Considering Rhythms of Grace

Our worship has come a long way. Those who plan and play work hard and do well. I want to make sure I’m thinking and making good improvements as needed. I want our worship to be faithful and meaningful, not stale or divergent. As a result I still read books on worship from time to time. This might be my emphasis for the year since I’ve got one in my queue for vacation.

Recently I saw Rhythms of Grace: How the Church’s Worship Tells the Story of the Gospel on sale and picked up a few copies. One for me, and one for our music director. Seeing a liturgy that reflects the history of redemption is a good thing.

The book is by Michael Cosper who is worship pastor for Sojourn, which produces some music for churches. I don’t know much about the church aside from what he says about it but he comes across as a new Calvinist (baptistic, non-confessional, NCT & non-denominational) that has invested time to learn more about worship from church history. He’s read some of the books I have: particularly Bryan Chapell and Reggie Kidd. He’s also has spent time at the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Some of this may explain the inconsistency of the book.

In some ways it was like I was reading two different authors. The first sounded young, hip and trying to be cool (like I used to be, trying, that is). It had a Mark Driscoll-esque feel to it which I now find less appealing. The second half sounded like a mature guy, at ease with himself and how his church worships. But maybe that is just me.

The book has a forward by Bob Kauflin, and blurbs by Matt Chandler, Sandra McCracken, Al Mohler, Scotty Smith, Joe Thorn and Kevin Twit. That is a good cross section of people who are either “new Calvinists” or old school Calvinists connected with the PCA. I wonder if they felt the same thing as me. Did they overlook it in love? Am I being picky? I don’t know.

His goal is good. He’s writing because of concerns he has about church culture pertaining to worship. Many of our worship leaders have no formal training. This book is written, in part, to help them form a better theology of worship that helps the congregation grow towards maturity.

“You know,” I thought, “if the gospel is supposed to be central to the Christian life, we should craft our worship services in such a way that they rehearse that story.”

He also states that his book is not a debate about the regulative principle and normative principle. He was not going to delve into that so people interested in such a discussion should just move on. He also briefly stated what he means by worship:

“I go to some effort here to make clear that worship is both an all-of-life, “scattered” reality and a uniquely communal, “gathered” reality. I also want to make a significant effort to clarify that Jesus is our one true worship leader.”

So, with those caveats in mind, let’s press on to look at this book.

The first part of the book focuses on explaining the Story of Redemption. There is only one place to begin a book on worship that is patterned after redemptive-history: the Garden. That’s where he starts, with creation. He spends time talking about the Trinity and Adam’s role as worship leader among creation. Borrowing from G.K. Beale he writes about Adam as expanding the Garden, which is intended to be a temple for the worship of the triune God. On the next page he quotes N.T. Wright. He uses a diversity of sources reflecting his influences. There is nothing wrong with the Wright quote he uses. But the fact he favorably quotes him may put off some people. But since he’s not arguing for the Regulative Principle of Worship many of those people will be off put anyway. But his bottom line in this chapter is that we were made to worship.

When Adam sinned he continued to worship, but he worshiped the wrong things. We are incurably religious, but as a result of our fallen nature we are idolators.

“Worship is essentially about ascribing worth. … The broken worship they share with the serpent leaves them naked and humiliated.”

It is the next chapter, Worship in the Wilderness, where I begin to feel like I was reading a Driscoll book. He makes a number of good points in this chapter, particularly concerning idolatry and entertainment. My issues start with his discussion of Cain and Abel, and why one’s worship was accepted and the other’s wasn’t. While I’d just jump to Hebrews 11 and say “faith” in addition to the lack of the blood of a substitute, he seems to make it a bit more complicated. He does quote Bruce Waltke in his longer than it need be explanation. Abel, he says, recognizes God’s lordship over creation, and gives God the best. Cain, he says, “is just showing up.” Eventually Cosper gets to Abel offering the sacrifice by faith, but the problem still seems to be Cain’s “rote obligation” instead of unbelief resulting in no sacrifice for sin. He, interestingly, characterizes this as “the first of history’s many worship wars.” I thought that was a chapter earlier, in Genesis 3, but I get the point. People were fighting for the first time, even though one didn’t know there was a fight.

