Sunday, October 22, 2006

A Guest Post

Hebel's first guest post is by Michael Wells, of St. Hilda's Katoomba, and Lord willing a 2007 first year Moore student. It's a post from sydneyanglicans.net and you'll find the original context here (basically a debate, some how spinning out of discussion on the New Capital Works project, on whether or not liturgy still has a role in church). "As a 20's person, I want to bolster the case for liturgy, if it is owned and believed by the congregation. To a certain extent I think we have been sucked in to the secular idea that 'church' only exists on Sundays. So we try and do everything on Sunday, proclaim the word, worship together and try and make meaningful contact and fellowship. We rightly see that the church has a vertical relationship to God and horizontal relationship to others, and an outward one to those in the community. But do we have to cram all these into our Sunday meeting? I wonder whether by making all (almost) Sunday services informal, we miss out on the rich majesty of our God and the biblical significance of our meeting together, whether we swap true fellowship for a 15 minute chat over coffee and whether we are left with much to invite our friends and neighbors to. Traditional liturgy made the whole church service proclamation, in which the whole congregation participated, and my worry is that we slide into a position where only the precher proclaims. Perhaps we need to encourage young people to be creating not bland informality, but their own symbolically rich (yet biblically sound as a pound!) corporate expression and proclamation." - Michael Wells 10 points if you can name the Cathedral.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah Mikey! I used to get frustrated with this and cop out with 'a balance between the two' can we have church that is open in its fellowship while at the same time representing the aweful God? How do people relate now? Are they required to learn church culture to experiance kingdom with his people, or is that an unatural expectation of Joe Bloe.

IHS
Angus

byron smith said...

Ely cathdral in northern England.

Nice point about the loss of liturgy silencing the congregation.

Matthew Moffitt said...

10 points Byron!

Matthew Moffitt said...

Byron sent me this quote from Hauerwas:

"One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend."
— Stanley Hauerwas, The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life, 89.

byron smith said...

Thanks - I hope you're keeping a tally...

It did help that the picture is called "250px-Ely_Cathedral_3.jpg"... :-)
But I will still accept the ten points.

Matthew Moffitt said...

Next time gadget, next time!