Posts Tagged ‘worship’

A minor kerfuffle broke out last week at Reformed Forum thanks to remarks I made during an interview about the history of American Presbyterianism. This subject invariably leads to questions about the historical differences between the OPC and the PCA and how these factor into their current relationship. And discussion of current OPC-PCA relations inevitably brings up the potentially delicate subject of the comity agreement that determines how each denomination should consider the other when planting a congregation. The current policy that guides OPC and PCA church planting endeavors is as follows:

Comity has meant different things to different people. We representatives of the home missions agencies and committees or boards of our denominations resist territorial statements on comity in the light of the social and cultural complexity of North American society and the great spiritual need of our many countrymen who are apart from Jesus Christ. Out of a concern to build the church of Jesus Christ rather than our own denominations and to avoid the appearance of competition, we affirm the following courteous code of behavior to guide our church planting ministries in North America:

1. We will be sensitive to the presence of existing churches and mission ministries of other NAPARC churches and will refrain from enlisting members and take great care in receiving members of those existing ministries.

2. We will communicate with the equivalent or appropriate agency (denominational missions committee or board, presbytery missions or church extension committee, or session) before initiating church planting activities in a community where NAPARC churches or missions ministries exist.

3. We will provide information on at least an annual basis describing progress in our ministries and future plans.

4. We will encourage our regional home missions leadership to develop good working relationships.

I raised concerns about the failure of each side to abide by the terms of the comity agreement. I illustrated my worries by mentioning two cities where conservative Presbyterian churches already existed and the other denomination went ahead anyway with a plant of its own. I did not mention “sheep stealing,” but that was how some interpreted my remarks. Since the PCA is a lot bigger than the OPC, some may have also inferred that I was taking issue more with the PCA than the OPC. Taking members in good standing from another congregation is a legitimate reason to object to a church plant, but not really the one I had in mind when I more or less made an off hand remark about comity agreements and also illustrated the point with examples my fading memory scanned and found.

The difficulties surrounding comity agreements have less to do with the transfer of members between communions than with the state of church planting among conservative Presbyterians. One concern first has to do with the market mentality that seems to go with home missions in the United States, the second with the branding of churches that follows said mentality.

In the good old days, denominations planted churches when a group of families (usually from the home denomination) found themselves in a new setting without a congregation from their communion. If the families numbered as many as five, the home missions committee would designate funds and find a church planter to minister to the group in hopes of establishing a settled work. To be sure, and the OPC has some examples of this, home missions executives would think about “strategic” locations for new churches in order for the denomination to gain a reputation and presence among a larger section of the American public. But generally speaking, home missions leaders went where groups of people wanted their services. No core group, no church plant.

Today, the model appears to be different and more like a business. Certain locations are highly desirable, these places have no Presbyterian churches, and denominational leaders decide to start a work or two there. This mentality would appear (I know nothing about business and marketing) to follow the logic of companies who have a product and are looking for ways to increase patrons and profits. Granted, we live in a voluntary church setting, so every congregation needs to “market” itself to gain members who will then pay for the church “services.” At the same time, a strategic outlook has led conservative Reformed denominations to look more at the potential for growth and visibility as a reason for home missions than a duty to send pastors to those places where existing church members can find no church.

Another aspect of contemporary home missions logic is the idea that Presbyterians should be able to plant as many churches as there are Americans. I am not sure anyone actually has a manual of population density, roads, health of the local economy, zoning regulations, etc. before thinking about planting churches across the USA. But because home missions is in the business of evangelism, and because the logic of the Great Commission is to take the gospel everywhere, home missions types tend to equate church planting with evangelism and the mandate to leave no soul unturned.

The problem is that as much as every American (and resident of the earth, for that matter) needs to hear the gospel, not every place can sustain a Presbyterian church. Once the novelty of being missional, for instance, wears off, and once denominational funding runs out, a church plant finds itself in the surprising position of being a settled congregation in maintenance mode, no longer being cutting edge but adjusting to the routine if not the boredom of the same people, each Sunday, year after year. Maintenance is a good thing. After all, sheep in a flock need to be fed and prepared for slaughter (read: die a good death). Shepherds who run off to new flocks and abandon old ones are not what our Lord had in mind when he taught about the Good Shepherd.

