Incandescent at the TV
ChurchTV last night made me very cross indeed. It was on in the background as Ros was marking schoolwork and I was reading. All of a sudden I mentally tuned in to something that made me stomp and fume around the living room. Picture me stomping and fuming. Grrrr.
The programme was about life on the Scilly Isles. A large segment was given over to how the "church" had finally fulfilled its great ambition to get a large peal of bells. The bells arrived to great excitement and the "blessing ceremony" was covered at length. The vicar sprinkled them with holy water blessed by the bishop, saying lovely things about how people had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to achieve this highpoint in the life of the church.
Holy water? Bell-blessing? At the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds?? Horror...
Cutting the vicar in question the most slack I suppose it might have been the editing that made this look so vacuous. But vacuous it was. Anyone watching who already thinks that Christianity is about arcane, incomprehensible, ritualistic mumbo-jumbo, and that churches are buildings where the only aim is to spend lots of money on the premises will have had the opinion strongly reinforced. All the while the presented wittered on about how this was a high point for the church on the island.
There was nothing at all on the programme about biblical church, or the biblical God or his Christ. This was church-as-social-entity, church-as-religion, church-as-ancient-and-utterly-irrelevant-ritual.
But it did just make me pause for one moment. You see I know a good number of churches who have got so suckered into pouring all their energy into their premises and their building plans that whatever their equivalent is of having a new peal of bells has become their aim. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
And I am currently preparing a church service for Sunday. There will be people who like older worship material (as do I), which to a fresh generation - or those who have never met the Lord - is no less arcane and incomprehensible than the vicar flicking "holy water" with a twig of rosemary. Everything about that programme screamed that whenever that congregation has decided to contextualise itself it isn't now. It was a monument or a museum. The question for me is: will what I do on Sunday fall in any way into the same trap? I can give all my good reasons for using a whole range of worship material old and new (and some of the reasons are good ones), but the point at which anyone doesn't understand what's going on, then I have signed up for the bell-blessing brigade.
How are you doing in your church? Is your aim impacting the world with the gospel of the glory of God in Christ? Or are you spending kingdom money achieving some other aims? And are your meetings really biblical church - full of adoration, contemporary, clear, passionate about the Lord and the scriptures, compassionate, reaching out, accessible?
Or are you with the strange bell-blessing people?
Reader Comments (4)
Excellent rant. I often stomp and rage myself at those programmes.
Favourite line: but the point at which anyone doesn't understand what's going on, then I have signed up for the bell-blessing brigade.
I agree with most of the rant, but am not sure what bell-blessing has to do with the traditional vs contemporary debate. Are you suggesting it would have been OK to spend hundreds of thousands kitting out the church with the latest strobe lights, staging and audio visual gear?
No, I was suggesting that whenever a church gets so sucked in to a project involving plant and buildings that it considers those things to be the aim, rather than serving a wider aim, its lost the plot. At which point the money is inevitably getting wasted and not being effective for the kingdom.
I can imagine a situation where you could make a case for strobe lights and audio visual gear (though I doubt you can for bells in this day and age and the programme certainly didn't), but that case can never be "let's get lighting for it's own sake". Money, equipment and buildings need to serve gospel purposes
Thought provoking.... along the tangent(s) of how to transition a church in a real backwater when the view of the relevant has been influenced more by local context rather than the larger context of fast cultural and technological change. Who's real is real? Try keeping two chinese fighting fish in the same tank without a glass divide on hitting the onslaught of the global (church) village, where new symbolism lies in rapidly expanding networks rather than the call of bells. Peoples response when asked why they come to church is invariably 'I looked up the website' nowadays.
.... do vast buildings need to be modernized to maintain cultural relevance, when they stand empty for 99 percent of the week...?