Reggie Kidd's Blog

On Bob Webber's Passing

2007-04-28T12:26:00.000-04:00

On the passing April 27, 2007 of Bob Webber, friend and champion of cross-shaped and historically informed worship, these words from the Book of Common Prayer:

Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world;
in the name of God the Father Almighty who created you;
in the name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you;
in the name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you.
May your rest be this day in peace,
and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.
Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Bob.
Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you,
a sheep of your own fold,
a lamb of your own flock,
a sinner of your own redeeming.
Receive him into the arms of your mercy,
into the blessed rest of everlasting peace,
and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.

Bob died the way he lived: with bold faith. His doctors told him before Christmas that with his pancreatic cancer he probably wouldn't make it through the holidays. Typical of Bob, he had to show them wrong not just by getting through Christmas, but by making it through Easter as well. With thanks to God for a race well run.

Why We Put the “Maundy” Back into Maundy Thursday — Holy Saturday Reflections

2007-04-07T12:53:00.000-04:00

People who know me know that I am a Georges Rouault fanatic. I love his ugly prostitutes, morose clowns, supercilious judges, predatory businessmen, vacuous bourgeoisie, imperious kings — and the here barbaric, there iconic Christ who came for them. Every once in a while a friend will risk a protest, “But his stuff is so sad!”

“Sad?” I reply, “No, Rouault’s vision is a vision of joy.” I love Rouault for the same reason I love two other Frenchmen’s bluesy work: Pascal’s apothegms and Calvin’s theology.

In the Bible things are sweet and beautiful and good for all of two chapters. The rest of the book is colored by the unspeakable ugliness and uncleanness that intrude when Adam & Eve take the Serpent’s bait. From here on, the book is about the re-flowering of a deflowered race.

I love Easter. From Christ’s resurrection, death begins working backward — deaths are undied, treacheries reversed, whores re-virgined, wallflowers dragged onto the dance floor.

But as much as I love Easter, I have a special fondness for the few days before. Days in which we reconnect with the barbaric Christ — who came to best our ugliness by becoming disfigured, our bestiality by “becoming sin,” and our emptiness by hanging in utter nakedness.

In With One Voice I wrote about the way that Good Friday services at Northland (A Church Distributed, in Longwood, FL), the church of my first twelve years here in Central FL, sustained me during those years. Services that simply and starkly rehearsed Jesus’s seven words from the cross, the lights dimming a bit with each saying, until the lights went out with, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Then lights coming up with the Apostles Creed’s, “… and on the third day …” By taking me into Jesus’s holy darkness, those services made his victory over the grave the more palpable to me.

In my five years at Orangewood Presbyterian (Maitland, FL), our senior pastor, Jeff Jakes, has urged this congregation to make our lives about “Christ and his Kingdom — it’s not about us.” It’s been nothing short of astounding to watch people “get it.” These people have built and restored houses. Suburbanites have gone into places of ministry that are not comfortable — and have stayed there. They go to Mexico and Turkey to support in person missionaries they support with their checkbooks. Twice in this past week individuals have told me about how well loved they have been: one who’s critically ill and who has had Orangewood people take him in, another whose marriage is crumbling but who has found church people acting like family. Week after week these folks set up and tear down a gym so it can become a sanctinasium. Week after week they take turns watching each other’s little ones so young moms & dads can worship. Week after week they honor each other’s wildly different tastes in worship music (we don’t do apartheid worship).

Because of the journey we’ve been on, this year we thought our Maundy Thursday service should put the “Maundy” back into Maundy Thursday. “Maundy,” after all, comes from “mandate” — it recalls the “new commandment” Jesus gives his disciples in John 13:34-35 to love one another the way he has loved them. How has he loved them? He’s just shown them, by wrapping himself in a servant’s towel and taken up a servant’s basin to wash their feet (Jn 13:1-17). To make the point as clear as he possibly can he has said, “… so ought you to do for one another” (Jn 13:15).

So, we thought, “Maybe it’s time we do what he told us to do.”

This year the pastors, elders, deacons, and some of the leading women of the church invited the congregation to allow their leadership to wash their feet: tokens of the kind of self-giving love Jesus embodied from incarnation to crucifixion, expressions of the church’s thanks for the lives of footwashing going on in our midst, and tangible urgings to do so all the more.

I’ll carry memories of this service with me for a long time. The most vivid was that of one of our elders — an exceedingly, exceedingly successful businessman who must wear his suit, starched white shirt and power tie in the shower — on his knees (in his suit, starched white shirt and power tie) on the one portion of our floor that was soaking wet because of a leaky basin. I caught him looking into the eyes of one of our middle schoolers, just getting her name so she could be reminded that Jesus loves her personally.

In her blog, Amy Pitsch shares some of her reactions — the discomfort she had to overcome was just like mine when a number of years ago I found myself unexpectedly dragged into my first footwashing.

As I write on Holy Saturday (listening to the Tavener-&-Mahler-&-Penderecki-laced soundtrack to Children of Men) my heart is full of grateful wonder. I marvel at the beautification of the ugly that was played out with basin and towel 2,000 years ago. And I resolve to take up my basin and towel because of the promise that one day the power of humility over pride, of love over hate, of lowliness over haughtiness, will re-light the globe, and the glory of Christ and his Father will outshine the sun itself.

“Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Alleluia! Alleluia!! Alleluia!!!”

"The Eagle and Child" Blogs With One Voice

2007-01-23T06:09:00.000-05:00

There are two levels of writer's hell I've known ... there are probably others, I just haven't been to them yet.

The first level of writer's hell is believing there is stuff in you worth saying that you simply can't get out. I lived in this level for five years writing my dissertation, which finally became Wealth & Beneficence in the Pastoral Epistles. I returned to this level for eight years writing With One Voice.

Somebody asked once, "Doesn't it feel great to hold your own book in your hands?"

Not really. That's simply when you find out about the second level of writer's hell: does anybody besides you think you actually had something worth saying?

Redemption for a writer is experiencing the utter grace of "connecting" with a reader. Unutterably great, inexpressibly humbling is seeing your words take hold in somebody else.

Russell Smith, presbyterian minister, "emergent neo-puritan and a witty epicurean," has been blogging his way through With One Voice of late. Yesterday he got to chapter five, "Jesus's Lament of Abandonment."