So missional inevitably morphs into maintenance and then denominational leaders need to consider how many congregations a locale can sustain. Actually, they should have thought about this before thinking strategically about a city or region and planting missional churches. But it is a serious question. Can a city of 300,000 support seven Presbyterian congregations, all of them conservative? Does a city of 500,000 have enough unchurched who might come to four Presbyterian churches? I know this may sound like Finney, trying to calibrate the work of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, Calvinists have a pretty good sense that not everyone is elect, and know there are ordinarily limits to the sovereign working of the Spirit. They also have a sense of stewardship and recognize that pastors and their families need to eat, and that ordinarily the Holy Spirit does not do home delivery. In which case, church planters might do well to turn to sociologists at least to understand the dynamics of communities, churches, and their sustainability. Meanwhile, the agrarian in me says that if farmers should know what the carrying capacity of a certain kind of soil is, church planters need to consider a similar dynamic. If an area like New England, that has not had a history of supporting Presbyterian churches, becomes the strategic place for church planting, shouldn’t the denominational executives consider why the soil in the North East is harder than the mid-Atlantic region when it comes to Reformed seeds?

So if part of my concern about comity agreements is about what seems to be the naivete of “strategic” church planting (I put it in quotes because it doesn’t seem very strategic to be ignorant of a place’s capacity to sustain Presbyterian churches), the other goes to the techniques necessary to plant a “Presbyterian” church in an over saturated church market (I put it in quotes because often the methods are not Presbyterian).

If part of the basis for a comity agreement is the notion that the communions entering the agreement are “of like faith and practice,” it does not make a lot of sense to establish a church in a community with an abundance of churches if it is going to offer the same goods and services as the existing congregation. Of course, this is not a problem for Starbucks or McDonald’s where consistency of product is precisely what makes a franchise work. Someone back at headquarters needs to calculate how many frappucinos can be sold in a day within a city of 350,000 potential drinkers, but once the math is complete, the companies’ engines are finely tuned up to deliver the same fructose, burnt coffee, and whipped cream to every single Starbucks store.

The demands of franchising and the consistency of brand, however, do not appear to apply to Presbyterian churches. One congregation may be traditional (read: 1950s United States), another neo-Puritan, another contemporary, and still another blended (read: incoherent). In which case, a town may support a new Presbyterian home missions work if it offers a liturgical recipe different from the existing church. This is even true for congregations within the same denomination. Within the metropolitan Philadelhpia area, the OPC has almost as many flavors (the high-church topping is somewhat beyond the finances of the average Orthodox Presbyteiran) as the PCA.

The variety of approaches to being and worshiping as a Presbyterian is likely the greatest challenge to comity agreements. Many a church plant can justify its existence by saying that its product and delivery will reach a demographic different from an established work. As true as this may be (although the cultural diversity of OPC and PCA churches would strike a modern-day Tocqueville as extraordinarily thin), this diversity seriously undermines claims to be “of like faith and practice.” John Frame and I swatted this one around almost fifteen years ago and I am still convinced that Reformed theology and ministry normally assumes an appropriate form that should prevail in all churches claiming to be Presbyterian. I am also convinced that congregations that vary greatly from the sobriety, decency, orderliness – not to mention the reverence – implied and explicitly stated in the Reformed creeds and catechisms are letting their practices alter their faith.

These reflections may explain the comments made during the interview at Reformed Forum. The latter were the tip of an iceberg that may be responsible for sinking the good ship Conservative Presbyterian, U.S.A. The worship wars and church growth theories – from McGavren to McLaren are sucking the vitals from Reformed confessionalism in North America. But I need to live with it because the current flavors of Presbyterianism – like the menus of Applebees and Cheese Cake Factory (why would anyone eat at a factory?) – are what the Reformed market place will bear.

Since I grew up in a home where the mother passed out tracts with tips and even with fares for turnpike tolls, I will be forever scarred by an evangelical piety that was always in the “car sales” mode, always looking to make the deal. (For a particularly empathetic treatment of this piety – as well as way too many ehff bombs for those with sensitive consciences, see The Big Kahuna.) Part of my mother and father’s piety included prayer before every meal, not only at home but also in the restaurant or diner. Oh, the embarrassment for a pubescent boy when the waitress brought the house salad to the table while dad was prayerfully thanking God for his provision. For that reason it became a source of comfort to learn while doing dissertation research that Machen was no fan of praying in public, say in a restaurant before a meal with commissioners to General Assembly. During my time in the Christian Reformed Church I also welcomed the practice among Dutch-American Calvinists that you did not need to say grace if a meal lacked potatoes or used no utensils. This meant a meal of just burgers at McDonald’s could be consumed without an audible prayer. Add fries to the order and you had to pray out loud.

