Welcome to the blog, friends from the 2011 Inner Journey spiritual disciplines retreat! What a great time. I loved spending a weekend in worship with you all.

Below is the resource list I mentioned at the retreat for practicing prayer and the daily offices.

Click on any title to view that book at Amazon.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn & Wintertime	The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime
The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime	The Divine Hours: Pocket Edition
Celtic Daily Prayer	Prayers Across the Centuries
Mosaic Bible Imi. Leather	Mosaic Bible Hardcover

(click the pics for larger versions)

Especially if you aren’t used to working with lighting, it’s easy to default to traditional methods of changing the look of your stage. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes building a set, repainting walls, or working with huge yardages of fabric can be exactly the thing, and the result can look really cool. On the other hand, that can also cost a lot of money, require lots of shopping trips, and consume massive amounts of staff time & volunteer time. One of the best things about lighting is that it allows for major look changes at a fraction of the time and cost.

One of our lighting problems has been the cream-colored chancel wall that backs our stage. It’s roughly the same color as human skin, so when we tried to light up people’s faces with the par cars far above the stage, the light spill on the wall would work against us, making everyone’s faces blend in to a cream-colored mess. For us, the nontraditional answer was to light the chancel differently.

The patterns on the back wall in the pictures above (and in the previous post about Easter) were made by putting easily-changeable gobos (metal disc patterns) in two ellipsoidal lights mounted on our back wall. The colors you see in the pics are readily available gels inserted in frames mounted to the lights. Especially if you buy used equipment, it’s not particularly expensive or difficult to get looks like the ones above. If you want to give it a shot at your church, I’ll be glad to try to answer any questions you have about equipment, sources, etc.

Some years ago I was on a mission in London. After one of our meetings, another team member came to me and said: “Why don’t you hold out your hands when you sing?”  I have nothing against that practice. There are examples of it in the Bible. It can express something physically of what you feel in your heart. But I could not see why it seemed to matter so much to my friend. So I asked him, “Why should I?” He replied: “Because if you hold out your hands, you’ll receive a blessing from God. He will come close to you and you’ll feel his presence with you”.

He was expressing the view of many: we meet with God as we sing praise to him, especially when we do so in a particular way. The role of musicians and ‘worship leaders’ is to facilitate that encounter. [...]

The Bible never teaches that a feeling can take us into the presence of God. If that had been possible, God would have sent us a musician rather than a saviour. Only Christ can take us into the Most Holy Place in heaven, where we have direct access to the Father through faith in him.

The very common view that ‘worship’ is essentially a time of singing through which we are drawn close to God has a number of harmful consequences….

Based on the rest of the article, I understand what Roberts is trying to say: It is not through music itself that we come closer to God; don’t mistake an emotional buzz for Him. What I think is entirely missing, though (from this article and many others), is a good explanation of how we actually do meet God and draw closer to Him in corporate worship. It’s not all just in my head, is it? Are my emotions playing a smoke-and-mirrors game that tricks me into thinking I worshiped?

Roberts certainly isn’t alone in pointing out the theological problems with thinking that music or specific actions with worship function as a sort of mediator of God’s presence. Plenty of authors past and present have said similar things, and they’re right: sometimes people unthinkingly exalt music to sacramental status and treat it as if it functioned like a means of grace. My friend and pastor, Phil, said it well when he quoted John Calvin: “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” If we don’t pay attention, we’ll start turning any good gift into an idol, and music is no exception.

But it would be awfully presumptive for us to assume that everyone who talks about experiencing God’s presence during worship thinks that the music itself is somehow making that happen. For those of us in churches that are largely nonliturgical, there is a sense in which our songs perform the function of liturgy. A good set of songs can take us on a corporate journey of praise, thanks, confession, repentance, forgiveness, and celebration. Passages like James 4:6-10 and Jeremiah 29:12-13 make it clear that God does indeed respond to us as we seek him in those ways. God doesn’t respond to our songs as such; he responds to the acts of worship that occur as we intend a song, making its words our words and its intentions our intentions.

I think it makes sense to say that singing functions not as a mediator or a sacrament, but as a concentrated setting for corporate spiritual practices. It is confession, or prayer, or praise, set to music. Singing—like every other spiritual practice—is not about manipulating God or hooking up to a special “worship grace spout” through which He pours Himself out to us. God does not require us to perform some action in order to experience His presence. He is always pouring Himself out to us, but we are seldom paying attention. It’s like Annie Dillard wrote: “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

Sure, worship singing functions vertically as praise to God and horizontally as encouragement to each other (as Roberts says in his article), but that is only part of the story. We should not ignore the fact that it also functions cohesively and inwardly. Cohesively, it acts like liturgy by allowing us to approach God together, with shared language and intentions. Inwardly, it acts by helping us “sit in the dark” and become undistracted enough to be aware of the presence and action of God that is already all around us.

Maybe Roberts is right in saying that worship is not a “time of singing through which we are drawn close to God,” but it fits with both scripture and experience to say that singing can be a time of worship during which we draw close to God—and He responds by drawing close to us as He promises.

There were several threads which ran through the conference, but the one that was most transformational for me was this, stated most succinctly by author Andrew Klavan: “A storyteller who doesn’t have the integrity to face the depth of the world’s darkness will not have the authority to lead people to the Light.” Not only writers are storytellers, of course. All art—all good art, anyway—tells a story. A song, a painting, or a film can tell a story. The structure of a worship gathering can tell a story, as can the elements within it.

The irony is that while Christians possess the greatest story of all time, much of the art perpetrated by evangelicals over the past hundred years or so has been, well, bad. I’m not even talking about Precious Moments figurines and Thomas Kinkade paintings. Everyone loves to hate on that stuff, but that’s because it’s easy and relatively safe for us to take potshots at Precious Moments. It is harder to talk about our churches. It hits closer to home and upsets more people when we evaluate what we hear, see, and sing every Sunday and find it wanting.