Russell "gets it": "The cross confronts us in our own anguish. It reminds us of our own fragility and enables us to worship in the midst of the pain."

For Russell's blog on this and previous chapters, as well as for his observations on everything from ethanol to Halloween, go to Russell's blog site, "The Eagle and Child."

Kudos & thanks, Russell.

Common Grounds: Athanasius, On the Incarnation

2007-01-19T10:57:00.000-05:00

Before Christmas, I offered some preliminary thoughts on the significance of Jesus's incarnation. I've followed those thoughts up with a posting on Athanasius's "On the Incarnation" at my friend Glenn Lucke's online community, Common Grounds. I'd be delighted if you'd go there to read the post. Here's the URL:

http://commongroundsonline.typepad.com/common_grounds_online/2007/01/reggie_kidd_ath.html#more

Oh, did I mention to my weblog friends that With One Voice has gone into its second printing?

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

An Advent Meditation — “Strong Enough to Save, Near Enough to Heal”

2006-12-18T07:25:00.000-05:00

“Why did Jesus Christ have to be God?” the potential ordinand was asked. And, at least so it seemed to me, he muffed it: “It took God to offer perfect obedience.”

Well, no.

The perfect obedience Christ offered for us he offered because he was human. Jesus Christ came as the Last Adam, the “Son of God, the Son of Adam,” who undid in a wilderness and on a cross the harm done in a garden and by the eating of forbidden fruit (see 1 Corinthians 15:45; Romans 5:12-19; and Luke 3:38-4:13). To offer perfect obedience was why Jesus Christ had to be human.

My puzzlement at the potential ordinand’s stumbling over the necessity of our Savior’s divinity sent me back to Robert Webber’s cogent discussion of the incarnation in his Ancient Future Faith. Even as I write, my late-in-life friend battles terminal cancer, and I find myself especially prizing the economy with which he says profound things.

Webber notes that the early church settled on (or perhaps groped towards) two axioms:

One: “only God can save.” The other: “only that which God becomes is healed.”

The first axiom comes from Athanasius (d. 373). “Only God can save” explains our salvation from above. It is a response to those Christologies (e.g., Arianism) that would not allow the full divinity of our Savior. If God himself has not come for us, but merely (as in Arianism) has sent a sub-divine surrogate, then we do not have a champion adequate to the task. As Ezekiel had prophesied: “I myself will shepherd them” (Ezekiel 34:11). Or in Isaiah’s terms: “Behold, the Lord God will come with might, with his arm ruling for him … Like a shepherd he will tend his flock, in his arm he will gather the lambs…” (Isaiah 40:10-11). It was — and had to be — God himself who had taken our humanity to himself, sympathized with us, bled for us, and risen for us. It was the only way to break the yoke of Satan’s oppression, to unbend the warp that the Fall introduced into God’s good creation. The full reclamation of all that was lost in the Garden is guaranteed because, in Christ, God himself has taken the field.

The second axiom was pressed by the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great and the two Gregories — all three younger contemporaries of Athanasius). “Only that which God becomes is healed” explains our salvation from below. It is a response to those Christologies that denied the full humanity of our Savior. If God hasn’t become completely one of us, then we are left not fully reclaimed, not fully redeemed. We needed one who was like us in all things “except sin.” Only such a one could be our High Priest. Only such a one could touch — and in touching, heal — that which is deeply broken and dead in us. So it really was — and really had to be — that it was as one of us that Jesus was born, lived, obeyed, suffered, died, and was raised. And it is as one who has united himself to us that he still intercedes at the right hand of the Father.

This Advent Season I give thanks for that great line of saints in the early church who — taking their bearings especially from John and Paul and the writer to the Hebrews — understood what was at stake in defending and articulating what Chesterton would eventually call “the romance of orthodoxy.”

This Advent Season I give thanks for Robert Webber and his winsome challenge to the postmodern church to reacquaint itself those early orthodox saints who had become so dear to him. If, despite our pleas to the contrary, the Lord should be pleased to add Bob to the great “cloud of witnesses,” we who still remain below can console ourselves in the knowledge that Bob will be in familiar company.

Finally, this Advent Season I give thanks for a fully incarnate Jesus — strong enough to save and near enough to heal.

A Gator Tale & a Reverie on Retaking Dominion

2006-08-24T08:32:00.000-04:00

This was a summer of firsts, including my first (and hopefully not last) gator hunt. It couldn’t have been more fantastic. We went out on the St. Johns River, between Orlando & Titusville, only a half hour away from my house (there are gators everywhere in Central FL ... you know you have to be pretty hardy to live in the subtropics).

So what happens is that we (hunting party of 3, plus 2 guys running the airboat) hit the water at 7:30 this past Tues. night ... it doesn’t get dark till 8:30, when you can start hunting. I’m up front with my harpoon (think: Captain Ahab looking for Moby Dick).

The idea is to get a gator’s reflective eyes in a high powered spotlight, run up on him in the airboat as fast as you can before he can dive under, harpoon him, chase down the buoy connected to the rope connected to the harpoon tip in his back, then reel him in, dispatch him with a 45 caliber “bang stick,” pull him aboard, tape his mouth shut (“just in case”), and take care of his spinal nerve (at which point you assume he’s probably actually dead).

By 9:00, after about 5 or 6 unsuccessful runs, but increasingly good harpoon thrusts (it takes a while to realize you have to thrust the harpoon, not throw it), I’ve harpooned a 7-footer (good size for tasty meat). What a man-rush! Entirely primordial.

Now that my partner’s looking for his gator, I’m able to sit back and enjoy the ride, pretty much enamored with the notion of masculinity. You know: being a hunter-gatherer and all, which, of course, the theologian in me can’t help but put in terms of, “Here’s a whole new dimension of ‘taking dominion’ ... this part of ‘bearing the image of God’ is pretty cool.” (Of course, as we all know, before the Fall, gators frolicked with dogs & children, and in the Peaceable Kingdom species-concord will return, “the gator will lie with the puppy.” Until then, though, we’ve got to do what we can to make the world safe for Fido and “the little ears” — not to mention for joggers).

