emergencies had somehow wandered off. The bible to my left was in Korean. No dice there.

I now had thirty seven seconds. Do I make a dash for my office? No. Fleeing the sanctuary right before the sermon generally doesn't look..pastoral. Do I wander out into the pews in search of one of the pew bibles? Seemed too random, and most of the bibles were in folk's hands. Do I run over to one of the worshippers, wordlessly snatch their Bible, and scamper back to the lectern, cackling mischievously? Entertaining, but possibly counterproductive.

I fumbled in my pocket for my iPhone, popped it out, and hit Safari. Twenty seven seconds. I called up the bookmarked website of my church. Twenty two seconds. I tapped "Scriptures of the Week." I tapped the link to this week's readings. Fifteen seconds. As the microscopic text appeared on my touchscreen, I touchscrolled down, then did that little unpinchy thing to make the passage legible. All was copacetic, with seven seconds left to spare.

And thus I became one of those hipster pastors who read their Bible verses from an iPhone during worship.

Heart Religion

So the other day, I get e-mail notification of several comments on one of the videos my church puts up on our rather significantly un-viewed YouTube page.  So far, our videos are pretty much for our own consumption.  Just getting more than a dozen views is unusual, so getting three comments in a row was worth me paying some attention.

The video is of our closing praise music session a few weeks back, in which a group of our youth pitched out some Contemporary Christian music.  I'm not the biggest fan of CCM.  It's just a bit too simplistic for my tastes, but it's what my mostly young and mostly Asian congregation prefers/is used to, so I've learned to live with it.  More than live with it.  Sometimes I'm surprised at how much I've come to enjoy and be moved by it.

The commenter, who is apparently a young evangelical Christian woman living in Singapore, was pretty harsh.  Our youth praise team was "lousy."  Their praise was so embarrassingly bad, said our Singaporean sister, that she had to close her eyes, but even then, the music still was terrible.  It was a sign, she thought, that these kids did not have Jesus in their hearts.  Any "unbelievers" who showed up at the service would be so turned off by this flaccid display that they'd never come to Jesus.  This got my back up, for two different reasons.

The first was because it was yet another manifestation of web-based incivility.  It's really, really common for folks to cast aspersions and generally dish out verbal smackdowns to others in e-media.  It's easy.  It's impersonal.  It feels good.   Way I figure it, blog-rants and drive-by-insults make up about 35% of the text on the web, and take up nearly as much bandwidth as the emails from Mrs. General Tunde Babangi asking for help transferring $2.7 million (dollars) from her frozen account at the First National Bank of Icantbelieveyoullfallforthis.

But all that angrily typed bellowing is desperately, hopelessly negative.  Wrong, even, if what Jesus had to say about how we are to treat one another means diddly squat.   So for a Jesus person to do it, particularly to my youth, well, it got my knickers in a bit of a twist.  Pitching aspersions at a group of kids is...well...seriously uncool.  Yeah, they aren't professional.  Things could be better.  But they're trying, dagnabbit. 

I called her out on it, bringing the Bible to bear, and after briefly resisting, she offered up an apology.  That isn't always the result, so I appreciate her willingness to say "sorry" to a total stranger.

The other button that presses for me is the presumption that "real" worship requires emoting.  Yeah, I know, I'm Presbyterian, and of the partially unthawed variety.  We prefer our worships to be the kind of thing that you might encounter in the First Presbyterian Church of Vulcan.  Sermons are logical discourses that examine a fascinating exegetical quandry that only surfaces when you've delved into the Greek.  Footnotes are provided, and in many instances, actually read aloud.  Our music is classical, preferably Bach, because anything from the romantic classical era (Faure?  shudder!) might cause a breakdown in the order of the service.  And as our worship has been carefully planned to run between fifty-eight minutes and 12 seconds and sixty-two minutes and four seconds, any expression of passion might cause a disruption to this well-oiled machine.

That somewhat hyperbolic stereotype is one of the reasons we're not the church brand of choice these days.  People want FEEELING in church, because if you're FEEEELING it, it must be real.  There's some truth to that.  We shouldn't seem bored.  We shouldn't not care or be clinical about our worship.  I struggle with that sometimes myself.  Like this Sunday, when I had nothing going into the worship.  I was dead in the water.  Zero.  I was forcing myself to go through the motions.  But at some point, I realized that the scripture I'd selected and the sermon I prepared were speaking directly to me.  I felt it, and it made the difference.  To me, anyway.  I'm not sure all those closed eyes just meant folks were deep in contemplative prayer.

But emotional affect can be simulated.  It's often simulated, because it's expected.  Just because you're up there bawling like Swaggart or weeping like Tammy Faye or shouting "GAAAAAAAAHD" into the air in your best Shatnerian bellow doesn't mean you're more authentic.  It just means you're a good performer.   Similarly, just because you speak with total conviction about what you're sure is true doesn't mean that you have a clue what you're talking about.  Sarah Palin, anyone?

Really having Jesus "in your heart" goes far deeper than the ephemeral to and fro of our emotional states.  It's a change in our nature, a shift in our sense of purpose.  It engages the entirety of our being.