Category: Social Justice

Imagine a Dangerous Life of Worship

Can you remember the first time you started reading the Bible? There were a lot of weird names and miraculous things happening and, whether you finished a single book or the entire Bible, you probably had a pretty good handle of the story because you read most of the words. Now, think about the second, third, or twentieth time you read through a book of the Bible. You began to discover things that you didn’t see the previous times. If you are involved in a bible study, others around you point out things that they saw that are new to you and vice versa. This awakening comes with the expansion of our imagination, growth that is a product of our deepening relationship with the Author of the story. Mark Labberton talks about worship that broadens our imagination in chapter nine of The Dangerous Act of Worship. True worship fires our imagination and enables us to have a more expansive view of our roles in restoring that justice that God wants for His world.

Imagination here is not just fanciful musings on what could be. Worship that brings us closer to the King is worship that fills us with God’s dreams and it leads us to look at people and events and our lives in a different way, discovering things that were not there the last time we looked, just as when we read the Bible over and over again. This process is enabled by our realization that God has placed His repentant children in a new place where we live by His grace power rather than our own contrition and energy. Our participation is ignited through prayer and scripture reading that opens our eyes to those around us. We seek their benefit while trusting in the Father for our own. As our imagination expands in this way we begin to see how God has arranged our intertwining lives such that we can contribute to a restoration of justice in their lives. Worship expands beyond our hour on Sunday to become our lifestyle.

At Saddleback last Sunday, Pastor Rick Warren said it plainly, if you don’t have a dream – a God sized dream- you’re just marking time. What’s your dream?     

Mavis Staples Continues the Fight

  The legendary Mavis Staples has treated us, just a couple of weeks ago, to a new album recalling the civil rights struggle that continues to this day in some quarters. We’ll Never Turn Back is equal part traditional spiritual and modern protest lyric, all of it driven by the deep soul-shaking voice of the soul and gospel marvel. After one listen you will be lost in her storytelling, singing that takes you back to the battle lines of the sixties and then carries you forward to the aftermath of Katrina. On the hundredth listen you will remain captivated by the strength of her voice, layered as it is over a perfectly stripped down backing band that includes Ry Cooder, drummer Jim Keltner, hip hop producer Mike Elizondo on bass and backing vocals provided by Ladysmith Black Mambazo and The Freedom Singers. This is a CD that will not leave your player for some time.

Every song on this album is a masterpiece on its own but the traditionals stand out. Mavis sings over the most austere of background music, eliciting an image of the small church gathered to raise their voices in praise. We Shall Not Be Moved and This Little Light of Mine take you to another place and remind you that there is much work to be done. Go now and buy this record. Then lock the doors, open the windows and turn up the volume. Never mind the neighbors, they can sing along as well.

The Social Gospel Revisited

On the republication of Walter Rauschenbusch’s seminal book Christianity and the Social Crisis, OpinionJournal.com reminds us that the pursuite of social justice by the Church must be balanced. Without an equivalent emphasis on personal repentance and holiness, the social gospel fell dangerously close to other movements which thought that they could perfect humankind given the appropriate circumstances.

More on Rauschenbusch:

Wiki

Rauschenbusch Center

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Dangerous Worship of Power

If you haven’t picked up Mark Labberton’s book The Dangerous Act of Worship yet, don’t wait a minute longer. Rather than a how-to, Labberton has crafted one of the finest volumes associating proper worship with justice that I have had the privilege to read. It is a not a book that you will tear through in a couple of days. I labored with this book over weeks because of the repentance motivated by the injustice that my own worship allowed. 

He writes in chapter seven about the proper recognition of power and how appropriate worship speaks to it. Safe worship permits the continuation of power abuse while dangerous worship recognizes the true power in God. Labberton says

Nothing thwarts God’s purposes more than twisted power; nothing renews God’s purposes more than redeeming power.

When we explore the danger of worship, pushing out beyond our safety zones to encounter the true and living God, we are struck by His power. Placed side by side with our feeble and unjust practices of power, we see the injustice wrought by our appropriation of what is not ours. Worship that walks us out into the dangerous desert alone with God realigns our thoughts and actions and helps us to discover that the greatest power is found in emulating the Savior’s self-sacrificial love. How many times has this topic been discussed in our worship planning meetings?

Mark asks us to reflect on each of the Church’s worship practices, from the Call to Worship to the Offering and Benediction. Each gives us an opportunity to reflect on true power, to help us realize that the manmade constructs that we often associate with power are but mere facsimiles of God’s supremacy. The brief section on the Offering is especially powerful, given the often contentious feelings that surround this practice. We live in a culture that sees money as power and, in some cases, worships it. The act of offering our gifts at the altar is a significant release that is often given short shrift in the Church today. Laying down the gift can be an exercise in recognizing the true wealth and it source and the more dangerous we make this the closer we bring our brothers and sisters to the practices of justice that it should engender.