Back to our gator tale. In such a state of mind, even the cigarette smoke and the “mf this” & “mf that” of Sean & Ray our, um, rustic airboat drivers seem right. Oh, yeah, there’s finally the conversation between Sean & Ray, on the one hand, and our threesome, on the other, during a lull:

SEAN or RAY: So what do you mf-ers do?

BUDDY 1: I’m a firefighter.

BUDDY 2: I edit TV shows about hunting & stuff.

SEAN or RAY: (to me): What about you?

BUDDY 1 or 2: Oh, well, he’s a musician & stuff.

ME: You don’t want to know what I do.

RAY: Really? What?

ME: I train people to minister the gospel.

(general pause)

SEAN: Well, I guess somebody has to.

(Murmers of general agreement, and finally, from somebody, “Let’s go find us one more gator.”)

By 11:00 my partner has his gator too (his is a 6-footer, which should be even tastier than mine ... plus this gator has a beautifully mottled hide). By 11:30 we’re back at camp skinning them. Yeah, skinning them. Normally suburbanites will take their recently-deceased gators to a meat processing plant. But for my buddies (one of whom is a trapper, and both of whom hunt everything, all the time, together [seriously, their conversation is like the nonstop repartee between Raymond’s parents in “Everybody Loves Raymond” ... all I can do all night is offer marriage counseling]) ... where was I? Oh yeah, but for my buddies, skinning is vital to the experience. We figure we have a good head for mounting out of mine, a really fine skin and head from the other, and some excellent meat to divide among us from both (jaw meat’s the best, then tail meat ... leg & just-outside-the-chest-cavity meat is pretty much “grinder” stuff you’d make into jerky & stew).

By 3:30am we’re done ... meat’s on ice, carcass has been returned to nature, my buddies are headed for the showers (they’re camping), and I’m headed home for a couple of hours of sleep. And at 8:00, I’m in class, which I survive with the aid of an “if anything doesn’t sound quite right today...” disclaimer. Decent nap in the afternoon, and since we bagged our limit on the first night, we don’t have to go out for a second. So I’m sound and mannishly contentedly asleep on the couch in front of the Little League World Series by 9:00pm.

It was a good day.

Samurai Testing & Lectionary Devotions

2006-08-22T10:18:00.000-04:00

Apologies to my vast blogosphere readership. In late Spring I managed to break a link at blogger.com, and I couldn’t get it figured out until now. Obviously, not born for a time such as this!

So here comes a series of blogs prompted by this summer’s experiences (they may not all come in a burst, because this week — start up of classes at RTS — is a pretty grueling one).

Samurai Testing. As all my friends know, because I can’t not talk about it, my youngest son and I have been studying a form of Japanese swordsmanship for a little over a year and a half now. Well, we were finally invited to do our first testing this summer, and we both passed. My son did so somewhat more respectably than I. To mix metaphors (well, to mix sports), I hit a single just inside the baseline, while my son hit a double off the wall. Regardless, we’re now both “first rank” (in the U.S., not the Japanese, association), , though that’s not something you’d ever actually mention — which is one reason this whole sword thing is so cool.

The predominant lesson is one I’ve ruminated about before: the “way” of submission I’ve seen in my Scottish-bred, Key West-born sensei. He doesn’t cut corners. He has given himself in humility to learn what his Japanese sensei wants him to know. He has no patience with ‘know it alls” and self-promoters. He’s learned a power of greatness that comes from taking the lowly path. For my son and me, what we learned from testing is something we already knew: testing isn’t the deal — making progress in the art of the sword is.

A second lesson has to do with the cumulative power of little acts of obedience when combined with a master teacher’s powers of observation and timely guidance. It has only been since the spring that the sword thing has become enjoyable. That’s because there have been several “breakthroughs” for me recently — that is, finally “getting it” about certain mechanics of the discipline .

What it’s taken to finally understand things I’d merely heard for months was a combination of my doing the best I could over and over and over again even though I was doing things wrong, and my sensei’s sensing the timely moment when an individualized word could be heard — that is, his recognizing “teachable moments”:

“Throw the tip of the sword as though you were casting a fishing rod, like this….”

“Keep the pad of your left palm on the sword all the time, like this ….”

“On the left-to-right side cut, keep the right wrist cocked, like this….”

At long last, when I do my forms, I don’t feel like a klutz, and when I approach a tatami to cut it, I expect to cut it cleanly and with an angle that’s at least close. I’ve had to do mongo-numerific repetitions, but sensei had to offer timely corrections, otherwise I’d still just be doing things wrong.

By my daily practice, I put myself in the line of fire for illumination. By his attentiveness, my sensei metes out his best instruction when it can be heard. The whole dynamic is, for me, a window into the way God relates to those he’s adopted into his family through Jesus.

Lectionary Devotions. Not unrelated to the above has been my use of the lectionary for personal devotions. For years I’ve done Bible reading on a “read through” basis, trying to get through the whole Bible in English every year and through the Greek NT once a year too. The latter’s been fairly consistent, the former pretty spotty.

A few months ago I changed over to following the Presbyterian Church (USA) lectionary, where the typical daily pattern is: a psalm or two, an Old Testament passage, a paragraph or so from a New Testament epistle, and a Gospel pericope. In recent years, I’ve picked up more friends from a liturgical tradition, and I’ve been intrigued, first, by how much more actual reading of Scripture there is in their Sunday worship services (a topic for another day!), and, second, by what an oddly satisfying thing it seems to be to them to be reading Scripture daily in concert with a vast number of fellow believers around the world. They seem to have a keener sense than I of being caught up in a shared story with a worldwide, heaven-and-earth-transcending communion.

At any rate, I’m giving myself to the daily lectionary readings for now. To facilitate that for myself and anybody else who cares to join in, I’ve posted an RSS link to the daily lectionary on my home page (www.reggiekidd.com).

A few observations.

Every day I have at least one psalm to meditate on (I usually use the chants from the Book of Common Worship). The psalms — especially as sung — sort of force a more personal engagement, and remind me that Scripture promotes doxology and authenticity. Lex canendi, lex credendi. Sing praise. Understanding will follow.