The next chapter, The Song of Israel, focuses on Abraham, Moses and David as key figures in the worship of Israel. On the first page of this chapter I wrote “Trying to be too hip?”. He states that both Abram and Sarai were sterile (not the word I use) but since Abram actually had quite a few kids this seems to miss the point. But in light of that in correctly pointing out that Abram was a broken man, talks about him “willing to prostitute his wife, and all too eager to jump into bed with one of his slave girls”. That he did, but I’m not sure how eager he was. He’s sinful enough, we don’t need to make him out as more sinful.

In speaking about his descendants this continues: “They are a family of lushes and adulterers, liars and lunatics, chasing voices in the wilderness,…” I missed all the drunkenness, except for his nephew Lot who was seduced by his daughters after they got him drunk. I’m not sure who the lunatics are either. He overplays it. The Bible isn’t hagiography but we don’t need to add sins and problems to their ledger.

Yet, he continues, “they are broken ne’er-do wells whose significance goes to highlight that God is the one who remains faithful.” Yes, they have faults, but again I think this is an overstatement. And on the next page, “The song of the patriarchs is a song born of weeping, of too much drink …”. Why does he keep finding drunks where I find none? Is this some Baptist thing? Additionally, “It sounds far more like drunken sailors, wailing a hazy lament in a land far from home…”. Is there some apocryphal book in there I haven’t read?

He shifts to the worship of Israel after the Exodus. It was a bloody mess, and he does well to communicate this. Sin’s cost is revealed. We generally view life as cheap. We regularly see people die in movies or TV. We play all kinds of shooter games. But as Covid-19 has revealed we have a real problem with real death. We live in a fantasy world where people don’t actually die. We, who let the butcher do our dirty work, would really struggle with worship according to the Mosaic Covenant.

This chapter does have a good section on worship, wrath and holiness. “We misunderstand the wrath of God if we think it’s only emotional rage, like an angry, frustrated parent.” We worship a God who has wrath because He’s holy. He rightly notes we underestimate both God’s holiness and our sinfulness. Proper worship has to grapple with these realities. We can’t avoid sin and wrath as if they didn’t exist. When we ignore them we distort the gospel and turn worship into superficial sentimentality.

After Creation and Fall comes Redemption, or The Song of Jesus. In the midst of this otherwise good chapter there is this: “The Lord of the Sabbath breaks the Sabbath laws.” Has he been listening to Steven Furtick? Jesus did not break the Sabbath laws. He didn’t celebrate the Sabbath according to the tradition of the Pharisees, that isn’t the law. This is a huge difference and this statement is problematic to say the least. He then talks about the crazy things we do for love, sounding a bit like Francis Chan. But it does get better as he writes about Jesus as the Temple, our Priest and Worship Leader. He discusses worship as participation in the life of the Trinity.

“That’s the story of worship: God creates, sin corrupts, but Christ redeems.”

Okay, he left out the hope of the consummation. But from here he focuses on worship, and the guy trying to be hip disappears. What leads up to this is essential, but the rest is the best of the book. He briefly discusses the worship wars. People argue about instrumentation, and depth vs. contextualization. Part of the struggle is between the attractional church and the missional church. Cosper reminds us of his definition of worship and then suggests a framework for thinking through these issues: Worship One, Two, Three.

• One object and author (God)
• Two contexts (scattered and gathered)
• Three audiences (God, congregation and the rest of the world)

“The gathered body teaches the Word and proclaims it together: we speak the truth in love as we sing, read the Scriptures, and remember the gospel together.”

