GraceBlog

UN-LEARNING CHURCH

    When I was in college I actually took a semester of voice lessons. I didn't expect to learn so much!  Getting the “feel” of supporting one’s voice from beneath the lungs and sending the vibrations of the vocal folds not out the neck or mouth, but sending the sound through the face via supportive core muscles. I did sit ups, but not for singing.  I already “knew” how to sing.  Or did I?

    For most of the twenty-plus years I had been singing—singing along with Mitch (I am really that old), with Sheriff John (a west coast children’s show), with the Kingston Trio, with the Beach boys, with Peter, Paul, and Mary, with the Platters, the Drifters, Martha and the Vandellas, Diana Ross and the Supremes.  With the help of crystal radio or transistor I sang along with the many invading British bands of the 60’s, then with John Denver, James Taylor, the Eagles, America, Bread, and The Carpenters.  Hmmm…I even sang along with the show tunes from Oklahoma, South Pacific, Music Man Carousel, Westside Story, then came the fetching lyrics from The Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, Camelot, and Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.  I would even sing along with Barry Manilow, with the Captain & Tennille, and Barbara Streisand (whose passion I loved but whose politics, hmmm...she should just sing).  I sang along with all of it unconsciously and without much discrimination.  I "knew" how to sing.

    In church I “knew” how to sing too.  I sang in a mixed octet called “The Company” (well, it sounded cool back in ’72).  I sang the great hymns of the church, revival hymns, and the new worship music of Cam Floria, Ralph Carmichael, and the Maranatha music emerging from the charismatic ministry of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California.

    But, back to the voice lessons in my twentieth year: my voice teacher said I needed to relax some “interfering muscles.”  I “knew” how to sing, but I was producing the sounds in “a most difficult way,” as she gently put it.  There began a long semester that was short on learning to make sounds and long on unlearning the difficult ways I was producing them.  (In fact, the sounds I was required to make for the sake of proper relaxation and strengthening seemed silly at first—counterintuitive.  I spent most of those fifteen weeks unlearning what I had spent most of my conscious singing life learning to do unconsciously and in a “most difficult way.” 

    Many of us who have grown up in church culture “know” how to “do” church, how to work in the church; we know what’s important, and we know how to get the important things done.  And if we have “done church” long enough in a certain way, those muscles for doing church are very, very strong.  These muscles might be producing church, but producing church in a “most difficult way,” as the gentle voice teacher put it.  Oh, there's so much more to unpack about the "most difficult way" people want to do church in the present culture of spiritual yearning but also institutional wariness.

    For now, just this: every church has muscle and muscles.  Learning to use the appropriate ones while relaxing the others is like kicking a habit you never knew you had.  Sometimes learning begins with un-learning, before we really start to sing.

                    --Larry

TWO VOICES TO THE ORIGINAL...

   James Martin fits the description of the mind Robert Coles has called "secular"--the secular mind.  It's the mind that goes at the great human and eternal predicaments as if "the whole game" is in its hands (that was Bonhoeffer, really).  Martin doesn't think much of religion; he kind of thinks of it on the level of the aesthetic--as enrichment, as accent. Religion, hmmm, religion...when a small number of men were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war "the great forces of morality had nothing to say about it."  Science and scientific sense promise solutions (if only "politicians would listen to the scientists").  So his book is a book of "solutions."   Addressed to a generation of young people he calls the 21C Transition generation, Martin thinks this generation can, if it will, leverage "small, politically achievable actions" that can have powerful corrective results.  He describes how the planet is 1) on an unsustainable and catastrophic course, what is 2) most likely going to happen (intensify) if we do not 3) do the right things (what to do). 

   You don't have to, and I'm not asking you to, agree with his analysis and solutions to these "high momentum trends" that are like huge deep "ocean currents" (not mere surface waves)--trends that threaten the human future.  But if you're a Christian believer, as I am, why not give a listen to the voice you hear in this book?  Let Martin challenge you as a Christian servant living on this same complex "isolated blue planet" suspended in "endless black emptiness."  Give a listen without being put off by this man's go-it-alone "secularity."  Give a listen because you know this is a "visited planet,"  we are not hung in "emptiness," and because you know you are called to trusteeship of a "green beautiful sphere" which has had a Word delivered to it from the outside.  Human destiny is much more interesting than either beyond our reach or in our hands alone.  We have been given hands to do what we're made to do in a world loved and created by a God who acts like Jesus Christ to set the world to rights.   

   This "interesting" place to be is where some of you will recall Dr. N.T. Wright's recent apology for our day, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.  Simply Christian is much more than apology, it's a stirring, sensible call to exuberant missional and evangelical life amid the threatening global momentums (if Martin is right).  Christian believers can be confident (if you were not already confident) in our message and mission. 

   Here are two very different contemporary voices to stir in us again the Original Voice that long ago excited us to "go"--to get on with bringing light to the nations and to the world.

                                                                                          --Larry

Pediatric Parable...

  We make disciples...we release them to follow Christ's call...

  Here’s a real-life parable.

 

   B.J. and I just sent our fourth son off to college.  Yes, we dropped Daniel off at Covenant College on Lookout Mountain, Georgia.  “Sent” is putting it too strongly, however.  You could say he “went.”  The time came for him to get out, move on, go off to college, and pursue his dreams.  Maybe he sensed it was time to go before we did.  And his going wasn’t like we shot him like an arrow to a destination of our choosing.  Rather, we negotiated that with him (as with our other three: Rog, Drew, Bill). After the negotiations, off they went, we got out of the way, we released them. 

 

   The mission of the church has this pediatric sense about it. 

 

   A thriving church is not about programs or tactics or events that "work."  This programmatic way of thinking believes certain programs and tactics are the elixir of a healthy, strong, and growing church. Instead, a thriving church has a focus and an attitude—call it a "spirit" that works, or call it an "atmosphere" that works.  It works because everyone knows—from leadership, to pastor, to member, to staff—what we are about, namely, this "pediatric thing" to grow disciples of Jesus Christ and to release them to whatever Christ calls them to do.

 

   United to Christ by faith in him, members of the church are invited to transformation, to discover their gifts, to discern Christ’s call upon their lives, to be equipped, and then to be released to do what the Spirit of Christ wants them to do.

 

   This simple process is the way an ordinary home rears children: to wake up to life, discover their gifts, discern their calling in life, equip themselves for that calling, and be set loose to do it.  Does all this sound too simple to say?  Maybe, but how often the simple things are forgotten…in the home and in the church. 

                    --Larry