Often this shows up in our willingness to speak about and represent the scent of yesterday’s decay, that area we have conquered, but not to face honestly our own continuing darkness and struggle. As Dan Allender said at Story, our lives are not linear. They do not run cleanly from death to life, from darkness to light. Until the revealing of the salvation yet to come (as Peter would say), we are messy saints indeed, wrestling and writhing in Paul’s Romans 7 agony of the in-between. Even in Romans 8, with all of its beautiful freedom from condemnation, Paul states that creation continues to groan with the pangs of childbirth, and it will do so until Jesus makes all things new.

Never should our art revel in darkness. At the same time, we cannot ignore it or dishonestly whitewash it. The world is messed up. Everyone knows it. Especially in the suburbs, we spend our lives trying to avoid that mess and provide safe, healthy environments for ourselves and our families, but some things are more important than safety. I’m not advocating that we all move to Darfur and listen to death metal. I’m just saying that I believe Klavan is right: Our art—our films, our stories, our songs, our sermons—must be honest about the continuing battle that rages in us and in the world. We have nothing to fear from the truth; God owns it.

A photograph of pure white is about as profound as a blank sheet of paper. A song with no dissonance is cloying. A story with no tension or conflict is tedious. Hope is beautiful precisely because we have not yet received what we long for (see Hebrews 11). Let’s not short-circuit hope in favor of safety. When we have the integrity to face the darkness honestly, we will have the authority to speak love and light into people’s lives—and be believable.

After reading some of the articles, I stopped to see what the Mayo Clinic had to say about burnout. They list a number of risk factors, and at least three of the five are practically built-in to being in ministry, at least in our cultural mileu. The top one? “You identify so strongly with work that you lack a reasonable balance between work and your personal life.” Sound familiar?

The findings have surfaced with ominous regularity over the last few years, and with little notice: Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change jobs if they could.
Taking a Break From the Lord’s Work (NY Times, via Jeremy)

80% of pastors say they have insufficient time with spouse and that ministry has a negative effect on their family.

40% report a serious conflict with a parishioner once a month.

33% say that being in ministry is an outright hazard to their family.

75% report they’ve had significant stress-related crisis at least once in their ministry.

58% of pastors indicate that their spouse needs to work either part time or full time to supplement the family income.

56% of pastors’ wives say they have no close friends.

Pastors who work fewer than 50 hrs/week are 35% more likely to be terminated.

40% of pastors considered leaving the pastorate in the past three months.
Death by Ministry (Eugene Cho, via Phil)

Until the 1920s, the pastor was a cura animarum, the “cure of souls,” or “curate”—a person who cared for souls by helping people locate themselves in God’s greater story. The first step in this work was the pastor’s own attention to her or his soul-care through an intentional focus on her or his personal relationship with the Holy. Yet…seminaries focus on academics and do not train Protestant clergy in spirituality or spiritual formation. At most, even in 2010, only a handful of seminaries require a semester of study in this essential subject.

The rationale for this omission is the assumption…that clergy receive spiritual formation in their home congregations. However, as Ezra Earl Jones…points out, churches are “places for programs” and because of this, pastors themselves “haven’t known the church to be a place of spiritual formation.” As a result of their own poverty in spiritual formation and relationship with God, pastors are not prepared to help people build relationships with God.
Soul Care and the Roots of Clergy Burnout (Anne Dilenschneider)

If you are involved in ministry or have a close friend who is, probably none of this is surprising to you, although it still might disturb you (as it should). My point in sharing these quotations is not to shock anyone or to gain sympathy for pastors; rather, it is to highlight two things: 1) There is clearly something broken. Maybe it is the way many pastors go about their jobs/lives, or what “church” has come to mean in America, or something else we haven’t put a finger on yet—but something is broken. 2) I know it has been said before, but it needs to be said again many times: The statistics above might be common, but they are not normal or right. This is not the abundant life that Jesus intended for us.

Yes, Jesus said that we must take up our cross in order to follow him and that we should expect persecution. Jesus, the apostles, the prophets—they all experienced hardships and suffering. My sneaking suspicion, though, is that the problems described above result less from persecution we face while doing God’s will than from our (collective and individual) choices about priorities, lifestyle, expectations, ministry styles, and church systems. Yes, that’s a loaded statement. No, I’m not going to unpack it right now. But you should.

The fact is that Jesus’ description of the Christ-follower’s life sounds awfully different from our lives:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke on you and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and my load is not hard to carry. (Matthew 11:28-29, NET)

He spoke these words to people who were overwhelmed by the burdens placed on them by their religious systems and religious leaders. Rabbis often spoke of their “yoke”, by which they meant their interpretations of Torah and other Jewish teachings. Jesus’ yoke is easy. How did we make it so hard? What have we done? Jesus regularly took time away for prayer, rest, and spiritual renewal (Luke 5:16). Why do we feel guilty doing this? Because it takes us away from our “job”? What has our job become, anyway?

I know one thing it is not: Our job is not to perpetuate religious structures. It is to lead people to Jesus; which requires a degree of spiritual health, maturity, and margin; which, in turn, requires living out (living in?) the spiritual practices Jesus lived out, as our primary (meaning first, and foremost) responsibility.

If we are to live abundantly under the light burden Jesus describes and fulfill his commission, it’s about time that we started acting like Him instead of like overworked CEOs. When you have a minute, check out the article Soul Care and the Roots of Clergy Burnout and consider its implications for how churches should evaluate success and what we as pastors should consider our primary role/calling.