A few words about the third. God is part of our audience. Our worship is pleasing to God due to the finished work of Christ. This doesn’t mean we can do anything in worship. We still strive to please Him with our worship. The rest of the congregation is also our audience. We remind one another of the gospel as we sing. We are there not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of the rest of the congregation (and they are there for yours). We also worship before the world as we proclaim the gospel to them, too. I generally put this as exaltation, edification and evangelism. But Cosper has a good framework.

He argues that many of our disputes in worship have to do with confusing categories. For instance, if we think we sing for an audience of one our worship doesn’t need to be comprehensible. But we also have 2 other audiences who need to understand our songs, prayers, litanies and sermons. Keeping the world in mind we keep our language simple and understandable. We can over-emphasize one context over the other instead of realizing that each reinforces and facilitates the other. He notes we can also overemphasize particular audiences. Ingrown churches emphasize edification. Churches that emphasize evangelism quickly become too superficial for growing Christians.

He then moves into Worship as Spiritual Formation. In the live CD from the Ryman, Kevin Twit notes that “worship is formative.” Cosper gets this. We are formed by the habits of worship. They should reflect and communicate the gospel to us so we learn how to pray, confess our sins and faith as Christians. He begins to explain worship as forming the spiritual community through story-telling and covenant renewal. Here he develops the difference between worship as concert hall and worship as banquet hall. The concert hall is a performance, though some in the audience sing along. But it becomes about the “show”. In a banquet hall there is community around a table, so to speak, as we tell stories and the Story so we are nourished and encouraged to face the realities of life after we leave.

He also sees worship as spiritual warfare. We turn from our idols to the living God each week. We declare that Christ is supreme and sufficient, while they are empty and worthless.

From there, he spends some time discussing the shifts in Christian worship over time. His focus is on the Western church. This is overly brief and at times seems a bit reductionistic. I’d say his grasp of English church history is a bit lacking. For instance, Presbyterianism existed long before Independency. Just saying.

After the Reformation he talks about revivalism. From this revivalistic emphasis on emotions, John Wimber developed the Temple Model of worship where the goal is not the gospel but “moving into the presence of God”. Yes, the goal of the gospel is to bring us into the presence of God, but through the gospel sung, preached, read and prayed. The Temple Model focuses more on mood and style to create the feeling or experience of personal encounter with God. He compares it to Roman Catholicism with the worship leader as a new priest paving the way into the holy of holies.

Cosper then talks about liturgy. This subtly gets us back to spiritual formation. Liturgy is the habits of worship that form our community. He argues for a gospel-shaped liturgy similar to Bryan Chapell. This is Bryan Chapell for non-Presbyterians. He structures the worship by redemptive history (Creation, Curse, Cross, Consummation). In light of the Curse we should sing laments, and pray them too. Worship isn’t about being happy. It is about seeing life from God’s perspective and being honest about where we are. As he works through the liturgy he provides some practical suggestions.

He then moves the discussion to singing. This is a common command in the Scriptures. He gets into the issues of what to sing; preference and deference. He spends time unpacking Colossians 3. We are wise to sing songs for a variety of time periods in church history.

“Our faith is a sung faith.”

The body of the book finishes with The Pastoral Worship Leader. He moves from the liturgy to the leader. This is an important chapter. He mines the life of Isaac Watts to discuss healthy contextualization in songs. We want the songs to be understandable, to clearly convey gospel themes to people utilizing metaphors they understand. In this he discusses the Psalms and some criticisms of exclusive Psalmody.

In thinking about contextualization he asks: Who’s here? Who was here before us? and Who’s not here but we’d like to see here? You have to minister to the people you have because they’ve been entrusted to you. You also need to consider who you’d like to see there. He’s not advocating faking it. He wants you to identify your stylistic center, the place you gravitate toward naturally. But you can’t stay there all the time. At times you sing songs outside of the center to address the smaller demographic groups in your congregation.

The appendices have some helpful information with sample liturgies, resources and some technical advice regarding sound.