Old Testament stories come in smaller bits. Following the lectionary, I’ll read about half a chapter a day instead of, like, three chapters in the annual “read through” track. That means the stories unfold a bit more leisurely, suspense building from day to day. Tracking Samson’s sorry tale over the course of several days, for instance, is quite a different matter than running through it in a day. You come back to him each morning waiting for him to wake up from his spiritual stupor and ethical torpor — but he doesn’t, until his days on this earth are spent. You see yourself in a mirror, and you cry out, “Lord, have mercy!” The Old Testament has suddenly become more like what it actually is, the poignantly dramatic unfolding of God’s story of his reclamation of this out-of-control planet he nonetheless loves.

No matter what, in the lectionary you always end with a gospel reading — that means (like any good children’s sermon) you always end up with Jesus. In the Protestant tradition that has shaped me, we prize the epistles (especially Paul’s), where the implications of Jesus’s coming — his death, his resurrection, and his guidance via the Holy Spirit — are spelled out. But the actual person — the one Martin Kaehler liked to refer to as the “historic Christ” of the gospel accounts — can go relatively unattended in our tradition.

It takes far more intuition and imagination on your part and far more illuming work from the Holy Spirit’s side, to go daily to the gospel accounts and get your bearings from Jesus. Today, for instance, I was reminded that it isn’t in Scripture as such that “eternal life” resides (we’re a religion “of the book,” so to speak — but the book isn’t the religion); rather, “it is they (the Scriptures) that bear witness to me. And you aren’t willing to come to me to get that life” (John 5:39-40). I realize the gospel writers are no less mediators of the “actual Jesus” than are the epistle writers. Nonetheless, through them I’m being reminded more directly of the meddlesomeness, the “I-won’t-be-refashioned-in-your-likeness”-edness of my Jesus.

“Lord, have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy on me. Amen.”

Colson cites "With One Voice" in BreakPoint

2006-08-02T15:25:00.000-04:00

In what has become a celebrated or infamous (depending on your perspective) “Musical Mush” BreakPoint radio commentary this past February, Prison Fellowship’s Chuck Colson vented his frustration at empty-headed worship music. “I am convinced that much of the music being written for the Church today reflects an unfortunate trend — slipping across the line from worship to entertainment.”

After a few months of interacting with readers’ varied responses, and after giving worship music a little more thought himself, Colson plans to offer two follow up BreakPoint commentaries recently.

In the first (Tuesday, July 11), “A Curmudgeon I Shall Be: Musical Mush Part II,” Colson commends the way many groups are giving older hymn text fresh legs — he mentions Reformed University Fellowship and Indelible Grace in particular.

In the second (Wednesday, July 12), “With One Voice: Musical Mush Part III,” Colson offers thoughts drawn in part from my book With One Voice: Discovering Christ’s Song in Our Worship. In the commentary, he commends contemporary music that is rich in theological content, and urges Christians to seize upon music’s capacity to open people’s imagination to the possibility that what we see is not all there is.

For access to Indelible Grace’s fantastic work, click here.

And for a free download (pdf format) of the chapter of With One Voice that Colson discusses, click here:

Blessings to all. Here’s to peace, unity, and truth in Christ’s church.

Being Quoted on Misquoting Jesus

2006-04-10T08:39:00.000-04:00

We interrupt our normally scheduled programming for this …

I’ve been trying to do a blog a week on “Sanctinasia and Sacred Spaces,” but I got sidetracked a couple of weeks ago … I’ll get back on task, maybe later this week. Meanwhile …

Two weeks ago, the Orlando Sentinel’s senior religion editor, Mark Pinsky (also author of The Gospel according to the Simpsons & The Gospel according to Disney) asked for some comments on UNC/Chapel Hill professor Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), an introduction to New Testament text criticism written for a “Barnes & Noble” readership.

Pinsky’s article, “‘Gospel truth’ is question for author,” including a closing quote from me, appeared a week ago, and is available here. I thought I’d post some further reflections, because Ehrman has brought to a general readership issues that usually only get discussed in the tiniest of circles, and because he does so in such a way as to invite us all to reflect on whether and why the NT documents are worthy of trust.

A Counsel of Despair?

Despite an enviously sensationalist title and subtitle, and despite numerous rhetorical flourishes about how radically scribes’ alterations of the New Testament leave us in doubt about core teachings, Ehrman’s actual analysis isn’t all that world-shaking. It’s not news, for instance. that the traditional ending of Mark (16:9-20) probably wasn’t original, or that the story of the woman caught in adultery likely wasn’t in the original of any of the four gospels.

Without the traditional ending (that is, if Mark 16:8 is the actual last verse), Mark’s gospel closes with a trenchant reader-response question: what are you, gentle reader, going to do with the report of an empty tomb?

Many of the early witnesses to the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 5:53-8:11) marked it as a questionable passage. Nobody knew where it should go, but it had that “ring of truth” to it, so there it lies. That it wasn’t expunged altogether is itself testimony to how hesitant scribes were to tamper with the text.

As it is, or so it seems to me at least, rather than leading to a counsel of despair over “misquoting Jesus,” Ehrman’s book shows how the past couple of centuries of closer analysis of the 5,700 some odd Greek manuscripts and manuscript fragments now available to us enable us more accurately to quote Jesus … and Paul … and John … and the rest of those whose voices lie behind the New Testament. Ehrman doesn’t acknowledge it in this book, but we are infinitely more certain about what the New Testament says than about what any other collection of Greek writings from the ancient world says — precisely because the New Testament was copied so copiously and so carefully.

Copyists as Conservers

Ehrman concedes that for the most part scribes were a conserving — not an innovating — lot. Scribes, he notes, “were intent on ‘conserving’ the textual tradition they were passing on. Their ultimate concern was not to modify the tradition, but to preserve it for themselves and for those who would follow. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited” (p. 177).

In my own estimation, Paul Rodgers’s historical fiction, The Scribes: A Novel About the Early Church (FirstBooks, 2000) better helps us to imagine those conserving intentions. Still, Ehrman recognizes that most changes introduced into the text tradition were accidental — and that the changes that were intentional were attempts to compensate for what were perceived to be mistakes by previous copyists. The alterations were not deliberate attempts to “change the Bible.”

