The Wilderness Way #40

This is the third Wilderness Way focused on the crucial issue of transformation. A few years agoLyle Schaller wrote a new book entitled The New Context for Ministry. One statement in particular leaped out at me. Dr. Schaller said, “The 1960s introduced a new era in American society, and the responsibilities of a pastor became both far more numerous and far more difficult. A higher level of competence as an initiating leader is required to revitalize or renew the forty or eighty or 100-year old congregation than is required to plant a new mission or to shepherd a relatively homogeneous constituency that’s comfortable remaining on a plateau in size.”

How do we go about transformation? There are many elements but I want to suggest to you that we go about it by going back to core ministry. A couple of years ago Sports Illustrated carried an article on how high level professional athletes train. They work on what is called core strength. They toughen their cores. The caption under a picture of hard physical training was: “It’s not just six-pack abs they want. A solid core can be the difference between becoming a star and losing.” The core can be the difference between a fruitful church and a declining institutional remnant.

Our core is biblically defined in the 2^nd chapter of The Acts of the Apostles. You will recall the Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost. Peter gets up and gives what scholars say is a kerygmatic (that means core of the gospel) sermon. He proclaims Christ; he offers Christ. When he finishes, the Bible says they were “cut to the heart.” The listeners asked, “Brother, what must we do?” Peter said, “Repent and be baptized every one of you, save yourself from this corrupt generation.”[1] The story of Pentecost continues with the birth of the church. “They continued in the apostle’s doctrine and fellowship, and the breaking of bread and of prayers.”[2] And then it goes on to talk about how they took care of everyone who had need, social justice, and love and mercy; and then it says, “and day by day the Lord added to their number those being saved.”[3] This seminal passage offers us the core for a faithful and fruitful Christian church.

The core starts with worship. Worship is Job 1. While there is much to share, allow me to highlight two aspects of a core built on worship – preaching and music. One of the ways we will move forward in transformation is by clergy deciding they are going to ramp their level of preaching up one level. This involves hard, disciplined work. It takes study; it takes time; and it takes effort. And it’s often a lot more fun for me to go visit somebody in a hospital than to really hunker down in the office and study.

A second vital aspect of core worship is music. The studies that have been done on the importance of music in leading worship are pretty interesting. If on a scale of 1 to 10 the preaching is, say, a 6 and the music is an 8 or 9, the people will hear the sermon as an 8 or 9. However, if the sermon is like an 8 or 9, and the music is a 5 or 6, they’ll hear that sermon as a 5 or 6. Now why is that? I think it’s because most of us do our doxology, our praise of God, in our music. Furthermore, we do it in all kinds of different music. Music is what scholars call a heart language. There is a famous series of volumes written by Kenneth Scott Latourette called The History of the Expansion of Christianity. One of the things that becomes very clear is that in every period of religious renewal, revival and transformation, there was a new hymnody that came into being. Great hymns like “O for a Thousand Tongues,” and “Amazing Grace” were originally in that modern music which traditionalists scorned. The pop music of the day was put in Christian words and brought back into the church.

Thus the church and culture conversed. In worship especially in music, the church spoke in the indigenous language of a people.

Worship is core. It is Job 1.

[1] Acts 2:37-38

[2] Acts 2:42

[3] Acts 2:47

By: Bishop Mike Lowry On 7/14/2010