Overall this was a helpful book. In my opinion there were some factual errors, mis-statements and attempts to be hip that just distracted me. Those shouldn’t keep you from benefiting from the book. You could possibly have benefited more, but there is much that is helpful here.

As a result of this book I’m hoping to:

• Make our implicit redemptive-historical pattern explicit.
• Regularly explain elements of our worship.
• Talk with our music director about our stylistic center. We struggled with this but in the last year I think we’ve gotten there. Now we can venture out for songs. Before it seemed we were struggling between two centers.

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Considering Openness Unhindered

Openness Unhindered is Rosaria Butterfield’s second book. Her first, Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, was largely autobiographical and took the Reformed community by storm. Her story of how God worked to turn her life from that of a very liberal, lesbian professor of English and Queer Theory to a conservative, Reformed Christian who is married to a Presbyterian pastor. Her book succeeded in annoying many who are not conservative, Reformed Christians. They made some faulty assumptions, like that she think God makes every Christian a heterosexual. In many ways she was a threat to the narrative of the gay community.

Her second book really isn’t like the first. It covers some same ground as the subtitle indicates: Further Thought of an Unlikely Convert- Sexual Identity- Union with Christ. But how it covers it feels very different to the reader. There are portions that seem more like the section in the first advocating for exclusive psalmody. She’s writing much more like a professor teaching us what she used to believe and how it is incompatible with Christianity.

She steps into the sexual identity debate that is going on in the church. The concept is a “gay Christian” is becoming popular on one hand. And one the other some think that a Christian can’t even struggle with same sex attraction (SSA), confusing temptation with sin itself. This is what much of the first half of the book is about.

In the preface, she explains the title in terms of union with Christ. Paul’s union resulted in his being open and unencumbered about his life and struggles. If we are united in Christ, we can be open and unencumbered about our struggles instead of acting as if all is well though your inner life is filled with chaos.

“Even our struggles, our failures, and our suffering are redemptive in Christ. But there is blood involved. There is a cutting off and a cutting away that redemption demands. Stepping into God’s story means abandoning a deeply held desire to make meaning of our own lives on our own terms based on the preciousness of our own feelings.”

She sets up the method, so to speak, in the preface. She argues for God’s created order as one that includes norms and boundaries for life which includes sexuality and gender. They are not social constructions, but about essence. Many, however, are pragmatists and think these boundaries and norms don’t exist and can be manipulated to please ourselves.  These people deny the authority of Scripture. But there are also some who while affirming the authority of Scripture “unbiblically believe that the struggle is the sin (pp. 7).” They believe that conversion experientially restores all boundaries and norms sooner rather than later.

In other words, Christians can struggle with SSA because they are still sinners. The desires they experience are wrong, but they are not themselves sin. Those desires are not innocuous, but neither are they impossible for a Christian. The Christian, when experiencing them, is to put them to death in the power of the Spirit, as they would any other temptation. Christians can experience SSA just like opposite sex attraction, temptation to greed, revenge and any other sin.

¹⁴ But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. ¹⁵ Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. James 1

There is a method as she covers conversion, identity, repentance and sexual orientation. She works through these theological categories. At times she brings us back to her story, but this book is more theological than autobiographical. As she notes, life stories, including her own, “are messy, contradictory, and humiliating. (pp. 12)”  She says she had a heterosexual adolescence. The sexual meat market of college threw her for a loop, and she felt out of control and her sexual desires became tangled and confusing. For 6 years she dated men, but fantasized about relationships with women, “especially my friends from my growing lesbian and feminist community base” (pp. 13).

Here for instance she distinguishes between homosexuality and homosociality. The latter is “an abiding and deep comfort afforded in keeping company with your own gender, and finding within your own gender your most important and cherished friendships. (pp. 31-32)” Lines get blurry at times.

She then moves into identity. So often we carve out our identity from the wrong things: vocation, past experiences, social status etc. Today people build theirs on their sexuality. We have a tendency to hold to Sola Experiencia- where our feelings and personal experience shape our identity, forming the lens through which we see life. These, for instance, judge the Scripture instead of Scripture evaluating our experience.

