Alternative Use Of Music And The Arts In The Free Church Tradition
Decisions made about the use of music and arts in worship always imply some theological understanding about the nature of worship. The following article describes a congregation in the free church tradition that has gone about the process of liturgical renewal well aware of the theological issues involved. This concern has influenced their choice of liturgical and hymns texts, the role that the choir plays in their services, and the ways in which visual and other arts have been incorporated.
At Grace Fellowship Community Church, we believe that the worship of God is the single greatest call and the single greatest need of our lives. To celebrate who God is and what he has done, to anticipate with the whole body of Christ what he will do at the very end of our deliverance, to give ourselves to adoring Christ in all his mystery and majesty—this is the point of our lives. Our destiny as the people of God is to be worshipers.
The implications of this for the weekly celebration of the church are wide-ranging and numerous. The obvious starting place is that worship cannot be selfish. It must draw us away from the smallness of our lives—the realities of family issues, career decisions, daily headlines, and politics—and point us to the greater reality that Christ has come to invade our world and give our lives Kingdom significance. We ask ourselves the wrong questions when we ask: Was the worship service uplifting to me? Did it inspire me, move me, challenge me, encourage me? Rather, we need to ask: Was God honored by the way I worshiped? Did I enter into worship as if I were indeed addressing the very Center of the universe or did he find me bored, distracted, passive, immovable? Real worship will be encouraging to us only as a result of our abandoning ourselves as we glorify God and seek to enjoy him forever, not when we make our own encouragement the goal.
Music
In our congregation, we view worship as dialogical. It is a dialogue initiated by God, always in grace, and always with a call for response. The same God who spoke creation into being calls us every Sunday morning to worship, to confession, to hear his Word, to meet him at his Table and then back to the world where we join him in his work. Music is one way to answer back to the God who so relentlessly pursues us. Through music, we nurture the conversation that God has been having with his people since Adam, and we anticipate the dialogue of heaven, where day and night they never stop saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come!" To sing this to him now is to be drawn into heaven, into the presence of God, and that is what worship is all about.
When our congregation began, we were mostly familiar with pietistic gospel hymns that addressed God and called us to commitment in deeply personal and highly individualized ways. In the eight years of life together, we are recovering the whole hymnal and have found such a richness of expression, both in melody and text, from the hymns that have been given to the church throughout the centuries (not just the nineteenth!). Those pietistic hymns are much more potent and meaningful when they do not need to carry the whole weight of our worship. There is something very confirming about singing the fourth-century words and thirteenth-century chant of "Of the Father's Love Begotten," a Christmas hymn, and then reveling in the glorious theological picture of the God who comes with "healing in his wings" in Charles Wesley's "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing," and then finally being driven to pure celebration in "Go Tell It On the Mountain" at the simple and radical truth that Jesus Christ is born.
Good hymns always expand our thinking about God. They are unashamedly theological and they dare us to be. They give us words beyond our common words for him and keep us from addressing God in ways that become too casual and familiar. And, when we are sensitive to the truth they hold, they allow us to make these words of reverence and awe our own. Good hymns link us to history and remind us that the Christian faith is not just our story, but the story of generations and generations of saints who have loved Jesus and have tried to follow him. When we sing the hymns of Bernard of Clairvaux or Martin Luther, we are affirming our oneness with them. We have also been appreciating the contemporary hymn writers—Timothy Dudley-Smith, Christopher Idle, Margaret Clarkson, to name a few—as they have interpreted in fresh ways what it means for us to be God's church in these times. We are very pleased with our hymnal, The Worshiping Church (Carol Stream, Ill.: Hope Publishing Co.), for its inclusion of these hymn writers and for offering what we feel is the best and most enduring of Christian hymnody.
We also incorporate praise choruses from both the Catholic and evangelical traditions. We have found these to give us a greater freedom in expressing our love and gratitude to God and are helpful when used in a supportive, responsive role. In our service, they are usually sung following a hymn or prayer when we want the congregation to focus on a particular truth for a longer period. We use choruses after the prayer of adoration (which follows the call to worship and opening hymn) as a way to elaborate on the prayer we have just prayed and allowed the momentum of worship to grow. This "momentum" has more to do with how the text highlights, interprets, and responds to particular events in worship than with the musical elements of tempo, melody, dynamics—though they are obviously intertwined.