Immigration and the Evangelical Mindset

Here is an article I wrote for Evangelicals for Social Action (link on my blogroll for further information) regarding the current division of the Evangelical community on the topic of illegal immigration.  

Balancing the Scales on a Theology of Immigration

The Bible is used as a bludgeon and a shield, but either extreme is improper when used in this debate. Read the piece and let me know what you think.

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Worship Awakening From Our Dangerous Slumber

We’ve all had the experience of waking up while travelling and taking a moment or two to realize where we are, and to orient ourselves to our new surroundings. The slumbering Church, by and large, remains somnolent and unaware of the new address to which God has moved them. In our dream state we see ourselves residing at our old address, identified with our American culture and failing to see that God has relocated us to the larger world where our neighbors are oppressed and hungry and ill and living in poverty. We have been moved to a new neighborhood and just don’t know it yet. Welcome to Injusticeville.

For our worship to reflect the glory of the God we serve, we must be fully awake and locate ourselves in the God’s world. Mark Labberton leads us in his fifth chapter to rouse ourselves and to identify ourselves as a part of a new neighborhood filled with God’s people rather than remaining frozen in the comfort zone that we self selected. Coming to know and love our neighbors moves us to action in restoring justice in their lives, as God’s heart controls our own. We are woken up and, as our eyes adjust to our surroundings, God’s immense perspective becomes ours.

Is your alarm set?

 

Not the SAME Old Story: Hope in the City

Check out this story about the SAME Cafe in Denver. Opened to provide a dignified and compassionate way of allowing everyone to eat regardless of circumstance, Brad and Libby Birky run their restaraunt using a unique pay what you can system. Though they will never get rich doing so, they are contributing the betterment of their little block on Colfax Avenue. What are we going to do today?

Find out more at www.soallmayeat.org

 

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The Dangerous Act of Worship: The Real Battle

We’ve all heard of the ‘worship wars’ and maybe even participated in the battles. Often, the skirmishes have centered around guitars versus the organ, hymns over the praise chorus, or even robes being more godly than the polo shirt. All of this, Labberton continues in The Dangerous Act of Worship, serves as distraction from the real battle within the body, the ease with which we forget our neighbor. The fracas over our personal preferences becomes somnolent, inducing a deep sleep that avoids God’s call for His people to seek justice in the lives with which theirs intersect.

Mark laments the ease with which the Church has forgotten her vocation. We have fallen asleep to the needs of our neighbor and, as we have turned inward within our fortress sanctuaries, we have forgotten that “our suffering world longs for signs of God on the earth.” He puts this omission in sharp relief by reminding us that Jesus’ command in Mark 12:29-31

(These) commands set the agenda for lifestyles of worship. No allegiance of love is ever to be greater than our allegiance to God. In God’s being and purpose, these are not rival allegiances. Love for God comes first and leads us to love our neighbor. In fact, failing to love our neighbor throws serious doubt on whether we are loving God.

We are challenged to expand our notion of worship from that hour on Sunday morning to include every twenty four hour in which we draw breath. Worship that loves God includes love for all of His creation and Creations. If our worship is limited to the verses of How Great Thou Art without recognizing the human-greatness in God’s eyes of our neighbor, we are slumbering. Worship that experiences the heart of God feels the burden he carries for our fellow man and woman who are suffering injustice in the world He made. Only when we awaken to this, are we fully engaged in worship.

What do you think?

 

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The Dangerous Act of Worship: What’s at Stake?

Mark Labberton, the author of the demanding The Dangerous Act of Worship, answers this question quite simply; Everything. All that we are, have as potential, or hope to become is wrapped up in our worship of God. Yet, with all this in the balance we concern ourselves with such mundanity as guitars versus the organ or KJV rather than NIV, all the while avoiding the suffering, poverty, and injustice that surrounds us. Labberton paints a vivid picture of the church as slumbering, unwilling or unable to waken itself.

In this first chapter, Mark establishes the foundation upon which he wants to ignite a change in our worship practices. He uses the familiar passage from Micah (6:8) to center his idea of true worship:

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

His thesis, teased out in the remaining chapters, is that we as the Church have fallen asleep to the call for mercy and justice. We should be awake, as our Lord Jesus was fully awake.

Jesus, if anything, was and is awake. That’s the shock for those who encounter him in the Gospels. He came to make a world of those who are awake-awake to God, to each other and  to the world. Waking up is the dangerous act of worship. It’s dangerous because worship is meant to produce lives fully attentive to reality as God sees it, and that’s more than most of us want to deal with.

What do you think of his analogy of the Church asleep and the contributions of her leadership to its slumber? Is your congregation focused on comfort or justice? I’ll be interested in exploring this further with you.

 

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