She argues that a homosexual identity is not removed by a heterosexual identity, but by Christ. We are converted to Christ, not heterosexuality (though that is a norm by the created order). A person may never be free from SSA until glorification, but they are to find their identity in Christ, not their desires.

One of the issues I had with the book was some of the terminology she uses for sanctification. She follows Vos’ commentary on the Westminster Confession and using “infuse”. This is idiosyncratic. Protestants typically use imparted because Roman Catholic theology talks of us being infused with grace through the sacraments. She doesn’t say this, but this former-Catholic struggles with the use of the term. Vos and Rosaria are the only Protestants I know that use it. Not sure why.

Because God gives us grace, we are able to say ‘no’ to our desires for sinful things (see Titus 2). In Christ we have been sanctified and are being sanctified. We don’t have to act on our lust, hatred, envy etc.

She ends the chapter discussing shame which leads her into the chapter on repentance. Shame is about being exposed, reveled as dirty, disgusting and disobedient. Shame for past actions refuses to stay in the past. We feel it now afraid people will discover what we did back them. She points us to confession of sin that we may be cleansed of all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). She distinguishes this from admission. Confession not only admits our actions were wrong, but also appropriates God’s grace.

In all of this she talks about original sin, which she sees as the great equalizer. We all suffer under it. Sin continues to dwell in us, and produces actual sins. She is highly dependent on the Puritans such as John Owen and Anthony Burgess. Because sin dwells in us, we experience temptation internally. We can either say ‘no’ to it, or ‘yes’ to it and sin.

In the 4th chapter, Sexual Orientation, she gets into theory and the history of sexual orientation. Prior to Freud no one thought in such terms. They thought in terms of behavior: that is a homosexual act. They didn’t think of themselves in terms of identity: I am a homosexual. She argues for this precisely because many Queer theorist and postmodernists argue for this. As a former English professor and Queer theorist she talks about why words matter, building a case against terms like “gay Christian”. This continues in Self-Representation or What Does it Mean to Be Gay?.

While she is very black and white, very theoretical, and sounds dogmatic (not necessarily a bad thing), she isn’t drawing lines in the sand. The next chapter, Conflict, is about her disagreement with other Christians about this. She recognizes that while these terms find their basis in a movement in which she was a mover and shaker, younger people don’t come at it with the same theoretical underpinnings and don’t mean by it what she believes it means. They agree to disagree without consigning one another to the region of hell.

She then moves into the living of the Christian life, focusing on community and hospitality. Her understanding hospitality  “starts with adoption and ends with keeping the Lord’s Day together, because the purpose of our adoption is worship. (pp. 150)” She starts with how community begins, which is important for Christians to remember. Community begins with a group of strangers, who have different ideas, passions and interests. True community is not homogeneous. We have Christ in common, but differ in many ways. Community recognizes that it is dangerous. We are in community with people who are sinners of all kinds. We can get hurt! But the perfect love of God is intended to cast out our fear. Open and unhindered, we share life together even the unpleasant parts of life like grief.

She then talks about how they have practiced hospitality in their neighborhood. I don’t think it would work in mine. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That just means it is an example, not the only way. It is also shaped by her Covenanter convictions. In some ways it seems similar to her defense of exclusive psalmody in the first book. It all seems a bit too perfect (to this admittedly cynical soul).

She then moves into church membership, and why we should take it seriously. She is standing against the consumer approach to membership. She quotes from G. I. Williamson about how there is no perfect congregation, and no perfect denomination (oh that more people in my denomination would understand that!).

“As a pastor’s wife, I have seen the ugliest side of people when they start to believe that the sins of others in our church are intolerable, or when they pack up and leave instead of receiving the repentance of other, or sticking around long enough to work on reconciliation. The people who leave the church because they think they are too good for it have no idea that hurt that they cause- for the people who love them and miss them, and for the people hurt by the things they said and the things they didn’t say when they broke fellowship.”