The point of these memories is to introduce a question for readers of Oldlife: what do you do when you are invited to dinner at the home of non-Christians? Do you bow your head and pray silently before eating? Do you pray with your spouse and/or family by the curb before entering the house or apartment? Or do you simply go with the flow and not pray? My own sense is that good manners involve respecting the rules of the house in which I am a guest. Better then to pray before entering the non-believing home than to make the hosts feel uncomfortable or embarrassed when I bow my head, say a prayer, and invariably miss the mashed potatoes while they are being passed. Doh!

What is impermissible, it seems to me, is for me to turn to the head of the non-Christian household and say, “let me lead us in prayer,” stand, and ask God’s blessing in the name of Christ. If I use the words “we” and “our” in my prayer, I am rightfully including my wife. But I am also including people who have not professed Christ and perhaps given them the impression that they are Christians by the use of “we.” If they are generic God-fearing Americans, that won’t alarm them. If they are some of my secular academic friends, they will think I’m nuts and likely lose respect. And if I pray in the first-person singular – “I just want to thank you Lord” – then why am I praying out loud? Am I not guilty at that point of doing exactly what Jesus told his disciples not to do when he said, “When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men” (Matt 6:5)?

But so far these questions and considerations are only the sub-point for this post’s point, which is how Christians act in public life in the greatest nation on God’s green earth. For a long time in our country’s history — 1789-1965 — Protestants acted like the public square was their dining room. They could go out and pray in Jesus’ name and not have to worry about anyone else taking exception because those from other faiths were not “real” Americans. The genuiness attributed to being American could sometimes reach back to New England’s Puritan federal theology, or sometimes to the nation-shaping energy of the Second Great Awakening’s Benevolent Empire, or sometimes it was simply a civil religion that put “in God we trust” on coins and “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to show those atheistic Russkies just who was God-fearing. But no matter what version of Christian America, Protestants believed that this land was their land and they did not have to be bashful about praying in public. The public and private were indistinguishable. For proof, just look at the way that Protestants defended prayer and Bible reading in public schools.

The problem with this conception of “real” America was that lots of non-Protestants were also citizens of the nation. The U.S. public square was also the home of Jews, Roman Catholics, Mormons, and various strains of unbelief. In which case, to enter into the public square and speak in Christian categories was akin to going over to a non-Christian friend’s home for dinner and insisting that a prayer be said before the meal. It is one thing to do that in your own home when non-Christian friends come over for a meal – though even then what pronouns do we use for such a prayer to show respect for the guests but not pray falsely to our Lord? But to go over to a non-believers house and be pushy about including non-Christians in forms of Christian devotion is rude.

It seems to me that this is what happens when Christians insist that faith and religious discourse be part of American politics. They don’t seem to recognize that non-Christians also live in the United States. This nation belongs to non-believers as much as it belongs to Christians. In which case, the insertion of religion in American public life is a modern version of Nativism – that nineteenth-century phenomenon that sought to keep Roman Catholics from becoming citizens of the United States (and sometimes burned Roman Catholic buildings). Driving unbelief from the land was wise domestic policy for Israel in the centuries before Christ – not just wise but holy. It is folly for any nation after Christ. For Christ’s followers, it is down right inhospitable.

16. Remember the Sabbath day.
15. Keep it holy.
14. You have six days for all your work.
13. The Sabbath belongs to God.
12. Don’t work on it.
11. Don’t let your son work on it.
10. Or your daughter.
9. Or football players.
8. Or cheerleaders.
7. Or advertizing executives.
6. Or broadcasters.
5. For God made the world in six days.
4. Then he rested on the Sabbath.
3. For that reason he blessed the Sabbath.
2. And made it a holy day.

And the number one reason not to watch the Super Bowl. . . .

1. The Eagles aren’t playing.

Not exactly, but the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City did say in his interview with Mike Horton at the White Horse Inn that confessional Christianity is the answer to the problems confronting the contemporary church. Okay, he said, “confessional evangelical” Christianity, which to confessional Protestants is a bit of an oxymoron since evangelical stands closer to pietist than confessional on the spectrum of Protestant Christianity. Even so, there Keller was telling Mike and company that teaching the Heidelberg, and adding more liturgy, is what the ailing Protestant witness needs. Along the way, Keller said that confessional churches were the proper antidote to megachurches, which at least in his experience are too slick, too entertainment oriented, and too consumerist for the sophisticates who reside in Manhattan.

