The Emerging Informality: Christianity's Dire Need, Part III

[I am grateful for the comments that appear at the end of Part I of this series. Thank you for helping me understand things more clearly. I am also grateful for the comments posted over at Sunshine Church. My brothers and sisters in the Church of Christ have moved the discussion further in a very good way. Thank you all. And as a result of issues raised here, and due to some of the hard things I've already written, I feel I must continue the series on informed formalism and Christian worship. My apologies to my readers who prefer my more socio-political essays. But this topic is indeed socio-political, too, for the loss of formality portends problems for all cultures and institutions, I believe.]

I think most people would agree with the claim that American culture (particularly) is steeped in informalism. Clothing fashions indicate this, as does etiquette between the sexes: women casually ask men out on dates, and vice versa, with even sexual intercourse treated as a casual exchange. Children address police officers or church pastors by their first names; titles are dismissed in corporate life, even to the point where it is hard to know who is indeed in charge. Few people hold their hands over their hearts as the American flag is raised; few know the words to the nation's anthem. Even our president is casual, as are the media who report on him, revealing to us their mutual repartee, badinage or mockery. And perhaps no more casual place in America is the American church, with children free to move at any time during a service, or amplifiers cranked to drown out the din of so many people doing their own thing (the louder the amp, the louder the crowd). Pastors dress themselves "down," computers and projectors and paper communion cups have made their way into the sacrament of worship. Church is hardly a formal affair anymore, at least for many of us.

Malcolm Gladwell in his telling book, The Tipping Point, discusses that when a community pays attention to the little things, the details like broken glass on the sidewalks and in the storefronts; when a community fixes minor things, major things happen, like serious drops in the crime rate. Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani was in fact upbraided for his commitment to prosecuting the city's most petty crimes. The result? Crime rates in New York fell precipitiously. You see, it is a lie that the devil is in the details. God is in the details. In fact, He always has been. If the Gospel is about anything it is about the glorious news that God cares about the details, our details.

Plus, just ask any wife, or just ask your girlfriend (assuming, of course, that you are single) whether details matter. You'll learn pretty quickly that they matter immensely. Details matter in birthday gifts, details matter at anniversary dinners and first dates. Romance is vibrant with details, as is love. Nice homes, nice cars, nice clothes; when you purchase any thing, that purchase is often made all the more pleasurable and all the more fun because of the details. Bad romances and ailing marriages, bad purchases and lousy meals, are almost always due to some inattention to detail.

Yesterday it was reported that a 12-year-old boy, while on a field trip to a Detroit museum, intentionally stuck his chewed gum to a $1.5 million painting. It is tempting to think the youngster did this in artistic protest of hideous, over-priced art. But I suspect that it is more the destruction of formality, of formally valuing place and object, that assisted him in his crime. And his age group hardly gets the sort of direction from the adults that should guide them toward high standards: my wife, a middle-school librarian, weekly reports that the greatest offenders of propriety at school assemblies are the teachers. No one cares about the essential details of courtesy, or so it seems.

Let me point out two passages from Holy Scripture. The first is from Ecclesiastes, which was most likely penned by King Solomon, the son of King David, the chief psalmist:

"Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.

Do not be quick with your mouth, 

do not be hasty in your heart 

to utter anything before God. 

God is in heaven 

and you are on earth, 

so let your words be few." (Eccl. 5:1-2)

These indeed are hard words. They are fraught with caution, suggestive of protocol and decorum. But do they remind you of anything? How about these words from St. Matthew's Gospel:

"But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words." [emphasis added] (Matt. 6:6-7)

Those of us familiar with liturgy, or any formalized rituals, know that such formalities are designed in large part for economy, for efficiency. They are designed to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. One read through either Rite I or II in the Book of Common Prayer proves that the entire gospel message is proclaimed in a very short time, in elegant language and wonderful ceremony, with few words. Pastoral prayers from pulpit and lectern, from the crossing or altar, are done with the facility of language that gets to the point, removing the person praying from the center of attention.