One text that Ehrman’s book forced me to rethink is a verse in the anonymous letter to the Hebrews (chapter 2, verse 9). It’s a subtle matter of seeing Jesus’s death as being “without God” (with a tiny minority of texts) instead of “by God’s grace” (with the vast majority of texts). But that doesn’t put Hebrews’ majoritarian scribes in some idiosyncratic dreamscape or agenda-driven war-room. It simply means the majority, at this point, “heard” or “read” Hebrews more more like the apostle Paul (who tends to stress that Jesus’s death was “by grace”) than like the gospel writer Mark (who has Jesus cry out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). The majority of scribes, it seems, tended to “hear” or “read” Hebrews through Paul’s ears or eyes — but that was understandable in light of the fact that most of them probably thought Paul wrote Hebrews.

This particular scribal change does show how scribes might not be able to block out other biblical texts when they are supposed to be focusing on the task at hand. But it doesn’t betray a massive failure to get God’s Word right on their part nor does it lead to a hopelessly confused situation for us — in fact, the fact that Ehrman can make his case suggests that our ability to come closer to the original text only gets better as time goes by. Thanks, in no small part, to Ehrman’s own work.

Owning Up to Issue-Driven Copying

In previous generations, text critics tended to pay less attention to the social contexts in which scribes worked. By contrast, and commendably, Ehrman tries to understand how social and theological conflicts within churches of the early centuries of the church’s life affected scribes’ work. There’s a prima facia plausibility to his thesis that we should expect textual transmission to be colored by conflicts over the role of women, over how to understand Christianity’s relationship with Judaism, and over how to present the best case for Christianity in a pagan world. The issues are more nuanced and complicated than he presents them (it is not a settled matter, for instance, that Paul did not write 1 Timothy or 1 Corinthians 14:33-36). However, in the main, the facts that we have so many manuscripts to compare with each other, and that we have such finely honed criteria by which to compare them (as Ehrman outlines in as clear a fashion as I’ve ever seen), simply put us in a better position than we’ve ever been in to take those conflicts into account.

Why Our Own Stories Make a Difference

Finally, I deeply appreciate the fact that Ehrman shares with his reader the way his personal story — his wrestling with whether the New Testament is divine or human in origin (see the Sentinel article) — shapes his craftsmanship as a text critic. My story’s a bit different, and that no doubt gives me a different angle on the discipline. (A different angle, as well, on the problem of evil that Pinsky’s article takes up, but that Misquoting Jesus does not. In that regard, briefly, somehow and for reasons it’s difficult for me to discern myself, I find myself less perplexed that evil should exist in God’s good world, than that the Christian narrative about God’s response to the intrusion of evil into his good world — what Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to describe as the “best damn story out there” — should go so largely unattended to and so largely not lived out.) Regardless, it’s time all of us who labor over the biblical texts try better to own up to the way our personal narratives contour our work.

On Sanctinasia & Sacred Spaces, Part 2

2006-03-28T05:30:00.001-05:00

My first post on architecture prompted some thoughtful reflections and great bibliographical recommendations by Roman Catholic theologian Denis McNamara, professor at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in Chicago.

McNamara urges us to think about the space in which we worship in sacramental terms. Where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, McNamara reminds us, Christ is present. Our gathering for worship, thus, “is the very reality which not only signifies, but makes present the otherwise invisible/inaudible reality of Christ’s grace-filled presence. Doing the gathering makes the presence real.” A symbol-rich environment, so it follows, enhances and adorns the meeting between the Creator of matter and sensate creatures who bear his image and whom he loves.

The Reformed heritage out of which I operate and within which I minister has experienced, by contrast, a great deal of ambiguity when it comes to a symbol-rich environment for worship. I want to reflect on that ambiguity, and offer reasons why I think it’s time for the children of the Reformation to be less afraid of the use of materiality in worship.

This is a longer post … please click for page 2 of "On Sanctinasia & Sacred Spaces, Part 2."

On Sanctinasia & Sacred Spaces, Part 1

2006-03-21T06:32:00.000-05:00

For a couple of decades my church (Orangewood Presbyterian, in Maitland, FL) has met in a combined gymnasium, auditorium, sanctuary — I call it a sanctinasium, others call it a gymnatorium. Orangewood is now considering building a new worship space. We’re going to have to decide whether our new space should be more like the old, or whether it should be something altogether different.

I’m inclined toward something different. Maybe worship — that is, worship in the Hebrews 13:15, people-of-God-gathered-for-praise sense — shouldn’t be dependent on a building.

But I don’t know. In our room, I find it to be hard work.

Some love it. For some, it’s stewardship — our multi-purpose and relatively inexpensive building serves the community 24/7. For some it’s worldview — no dichotomy between sacred and secular.

Stewardship is a tricky issue. On the one hand, Jesus had a huge problem with money going to so-called sacred purposes that should have been set aside for the care of parents (Matthew 15:1-5). On the other hand, he commended the lavish anointing of his body for burial with perfume that could have been sold for poor-relief (Matthew 26:6-13).

Worldview is tricky too. Perhaps, indeed, the ever-suspended basketball goals and the bleachers-qua-pews should remind us that to the Lord of Creation and Recreation the line between Sacred and Profane runs through the Incarnation. But my sense is that it doesn’t actually work that way. At Orangewood, we have to work terribly hard against our surroundings to help people “connect” to the story of and the presence of the Incarnate One.

I find myself wondering: could a building that suggests “sacred space” — a place to retreat for a time from recreational sport-space for spiritual refueling and for reflection — possibly actually help us better follow Jesus as a redemptive presence in the world?

Max Weber begins his analysis of the relationship between “the Protestant ethic” and “the spirit of capitalism” by noting the way Calvinism (my theological heritage) championed this world as being a legitimate venue of discipleship. The cobbler and the cleric became spiritual equals, as did merchant and monk.

But Weber ends his analysis with the complaint that in the aftermath of the declaration that “everything is holy,” Calvinism has left us in an "iron cage" where nothing is holy. Weber gave us the converse insight to Dostoevsky’s dictum, “If God is dead, it’s not that people will believe in nothing, but that they will believe in anything.” For Weber, the consequence for believers’ making everything sacred, is that in practice they allow themselves to hold nothing as sacred.

I see it in the ambivalence of congregants in my background to anything that smacks of ritual or mystery. We are non-church, the anti-church.

Generally, American evangelicals (of whom my wing of the Calvinist clan are members) seem to be accustomed to the normal interruption of evangelical worship with a “Meet & Geet” time. Asked, though, to embrace their neighbor as an act of worship with the greeting, “The peace of Christ be with you,” many react, at least initially, as though they’d been asked to pray to Mary or kiss the papal ring. “Hi, how are you,” is OK. “The peace of Christ,” is spooky.