This is a good book. It is not as easy to read as her first book. It does get more deeply into some very important ideas, theologically and philosophically. It gives those of us who haven’t read gay theorist a summary of sorts from a former-gay theorist.

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Considering Psalm Singing

In my first pastorate, I served in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP), which had a long history of Psalm singing. While they no longer practice exclusive psalmody, they still break out the Bible Song Books for Synod each year. It was always foreign to me, having not grown up in the ARP. The songs seemed more adaptations of Psalms than a true Psalter.

Recently someone gave me a copy of Psalm Singing Revisited: The Case for Exclusive Psalmody by Bruce Stewart. It is a short booklet, but I finally found some time to read through it. I thought I’d share my interactions with the booklet, and therefore his position as noted in the subtitle.

The Reformed heritage has a long tradition of singing the Psalms. This has long been understood to be necessary on the basis of the Regulative Principle of Worship as expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) as well as the Larger and Shorter Catechisms.

1. The light of nature sheweth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and doth good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture. WCF, XXI

The argument is that the Psalms are songs given to us by God. All other songs are the product of the imaginations and devices of men and therefore unacceptable for worship. The question is, is this a proper interpretation and application of the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW)? Is it consistent with how we apply the RPW to other elements of worship prescribed in Scripture?

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ARP and RPCNA

You will note two common letters in those initials, in sequence.  RP.  Both the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and the Reformed Presbyterian Church, North America trace their roots back to the Covenanters who withdrew from the Church of Scotland so long ago because Arminianism and an Episcopal form of church government had infected the Church of Scotland.

What came up at the ARP synod was our future.  If you were to put this in courtship terms, we talking about spending some time getting to know one another.  Our hands probably haven’t even brushed accidentally.  But in the interest of biblical unity, we are talking.

The ARP has about 27,000 members which means it is smaller than the small city in which I live and serve.  We are over 200 years old and have not caved in to liberalizing forces.  On the theological map, I guess you could say we are between the EPC and the PCA.  As a pastor, I would be in the segment adjacent with the PCA.  We are found primarily in the Southeast, though we have a new Presbytery in Canada.  There are more ARPs in the Pakistani synod than here in the US.  There is also an ARP synod in Mexico.  Not bad for a small, largely rural denomination.

The RPCNA is about 6,000 members in churches that are primarily in the North and  Midwest.  There is a congregation in Orlando, FL.  Many of you have probably heard of Geneva College in Beaver Falls, PA.  It is their denominational college.  Their seminary is The Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary  in Pittsburgh.  (We, of course, have Erskine College and Seminary in Due West, SC.)  The primary difference would probably be that they are exclusive Psalm singers.  The ARP has a few congregations that sing only Psalms.  But this is the one issue that decides whether or not we ever consummate.  There will have to be lots of conversations before that ever happens.

I was duly impressed by their representative who spoke to our synod last week.  He was struck by the enormity of the issue, referring to the Gordian Knot.  But repeatedly went back to the biblical passion for unity purchased by the death of Jesus.

None of us knows how this will pan out.  But it would be great if there were fewer Presbyterian denominations out there- not because of decline, but because of union.  I think that would be a great testimony to the power of Christ, the love of Christ to lay aside peripheral issues when we have all the BIG issues in common (after all, we are Reformed and Presbyterian).  So, perhaps we’ll go out together and decide we really like each other, and can do more for the kingdom together than apart.  That would be a great thing.  But it may take awhile.

7 Years Later, an Update: The ARP has issued an invitation for the RPCNA to join them at Bonclarken for a joint meaning. I am not sure of all the logistics, but the ARP has agreed to only use the Bible Songs book and without instrumentation in deference to the convictions of their brothers. I say “their” since I am no longer an ARP pastor but serve in the PCA now.

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