escapingbabylon.com

LaTonya Taylor of Urban Faith, while writing a tribute to Walter Hawkins gave some really good insight into Gospel Music that is a really good articulation of things that I’ve never been able to articulate.

There are at least five things I value in traditional, choir-driven gospel music above all else:
1. Clarity of the gospel message.
2. Accessibility to the local church choir and musicians.
3. An aspirational quality — that is, songs a choir can sing next Sunday, and continue to sing better through the years.
4. Singability for the choir, and saaaangability for the lead vocalist.
5. Demanding music that doesn’t scrub out the spontaneity or experiential nature of gospel.

Additionally, I believe strongly that good gospel for the church setting stays on the side of congregational song rather than concert performance. If the congregation can’t sing a song without getting ensnared in a labyrinthine thicket of vamps, key changes, and vocal acrobatics, that song positions the congregation as an audience, rather than as a body of people participating together in worship.

Goin’ Up Yonder – UrbanFaith.com.

She also posts the following video and says

By 3 minutes and 16 seconds in, it’s all over, and it’s just begun. Here you hear the narrative poly-vocality that creates one song out of two, and contextualizes the individual experience within that of a community. As the choir rocks steadily into the repeated “I’m going away,” Hawkins sings over them, giving specificity to that general vision. If you’ve ever sung lead over a song like this, you know that the interchange between your voice and the collective voice of the choir is the difference between having a perfunctory rehearsal and having church. The community girds you from beneath, lifts you up and over a cloud of witnesses, empowers you to speak your piece, as long as you’re willing to speak for everybody.

This last paragraph is amazing for two reasons. Firstly, it’s completely accurate about the experience of singing lead on a song like this. Secondly, it captures a bit of how community is expressed and modeled in the practice of gospel music. In this music, individuality and community are not opposing forces. The lead singer isn’t being asked to simply sing the song but to “saaang”. The song is not complete unless it is processed and expressed through the lead singers own experience, ability, belief and emotion to become something that only that singer can do. But this is not done in opposition to the community of the choir, but in harmony with it. When done well, the choir leaves room for the individual expression of the lead, and the lead leaves room for the community voice of the calendar, and all are in tune with each other and with the director so that the song may be contextualized to the particular emotions, event, and move of the Spirit that’s happening at that particular time.

I thought this was cool. Go check out the blog post. Let me know what you think.

So some of you may know that I’ve been doing the children’s story at Pilgrim. The Children’s story is a time during our regular service where someone will call the kids up and share a story, message, mini-sermon or whatever that is targeted towards the children.

It’s a good way to communicate to the kids that they are important enough to have a section devoted to them in the adult service (though it would be great if adult services could also be kid friendly, but that’s another story).

So at the urging of an amazing friend of mine, I’ve started putting the illustrations online at a blog called Play Dough Gospel. Feel free to check it out, and let me know what you think.

p.s. That site looks significantly better in any browser but Internet Explorer.

• I’ve figured out my relationship to Christmas, but I still haven’t figured out my relationship to Lent.
• That being said, I think I’ve found a personal, legitimate reason to fast (and no, I’m not officially sharing it here yet).
• It messes me up when an 8 year old casually says to me that their father is in jail, and has been there “forever”. I hope that’s something I never get used to.
• During the Children’s Story today, I spoke about the Parable of the Mustard Seed . One of the women in church gave me a small packet of mustard seeds after service. Another member gave her a pack when she was in the hospital with cancer. Though (and because) she’s been cancer free for years, she’s always carried a packet with her as a reminder.
• I’ve been considering that small package all day. I think that God wants us to consider that the Kingdom of God is such that the things that seem small right now can transform a community so that 8 year olds no longer refer to incarcerated fathers as another fact of life.
• I realize that this post may make more sense if I had already done the Kingdom of God post. It’s coming. It’s a bigger, more personal post than I had originally thought.

Wrath by matchstick

Over the past month, I’ve had at least two online conversations where I’ve realized that the idea of a broken world was a fundamental assumption beneath the words I was saying. I had a couple of other directions to go with this series on my current personal theology, but I think it may be best to go here for a little bit.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that the world is broken.  We can see negative effects of hatred and greed all over the world, and in almost every aspect of life. Hatred and greed are systemic problems, and we are the architects of the system of our demise. This brokenness is the opposite of shalom, that state of harmony with God, God’s works, and God’s creation.

We were created for shalom, but from the appearance of the first human being, we’ve chosen to reject it, and embrace hatred, selfishness, and greed. We’ve chosen, and continue to choose our independence from God over our harmony with God, and as each of us makes those choices, we become broken people. We are a society of broken people, and as such the systems of the world show this brokenness. And so every system(including religious systems) we try to create to alleviate this brokenness, fails. The truth, borne out by history, is that we just don’t have the strength to fix the brokenness on our own. But all of our systems do point towards shalom in different ways, but like the proverbial blind men, we only perceive a piece of the elephant.

So for now we remain broken, and both our planet and our people suffer for it. It’s a suffering of our own making. Like I said at the beginning, we are the architects of our own demise.

Sometimes I look at my personal theology, and I think it’s a very strange thing. For example, I easily find myself rejecting the idea of using God and Christianity as a means for gain. There’s always a part of me that cringes when someone implies that one should tithe and give offerings as a means to be blessed. That same part cringes when someone puts forward the idea that getting out of hell should be one’s motivation to follow Jesus.

It’s strange, because I do believe that God’s promises to provide for His followers also extends financially. I also believe that following Jesus will keep you out of hell. But for some reason, in my mind these are side effects, not the thing to be chased after.

So if neither temporal blessing nor eternal security is the thing, then what is? For me (and I’m under no illusions that this may be universal) the thing is rightness, the thing is the ever-elusive shalom. I think the greatest thing, and honestly the thing that motivates me to continue is the desire to be joined/connected/in right relationship with God, and with God’s work.