So, this was serendipitous.
The day after the election I was tidying up a stack of
papers – a random collection of things I’d kept over the years to use for choir
devotions, my old music ministry newsletter, zingers, or whatever. (I had commandeered a binder in a recent emergency, and there was this stack o’stuff on
my office floor :~)
Sorting through this material was a walk through my first
few years as Music Pastor at College Church in Wheaton. And here was something
that my colleague, Dave Helm, had passed on to me. It is from the November 1997 Tabletalk, by Douglas Wilson: “The
Cultural Impact of Worship.” There is a lot of incendiary material in the
article . . . it is, after all, by Douglas Wilson! But this is the part that
Dave had highlighted and brought to my attention:
Christians do not
know how to lift a glass of beer to the glory of God for the simple reason that
they do not know how to sing the Gloria Patri. We do not know how to compose concertos that honor God because if the
sermon goes longer than fifteen minutes we get a case of the creeping fantods.
We do not know what a statesman is because we do not know what a call to
worship is. (p. 59)
Interesting that this quotation would leap out at me the
day after this particular national election. Could the election of Donald Trump
as President be a natural consequence of evangelicals’ “willing adoption of a
breezy formality in worship that has led to a host of problems outside the
church”? (p. 58)
Well, it’s one way to account for why many who call themselves evangelicals voted for a
person so antithetical to what evangelicalism supposedly stands for. I continue
to believe that how we worship makes a difference in the world. And it might not
be the difference we think it is or wish it to be.
