Churching in a time of "me"

A visit to a large Anglican church in the north west Bible belt of Sydney last Sunday was to say the least a revelation. It was the 10am family service with probably over 200 adults after the children had left, after the initial burst of singing.

Key observations:

• From the structure of the service there was nothing that would have told you that you were in a worshiping community that located itself in the Anglican tradition, no trace of even the most informal of the liturgies from any prayerbook that I am aware of.
• The music was essentially of the Hillsong style - 'praise" characterised by tunes that are not tuneful, that is not easily singable by the congregation and driven by the instrumentalists and vocalists.
• The lyrics were focused on the benefit to"me" of what God had done. In one song almost every line had a reference or I and/or me. The drift of the lyrics while supposedly emphasising the wonderful things that God has done for me, ends up focusing on the "me" as being important and the real focus of what is happening.
• The building had no element of decoration that would have conveyed that you were in a place where people were gathering to celebrate and no artistic expression of the life of the community and its relationship to God, the community and the world.

Questions that came to mind:

• How much is the cultural emphasis on our role as consumers infiltrating our worship?
• In an era in which churches are competing in a marketplace of choice how can we build critical resistance against consumerism and inculcate the characteristics of the beatitudes and the challenge of the call to discipleship and community?
• How do we hand on the traditions of the faith as a challenge and a claim on us rather than a feel good consumer option?

What 'gods' do we worship?

On my waythrough Nicholas Lash's series of lectures "Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God" I kept coming across passages that were provocative and challenging for both those who would call themselves Christians and those who don't.

"Incidentally, if 'gods'are now beings of a particular kind, then christians, Jews, Muslims and athiestsall have this, at least, in common: that none of them believe in gods. (p.10)"

Lash explains:

"For most of our history, then, 'gods' were what people worshipped. I do not mean that people worshipped things called 'gods'; I mean that the word 'god' simply signified whatever it is that someone worships. In other words, the word 'god' worked rather like the way in which the word 'treasure' still does. A treasure is what someone treasures, what someone highly values. And I can only find out what you value by asking you and by observing your behaviour. ... The point is that there is no class of objects known as 'treasures'. ... Valuing is a relationship: treasures are what we value.

Similarly, 'gods' are what people worship, have their hearts ultimately set on. I can only find out what you worship, what your gods are, by asking you and observing your behaviour. And these days it is almost certain that the gods you worship will not be named by you as gods. Most of us are polytheists, inconsistently and confusingly worshipping ourselves, our country, 'freedom', sex or money. There is no class of objects known as 'gods'. Worshipping is a relationship: gods are what we worship." (p.10)

'...those who write so carelessly about other people's 'gods' simply take for granted that the work 'god' names a natural kind, a class of entity. There are bananas, traffic lights, human beings and gods. Or perhpas not: on this account of how the word 'god' works, 'theists' are people who supples the class of gods to have at least one member; 'montheists' are those who maintain that the class has one, and only one, member; and 'atheists' are those who think that, in the real world the class of 'gods' is, like the class of 'unicorns', empty." (p.12)

Each religious tradition is then a school in which we can undergo the learning process of how to speak appropriately and how to worship appropriately, non-idolatrously, in relation to whatever it is that we regard as the mystery of life and the universe.
(Even that is to phrase the matter in a way that would not be agreed on by all traditions)