I sure wish Mike had asked Keller more about confessional Protestantism and where Redeemer Church is exactly on the faith and practice of Reformed Christianity. Granted, Keller was on to talk about his book, Reasons for God, which is a work of apologetics, not pastoral ministry. Even so, the discussion was revealing if only because reaching unbelievers is something that has bound Redeemer closer to Willow Creek than Keller let on with his contrast between confessional and megachurch churches.

What Keller did not concede is that he and Bill Hybels have emerged as gurus for an approach to church planting that is “seeker-sensitive.” The seekers may be suburban Chicagoans or cosmopolitan New Yorkers. But in both cases the stress has been more on winning people over than on discipling the won in the whole counsel of God, as in the Great Commission’s “everything I have commanded you.” This is not to say that evangelism is wrong or bad. It is to question whether evangelism is the paradigm for a full-service church in the tradition of Reformed confessionalism. I mean, if you classify your worship services according to musical style as Redeemer does – classical or jazz – you may not exactly have read through Clark’s Recovering the Reformed Confession about the nature and piety of confessional Protestantism.

What makes this point even more plausible is something that Keller wrote about a month before appearing on Horton’s show. At his blog Keller wrote:

The time at Willow led me to reflect on how much criticism this church has taken over the years. On the one hand, my own ‘camp’ — the non-mainline Reformed world — has been critical of its pragmatism, its lack of emphasis on sound doctrine. On the other hand, the emerging and post-modern ministries and leaders have disdained Willow’s individualism, its program-centered, ‘corporate’ ethos. These critiques, I think, are partly right, but when you are actually there you realize many of the most negative evaluations are caricatures.

Keller goes on to say that with the assistance of John Frame he has come to a new appreciation for Hybels and Willow Creek. (Note: Keller and Frame share more than tri-perspectivalism in common; they also understand the nature and character of Reformed worship in ways that contravene the regulative principle as found in both the Westminster Standards and the Three Forms of Unity.) According to Keller, applying Frame, Willow Creek manifests a “a ‘kingly’ emphasis on leadership, strategic thinking, and wise administration.” Keller admits that sometimes the Willow Creek model “obscures how organic and spontaneous church life can be.”

But that concession leads Keller once again to give another of his “with-presbyters-like-this-who-needs-evangelicals” stands for the Reformed tradition. He writes that “Reformed churches have a ‘prophetic’ emphasis on preaching, teaching, and doctrine” but the danger is “a naïve and unBiblical view” which assumes “that, if we just expound the Word faithfully, everything else in the church — leader development, community building, stewardship of resources, unified vision — will just happen by themselves.” (To complete Frame’s triangle, Keller credits the emergent church with an emphasis on community, liturgy and sacraments.”)

This perspective on the Reformed ministry does explain why Keller didn’t endorse Clark’s book. It also indicates why Keller and the rest of Redeemer’s staff need to read it. Confessional Protestants do not believe simply, to paraphrase a line from Field of Dreams, “if you preach it, they will come.” I know pastors in the Redeemer NYC diocese who accuse the Reformed tradition of being logocentric. If that means affirming the formal principle (sola scriptura) of the Reformation, then I’ll accept the label.

But church life is much more than preaching and teaching the Bible and our Reformed confessions teach this. They say all sorts of interesting things about word, sacraments, prayer, discipline, worship, the Lord’s Day, communion, ordination, and polity. They all assume that these teachings require the efforts of pastors and elders who attend session and consistory meetings, presbyter and classis, General Assembly and Synod, visit with families in their homes and the sick in hospitals, catechize the youth, practice hospitality, and prepare high-carb casseroles and jello salads for pot-luck suppers.

That kind of hands-on, local ministry is what animates confessional Presbyterianism. As Old Lifers know, it is seeker-sensitive in the best sense of the phrase, namely, serving the God who seeks Christians who worship in spirit and truth.