The fact is, in the last few years, we have introduced at Orangewood the passing of the peace, congregational chant, incense as a picture of prayer, anointing for healing. And the overwhelming (though not unanimous) response has been: “Give us more of the mystery. Give us more of the holy.”

As we think about an architecture to house our future worship, I find myself wondering if we should let it look and feel more like, well, a church than a gym or a theatre or a mini-convention center.

I’m wondering if others have been down a similar path. Maybe you’re in — or maybe you’ve been in — a church building where you think the “sacred space” thing has been done well. Or maybe your path — and perspective — are quite different. Regardless, I’d appreciate hearing reflections and questions that will help me refine my own. You’re welcome either to e-mail me (webmaster@reggiekidd.com), or post observations below.

Maybe you have some books to recommend. For what it’s worth, my own imagination is being fired by Michael Crosbie’s two copiously illustrated books, Architecture for the Gods (Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000) and Architecture for the Gods, Book II (Images Publishing, 2002).

Interview — “The Psalms: Their Story Line, Their Warfare, Their Emotions”

2006-02-16T08:53:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, my friend Glenn Lucke interviewed me for his Common Grounds web community. We talked about the story line of the book of Psalms, how Christians should (and shouldn’t) appropriate the war imagery of the Psalms, and how the Psalms help us figure out the place of the emotions in worship.

For the full interview, click here.

"His Love Can Never Fail" — Following Peter Follow His Master

2006-01-20T04:55:00.000-05:00

For our church, 2006 brings a journey through Peter’s First Epistle. It will bring a challenge to follow in the footsteps of the fisherman. Jeff Jakes is calling the series, “Standing Firm.”

Greg Davis calls the image he’s created to introduce the series, “Follow Me.” It recalls, he says, “many of the historic symbols that have come to be associated with the life of the apostle Peter. From his calling after the miraculous catch of fish, to the great pronoucement when Jesus tells him he will be given the keys to the kingdom, his initial resistance to allow Christ to bathe his feet, his denial, his calling to be a shepherd of men by the shore of Galilee, to his death on a cross. The background tower with the broken door suggests the breaking down of the gates of hell.”

Though E.S. Hill’s 1897 hymn “His Love Can Never Fail” is about a path we’re all called to walk, it sounds like Peter’s song especially. I can’t help but hear the lyrics in light of what Jesus told Peter: “‘Truly, truly I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.’ (This he said to show by what death he was to glorify God.) And after this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

Peter’s walk had to have been a walk of this kind of faith — he had to know the only way he could follow Jesus was to know his God could never fail:

I do not ask to see the way my feet will have to tread
but only that my soul may feed upon the Living Bread.
Tis better far that I should walk by faith close to His side.
I may not know the way I go but, oh, I know my God.

His love can never fail. His love can never fail.
My soul is satisfied to know His love can never fail.

And if my feet would go astray they cannot for I know
that Jesus guides my falt’ring steps as joyfully I go.
And though I might not see his face, my faith is strong and clear
that in each hour of sore distress my Savior will be near.

I will not fear, tho’ darkness come abroad o’er all the land,
If I may only feel the touch of His own loving hand.
And tho’ I tremble when I think how weak I am and frail,
my soul is satisfied to know His love can never fail.

We render the song this Sunday to Chris Miner’s new tune, as sung by Derek Webb on the CD, Indelible Grace IV: Beams from Heaven.

All I Want for Christmas -- a new reggiekidd.com

2005-12-27T15:13:00.000-05:00

There are Christmas presents, and there are Christmas presents. There are friends, and there are friends. My friend, Greg Davis (writeclik.com) has designed a new web page for me. It's a superbly gorgeous Christmas present!

Please check out the new With One Voice page at www.reggiekidd.com.

I'm especially excited about offering a "Further Thoughts" page supporting WOV (under the menu item, "About the Book"). As I explain on the "Further Thoughts" page, I expect to keep learning (in no small part, from readers!) about knowing a Savior who sings among and with his people. Thus, the "Further Thoughts" page...

Initial observations there have to do with a few bibliographical matters. I should have mentioned Vern Poythress' 1975 article "Ezra 3, Union with Christ, and Exclusive Psalmody" from the Westminster Theological Journal, when I argued that Jesus fulfills Psalm 22:22 by leading his churches' congregational singing. I also note Charles Drew (a WTS/Phila mate), who's written a fine book about finding Christ in the Old Testament, The Ancient Song. Alas, I didn't come across Charlie's book until after WOV was published.

Finally, Mark Driscoll's cogent remarks about "high, folk, and pop" culture (what I call the voices of "Bach, Bubba, and the Blues Brothers") in his The Radical Reformission prompted me to reflect further on the way I use those categories. I wish I'd come across Driscoll's book before my book was done ... I'd have written a stronger book. He's got some great things to say about wisely embodying the gospel in culture.

For more, go to "Further Thoughts"

Thanks so much to Greg Davis for his labor of love. Please go to his website (www.writeclik.com) and browse through his fantastic art designed to aid congregational worship. We benefit from it each week at Orangewood Presbyterian.

“Dude, Where's My Song?” — Thoughts on Advent, 2005

2005-12-03T09:08:00.000-05:00

Fifteen years ago during the Advent season, my now 17 year old son was rescued from a drowning incident. Ever since, the weeks of Advent have been precious and poignant reminders to me of the rescuing love of God we celebrate at Christmas.

Every Christmas carol, every Christmas wreath — all of it — has charmed me with the grand Story that was being retold.

This Advent, not so much.

This year, Advent has not been easy. It’s been hard to refuse joylessness and to deflect cynics’ anti-capitalist jeremiads.

It’s not that I’m tired (which I am) or burned out (who of us doesn’t feel on the edge of that, all the time?).

No, it’s more like … well … you know, Nietzsche left the faith not because he didn’t believe. He left because he wanted more in which to believe. He left looking for a “nobler god.”

To read the rest of the article click here.