But in many churches spontaneous and not pre-written worship and prayer is preferred, ostensibly proving authenticity and freshness. Of course, those of us who have endured listening to our pastors' or elders' long-winded "spontaneous" prayers have no doubt muttered in Christian charity, "Please, be done with it." And surely we've heard spontaneous prayers that are nothing more than re-arranged, automatic phrases. In fact, each of us can churn out such prayers at the drop of a hat, so familiar are we with these phrases. Written and spontaneous prayers can both become rote, reflexive and even dead.

Last December, in Touchstone: The Journal of Mere Christianity, I wrote about the all-too common practice of "asking" God in prayer without asking God anything at all. Surely we have all heard this: "Lord, we just ask that you be with Pastor Fred;" or, "Heavenly Father, we just ask that you guide us, fill us, heal us." My point in that essay was that such prayers are not questions, since there are no question marks in anyone's prayers. We say we ask but we don't actually ask! Our prayers are bereft of question marks, and we speak to God in ways we would not speak to our friends. Imagine speaking this way to your golf buddy: "Hey, I just ask you to hand me a five-iron."

You see, so many of us care so little about details that we forget the detail of prayer's punctuation. "Ask, and it shall be given you." And yet we don't ask at all, since we are so thoroughly informal we aren't even aware how vacuous our prayers have become.

These are realities. Nothing here is made up, mere fictions or straw men. Some would argue that the Gospel bids us to be free of these "worldly" formal constraints, insistent that Christ's news is that God is our "Daddy," our Father, our Abba (and that Christ is our brother). Of course, this is true, and yet rare is it that we hear that a father in Jesus' world was not informal, but the rabbi and priest of the house; involved in civic affairs at the city gate; a man gentle with children and yet worthy of their deepest respect. Toddlers of course could address their "Abba" in informal speech; but that is hardly the way fathers wanted their mature children to address them. Jesus tells us, in fact, to speak formally in prayer: "OUR (not just mine) Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." This is a formal address, taught us by our Savior. Moreover, we do not hear St. Paul declare to us that in the end of time "every knee shall bow, every tongue confess" that Jesus Christ is our brother, but our Lord, our King. We do not see a Father crowned; we do not see a brother lifted high, but the very King of the universe. This is the language and imagery we see in the Bible; Jesus is born of the Davidic line: He is royal, kingly, the very Prince of Peace.

Please realize that I am not here discussing personal, private relations with Christ. I am referring to the Bride of Christ, the corporate Church in corporate worship, that great gathering wherein self-centered worship ceases. I am talking about the gathering of the faithful, where the goal of worship is not about acquiring a blessing or feeling or some such edification. Corporate worship is where the self is to be subsumed by the centrality of God's place in the universe. It is not the obliteration of self, but its humility. Worship isn't some transaction wherein we indebt God to bless us; worship is a discipline of corporate life. Personal edification is available in all the other parts of church life: in cell groups, prayer meetings, home fellowships, Bible studies and everything else. The goal for us in corporate worship is unity, where the body corporate learns to act, speak, pray, kneel and sing as one.

I am ultimately talking about whether the current trend to become even MORE "informal" in order to be "relevant" is indeed a good thing. Moreover, I am talking about aesthetics, about beauty. If I am to serve a lovely meal, I do not serve filet mignon on a newspaper, nor do I set the table with plastic forks. Nor do I set my guests at lawn chairs in the midst of the dining room; I don't burn road flares for candles, or hang a flourescent shoplight from the dining room ceiling. And while my neighbor may daily wear overalls to work, I don't ask him to join me at the Ritz-Carlton for tea in those clothes because that is what he "understands." To do so is to insult his intelligence and his dignity.†

There is nothing harmful in aiming high in anything, particularly when that anything is the worship of God. But there seems to be this almost conceited idea that because Jesus called us brothers and sisters, we get to define what corporate worship means by comparisons we draw from our homes. If Jesus is indeed merely my brother, then He is like no brother I've ever known. And that, I can tell you, is a good thing.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

[Part IV begins here.]

†(For compelling books on Christian aesthetics, see Calvin Seerveld's Rainbows for a Fallen World, or D. Bruce Lockerbie's The Timeless Moment. The reviewer's comment at Amazon.com regarding Lockerbie's book is accurate, though far too brief.)