Our choir plays a very substantial role in our service. The choir teaches new hymns to the congregation, serves as a "cantor" for music which is in the style of "musical liturgy," and along with the piano (we do not have a song leader), shares in the task of encouraging and directing the congregational singing. In our service, the choir anthem is not locked into a certain spot every week; the choir might sing the call to worship one week and one of the prayers (confession, preparation for the Word, Communion) the next. The fact that the anthem can be a fluid part of the structure is helpful in two ways. First, it gives the choir director a much greater flexibility in terms of repertoire because the anthem isn't confined to playing one particular role week after week. Secondly, it helps the congregation to appreciate that the choir is not "entertainment" but actually serves, particularly when the choir sings the prayers, to speak on behalf of the whole community to God.
Our desire to follow the church calendar has been the motivation behind much of the work we have done in the arts. The ancient seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost are not only helpful in rooting us in the story of Christ's life and the truths of the gospel—incarnation, redemption, and consummation—but they provide us with a visual way to enter into and celebrate these truths. The symbols, colors, and drama of these different seasons have come to be part of our tradition at Grace Fellowship, and every year they grow in their meaning as we grow in understanding how they give a holy perspective to our lives.
Visual and Dramatic Arts
Most of us had come out of a church background in which the visual arts did not play a significant role in worship, so the first step for us was research. One person on our worship team did a lot of reading on the historic celebrations of these seasons, which inspired much of the rituals and practices we do at these special times. Another person worked on the traditional symbols and Chrismons (Christ's monograms) of the faith, which led to her designing various banners and pulpit hangings for each of the seasons.
We celebrate Advent with the traditional wreath and four candles, each representing a different aspect of Christ's coming. A new candle is lit each week so that by Christmas Eve, as the light grows brighter and our anticipation of Christ's coming is heightened, we light the fifth and final candle, the Christ candle, and that is the sign for us that the longings and expectations of all creation are met in the Light of the world, Jesus Christ. A four-paneled banner is used in a similar way to tell the Advent story. The picture is based on the Isaiah 11 vision of the shoot that springs up from the stump of Jesse. The first panel, brought out on the first week, shows in dark, desert colors of what appears to be a lifeless branch. The second panel adds to this picture one tiny, but vivid green leaf set against the brown and gray background. The third panel shows more leaves and tiny pink buds. By the fourth week of Advent, the picture is complete: at the center a brilliant red rose has blossomed, representing Christ.
During Advent we celebrate the Light who is Jesus Christ growing brighter and stronger as the season progresses, but during Lent we watch that light grow fainter as we journey with Jesus to Calvary. Our practice at Lent is to place seven candles (one for each week in Lent, plus Good Friday) on a table along with a plain, wooden cross that has been draped with a sheer, purple cloth. Each week as we reflect on what it means for Christ to submit himself into the hands of sinners, one light is snuffed out. By Good Friday, a service we hold in almost total darkness, we remove the purple cloth from the cross, sing the words of the Kyrie ("Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.") and snuff out the last flame. This is drama at its simplest, starkest form, but it tells the story—the world has killed its Deliverer, and all the lights go out.
Often just the simple reading of Scripture provides an opportunity to use drama in the service. Once, in a series on the Psalms, we used as an additional text 2 Samuel 12:1–13, where several characters playing Nathan, David, and a narrator, read through the story of Nathan's confrontation with David after his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband. This is a text full of tension ("You are the man!") and poignancy ("I have sinned against the Lord!") as David's sin is exposed and he senses the horror of what he had done. This text was followed by the David character reading Psalm 51, where David pours out his soul in confession to the God who does not despise broken and contrite hearts but redeems them.
In a sense, this kind of drama, not very elaborate or lavish, but simple, typifies our whole approach to music and the arts in worship. Because we are not a large congregation with a big budget for the arts, we must rely on finding beauty in simple things. This "limitedness" has served us well. We are discovering that in the gospel itself, the story of God's loving pursuit of his people, is enough drama and music and beauty and art to continue to renew our worship.