Bach, Bubba, & The Blues Brothers - The Beat Goes On

2005-11-21T05:53:00.000-05:00

It’s been a wacky season. The publication of With One Voice (WOV) has led to opportunities to tell the “singing” side of Jesus’s story — a thrilling and humbling privilege. A grand time too to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I’m especially grateful to folks at St. Paul’s PCA in Winter Park, at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY, and in the Midwest Presbytery of the EPC — for their warm hospitality, gracious spirits, and penetrating questions.

Part of the “singing” side of Jesus’s story is the celebration of his many voices, which, as my friends and readers know, I parse in terms of Bach, Bubba, and the Blues Brothers (Chapters 8-10 of WOV).

Recently and unexpectedly, God allowed me a special hearing of each of those voices.

Bach’s Voice: The Gloriae Dei Cantores
Bubba’s Voice: “Life is Like a Mountain Railroad”
The Blues Brothers’ Voice: U2’s Vertigo Tour

If you want to read more click here.

Incense, a Cross, and Oil: In Service of Prayer, Repentance, and Healing

2005-10-25T06:07:00.000-04:00

We just completed an intriguing trilogy of services at Orangewood Presbyterian Church (Maitland, FL). For me, it was part of a remarkable journey with a church that is unaccustomed to doing worship that is highly symbolic.

(The logic for the series of services we are doing is laid out in a brief article I wrote, entitled Why Matter Matters, and posted at the Orangewood website. Click here.)

What follows is as a long (by weblog standards) description of the three services, the first (10/9/05) concerning incense and prayer, the second (10/16/05) concerning repentance and the Cross, and the third (10/23/05) concerning anointing for healing. For the full article, click here.

"WOV on the Shelf!"

2005-10-07T06:19:00.000-04:00

This is to let my weblog friends know that as of this morning, With One Voice is available for purchase at the RTS/Orlando Bookstore (1231 Reformation Drive, Oviedo, FL) and through the bookstore's online service. The RTS/Orlando Bookstore offers With One Voice for $10.00 (a third off retail), which will surely be the lowest price in the country. Click here to order online.

For amazon.com orders, click below:
With One Voice: Discovering Christ's Song in Our Worship

Thanks to my many friends in Christ who have prayed with me that this under-appreciated part of Jesus's story could be told!

To quote Clement of Alexandria's prayer to Jesus:

"Sing praises, and declare to me God Your Father.
Your story shall save, Your song shall instruct me"
(Exhortation to the Greeks, 11).

“Consider My Servant Job”

2005-09-29T15:34:00.000-04:00

My church’s journey through James converges with the natural disasters that have hit our Gulf Coast neighbors

At Orangewood, where I lead worship, we arrived this past weekend at James 5:10-11, where James points to Job as a teacher of endurance. “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord,” confesses Job when he loses his family to a storm. “It is well, it is well with my soul,” pens Horatio Spafford when his family perishes at sea. As hard as it is to fathom sometimes, the faith that God’s people have sung from Job’s day to Katrina’s and Rita’s is that God is good and faithful and kind, all the time. As Matt and Beth Redman write and as we sang this week:

Blessed be Your name
when the sun’s shining down on me,
when the world’s “all as it should be,”
blessed be Your name.

Blessed be Your name
on the road marked with suffering,
though there’s pain in the offering,
blessed be Your name.

Especially moving to me were the images that Greg Davis took from William Blake’s The Book of Job, and projected during the service. As Greg explains: “These illustrations visually weave the familiar story of loss and redemption in the life of this great man of the Old Testament. One interesting thing to watch for: In the first illustration of the series, Job is gathered with his family beneath a tree on which hangs a group of musical instruments. Everyone looks very pious and holy, yet detached.

“By the last image, after Job has suffered calamity and restoration, the instruments have been taken down and are now in the hands of the family. The passivity is gone, replaced by an outburst of joy and celebration. Life can sometimes bring great pain, but God’s graciousness lifts us to celebration, even through trial. Such is the mystery of grace.”

WOV Excerpt: "What's the Big Deal about Singing?"

2005-09-22T09:28:00.000-04:00

My friend and weblog maven Glenn Lucke invited me to post an excerpt from With One Voice (which should be on shelves and at amazon by the end of next week) for his blogging community at commongroundsonline.

I invite everybody to go to commongrounds, check out the excerpt, and take time getting to get to know the really fine voices who have a presence there: for example, Carolyn Custis James (saying needful things about women in ministry), Catherine Claire (God's heart is almost as big as hers), Linc Ashby (somebody who gives a d@#$ about the poor), Justin Holcomb (making pomo look wimpy), Drew Trotter (don't even think about offering an opinion about media without checking what Drew thinks first).

Worship Leader Magazine Reviews WOV!

2005-09-09T07:40:00.000-04:00

Publication of my book, With One Voice: Discovering Christ’s Song in Our Worship is about 3 weeks away. Of course, my stomach’s in knots. I was delighted, though, to find the following (excerpted) review in the September 2005 edition of Worship Leader (subscription info is here):

“With the shorthand references of “Bach,” Bubba,” and “the Blues Brothers,” Kidd delineates and compares three types of musical expression: art music, folk music and popular music. His main purpose is to provide an apologetic for accepting and appreciating each of these types as a legitimate vehicle for expressing the worship of God’s people. He builds his argument especially on Psalm 22, where he sees a prophetic description of the ministry of the exalted Christ among His chosen people from all walks of life. Kidd points out that Psalm 22:22 (also quoted in Hebrews 2:12) speaks of the risen Messiah singing in the midst of His people, and his contention is that the most important component of the Church’s song is the commonality of the living Christ actively leading us in our worship, no matter what form the outward musical expression may take. (See James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace [Intervarsity Press]). It is Christ’s song which gives pleasure to the Father and which makes our approach possible and our worship acceptable.

“Kidd is well- and widely-read and draws upon a wide range of sources (ancient, historic and modern; from the Church fathers to current rock lyrics; theology, literature, and art) to help illustrate and defend his call for mutual understanding and acceptance of one another’s worship forms and practices. What Jesus accepts and endorses (according to Psalm 22), let no man despise!

“The book is a rich resource of instruction on many key biblical texts, handled with integrity and skill, yet there is wonderful balance of personal anecdote and exhortation as well. Kidd writes with a solid biblical foundation for his arguments, yet at the same time with a warm pastoral heart. His desire and aim is to see God glorified by a riotous diversity of worship expressions lifted up by His redeemed people from “every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revel. 5:9), as well as by the mutual deference and the unity of His people. May it be so!”