On balance, Reformed Protestants were no more responsible for the glories of the modern world (e.g., science, capitalism, education, liberal democracy) than were other western Christians. That is at least the conclusion of Phillip Benedict in his remarkable social history of Calvinism, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed. But Benedict does detect a level of activism among the Reformed that differentiated it from Lutherans. And the difference has a lot to do with the Reformed’s zeal for church polity and liturgical reform. Benedict writes:

It remains the case that at certain critical moments Lutheran church leaders held back from establishing churches under the cross or from defending such churches by force when the Reformed plunged ahead and did so – most notably in the Low Countries in 1566, where the Lutheran refusal to oppose the duly constituted authorities contributed to the Reformed church’s assumption of leadership in the movement of resistance to Habsbourg rule. . . . Surveying the entire period of 1517-1700, one cannot avoid concluding the Reformed embraced and acted upon such views more than any other confessional group. This is not because of any enduringly distinctive features of Reformed thinking about political obligation. It stems instead from two other foundational stone of Reformed theology: its profound hostility to idolatrous forms of worship and its conviction that certain kinds of church institutions derived from scriptural authority. The former drove Reformed believers to separate themselves from the church of Rome in situations in which other evangelicals were prone to compromise, and thus to find themselves especially often on a footing of threatened minority impelled to fight for its ability to worship as it pleased. The latter [church government] sparked movements of resistance to perceived threats to the purity of the proper church order.

This is a key difference between paleo- and neo-Calvinists (not to mention other Presbyterian transformers of cutlure). In the case of old Calvinism, the aim was to reform the church, which in turn led to various forms of political resistance and activism in order to worship God truly. In the case of new Calvinism, distinct marks of Reformed worship and polity are sacrificed in order to work with other Christians for the sake of a righteous and just society.

So if neo-Calvinists really want to enlist the support of paleos for the sake of transforming society, they’ll need to clean up their liturgy and bone up their ecclesiology. Please no Fosdickian responses of “what incredible folly.”

Some say it is nonsense to posit any difference between Puritans and Presbyterians. Others put it more delicately and argue for essential agreement among British Calvinists. The URC pastor, Mike Brown, has given some attention to this subject through the lens of Calvin and Owen on worship. He writes with some surprise that “the likes of Horton Davies and J. I. Packer . . . see a gap between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at least) on worship practices. The piece of evidence that stands out is that John Calvin used and advocated a liturgy. John Owen opposed liturgies. To bring the Presbyterians into the debate, John Knox developed a liturgy for the kirk that became part of the early Presbyterian experience.

But Brown is unconvinced. He sees essential agreement:

Where one witnesses obvious discontinuity between the Continental Reformer and the English Puritan is in the use of liturgies. For Calvin, the liturgies he put to use in Strasbourg and Geneva displayed his understanding of a worship service that was spiritual, simple and in complete accordance with what Scripture alone prescribed. On the other hand, Owen clearly reveled great disdain for liturgies. In his Discourse Concerning Liturgies, Owen made many statements that suggest he believed liturgies somehow quenched the Spirit and obscured the simplicity of worship. Understood in its context, however, Owen’s Discourse is a polemic primarily against the imposition of liturgies. While Calvin knew well the difficulties of having a Protestant state make certain impositions upon the order of worship (such as the Genevan city council denying him his request for weekly communion), he never faced the type of situation which Owen and his fellow Nonconformists faced in England during the 1660s. This must be taken into consideration when evaluating any discontinuities between Calvin and Owen and their theologies of worship. Both Calvin and Owen were men of their times. Yet, both of these towering figures in the Reformed tradition firmly and unwaveringly believed that worship must be biblical, spiritual, and simple.

One question that lurks behind assessments like this is whether Puritans like Owen opposed all liturgy all the time, or simply the liturgy coming down from on high in the Church of England. Sure, most state-imposed measures are unwelcome, but Owen seems to go beyond this when he argues that liturgies restrain the free operation of the spirit.

This leads to an additional question, which concerns the way that Puritanism and Presbyterianism played out in the United States. New England was more receptive to revivalism than were the most Scottish segments of the Presbyterian Church (the Old Side and the Old School). This raises the further question, again for some unthinkable, whether Puritanism encouraged enthusiasm and spontaneity in ways that Old World Presbyterians regarded as a threat to confessional subscription and church polity. After all, if you can accept the word of others for creed and church order, why not in the prayers and forms of worship. (And, by the way, the Westminster Standards reveal much more detail on the interiority of Christian devotion — i.e. the ordo salutis — that The Three Forms of Unity or the Scottish Confession of Faith.)

One way to illustrate that these intuitions as more realistic than hypothetical is to remember that Presbyterianism started out in Scotland with liturgies (from Knox) and that arguably the greatest Puritan theologian, John Owen, wrote an essay against liturgy.

It may not prove the point about differences between Puritanism and Presbyterianism. But the different ways that those traditions played out in the United States do make you wonder.