May it be so, indeed!

"Hard Times, Come Again No More"

2005-08-29T21:26:00.000-04:00

Stephen Foster normally wrote romantic and sentimental songs, either about lovesick lovers (“I Dream of Jeanie”) or places he could fantasize about because he’d never been there (“Way Down upon the Swanee River”) or rustic people whose troubles were far removed from his own (“Old Black Joe” or “Old Folks at Home”).

But things were different when he wrote “Hard Times, Come Again No More.” In the mid 1850’s Foster’s own Pittsburgh was in the grip of out of control unemployment; cholera one summer killed 400. To help ends meet, the Foster family took into their already crowded home a minister. “Hard Times” reads (and sounds) like a completely different breed of song:

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door
Though their voices are silent their pleading looks will say,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

Out of the blue and if only briefly, Foster saw poor people as his neighbors. Suddenly, their “pleading looks” created a demand for his attention. Their “frail forms fainting at the door” called for companionship — “while we all sup sorrow with the poor.”

For this one song — maybe thanks to that resident minister — Foster heard the voice of the One who said, “I was hungry and you fed me.”

(My favorite version of this song, by the way, is by The Lost Dogs, on their Scenic Routes CD).

From the Beatitudes — A Prayer of Confession

2005-08-23T11:20:00.000-04:00

Lord Jesus, you bless the poor in spirit
and give them the Kingdom.
But we fatten ourselves, as James says, “in the day of slaughter”;
we turn away from those whose physical poverty
reminds us of our true spiritual state,
and we build our own little kingdoms of self.

Kyrie eleison — Lord, have mercy.

You bless those who mourn and you comfort them.
But we flee grief that leads to repentance,
and we seek comfort in possessions and prestige and power.

Kyrie eleison — Lord, have mercy.

You bless the meek, and promise them the earth,
you bless the merciful, and promise them mercy.
But we are far from meek —
we try to make the world our own through pride and self-promotion;
we forget the forgiveness that was won at such cost,
and we hold grudges at the slightest offense.

Kyrie eleison — Lord, have mercy.

You bless those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—
you promise to satisfy their desires.
You bless the pure in heart, and promise that they shall see God.
But we hunger and thirst after everything else:
the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes
and the pride of life;
our hearts are not pure, and so we cannot see you.

Kyrie eleison — Lord, have mercy.

You bless the peacemakers and the persecuted and the reviled—
you call them sons of your Father
and you give them the kingdom of heaven.
But we covet each other’s things and looks and jobs and successes,
and we cultivate friendship with world,
so showing ourselves more fit to be sons of the devil
than heirs of your Kingdom.

Kyrie eleison — Lord, have mercy.

Kyrie eleison — Lord, have mercy.
Christe eleison — Christ, have mercy.
Kyrie eleison — Lord, have mercy.

Amen.

"Get Together" & "The Weight of Glory"

2005-08-08T14:00:00.000-04:00

It may not seem like the most natural choice for a song with which to follow Communion in a service of worship: the Youngbloods’ 1960’s song “Get Together.” But our preaching schedule happens to have brought us to James 4:11-12’s exhortation about not judging one’s neighbor (a litotes for loving one’s neighbor) and to the Lord’s Table at one and the same time.

I remember when I first heard “Get Together” in a coffee shop in Miami in the ‘60’s. (Now it so happens that I became a Christian during that decade —early enough, in fact, in my college years that, well, certain life choices were cut off for me. As a result, my memory of those days is dulled only by the passage of time, not by a “purple haze,” if you get my drift.) What I remember so vividly about that night was how there shot out from this pretty-standard-for-the-time song about Love and Peace (yes, capital “L” and capital “P”) this lightning bolt of a lyric: “When the one who left us here returns for us at last.” (Or was that “One”?)

For me, that line lifted the song into a different realm. Rather like that whiff of the eternal that writer Charles Williams finds in the most mundane of objects: “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.” I saw the Youngbloods’ call to “try to love one another right now” in a whole new light — that of that most dramatic of rescue missions: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” I found myself seeing the song’s call to charity in the light of C. S. Lewis’s musings on the bestowal on my neighbor of “the weight of glory.”

So, I couldn’t help myself this past Lord’s Day. I asked the congregation to sing a song at the close of the Table that, if they had any familiarity at all with, was no doubt not one of worship. But I asked them to sing in view of these words from Lewis:

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. …

And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner — no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat — the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden (C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”).

State of the Union -- Worship at Orangewood PCA, Summer 2005

2005-08-02T08:20:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Worship Planning at DeLeon Springs, July 28, 2005

One day last week, our worship planning team got away to DeLeon Springs State Park (outside Deland, FL) for a morning of pancakes (the park hosts the Old Spanish Sugar Mill Grill where you make your own pancakes on a grill in the middle of your table!) and of “blue skying” the subject of worship.

Looking around the table, I realized it’s not hard to joy in God’s joy in making wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts (and we’re not just talking pancakes here). It’s what English writer Charles Williams liked to call “co-inherence,” or more poetically the “Dance.” As we move toward one another we participate in God’s reintegration of what was torn apart when our original parents moved away from him.

I experience Williams’ “dance of co-inherence” when I submit to the twin facts of my weaknesses being compensated for in others’ strengths and of my strengths being an exact match for their needs. That fact is elegantly on display in our group.

Without Vicki to provide discipline to our vocal team, without Kyle to give overall craftsmanship to our music, without Greg to lend visual beauty, without Chris to find the right spot for sound and light knobs, without Jeff to cheer us and exhort the congregation, what I have to offer is pretty shabby. What I can conceive for worship is only as good as what we can execute.

We talked, well maybe I talked a little more than anybody else, about what’s still missing in our worship at Orangewood, what we/I would like to see us work harder at incorporating. Here’s my list (not in any particular order):

(To keep this post from getting too long I’ve put my explanations on another page. Click here for more on each topic.) If you want to contribute to our ongoing discussion, please follow the link and then come back here to comment (or just e-mail reggie@reggiekidd.com).

A More Frequent Lord’s Supper.
A Richer Visual Aesthetic.
High-Touch Worship for a High-Touch God.
Bach’s Voice.
More Scripture.