Know Tea

This is actually adapted from a reply to a comment on this very blog from two years ago.

Today we were talking about what to do for the Fourth of July. There is a huge church here in town that does a patriotic extravaganza. We won’t be attending. Now it’s not because I don’t like patriotic extravaganzas at churches. I don’t, but that’s not why we’ll not be attending. (Before I get letters from Don Wildmon and/or the John Birch society, it’s not that I hate America. It’s that I get queasy when churches mix Christianity with Americanism. You won’t see any American flags in our church sanctuary, on the Fourth of July or any other day. We are citizens of the Kingdom of God, and that transcends nationality, race, and every other division human beings can think up. End of mini-sermon.) No, we won’t be attending because I’ve heard this church choir many times on TV.

And they suck.

Let me clarify: it’s not that I object that the music isn’t being perfectly executed by a top-notch, professional group. It’s that the music is not even done to the level capable of the group in question. I know that even our best is, in God’s eyes, far short of what he actually deserves. We’re not perfect, and nothing we make, including music, will ever be perfect.

I am talking about the practice of just “tossing something off” without any effort to make it sound good, without any effort to do it well. I don’t get phoning in worship. I guess this is related to the “It’s for Jesus so it doesn’t matter” attitude one of the local homeschool moms was trying to teach our children earlier this year. The minister of music at this church in question has the skills at his disposal to teach those people something about music. He certainly has the skills to know that a Western Swing beat does not fit with the singing of “Holy, Holy, Holy” (and oh, yes, they did too).

I have the same reaction when musicians don’t practice what they’re going to play in worship. I can’t understand someone slaving away to perfect a concert piece, but when it comes to playing for worship, they don’t practice. A worship service is no time to sight-read a hymn or any other piece of music. Whatever happened to “Give of your best to the Master”?

In Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, Shug Avery said she thought it must tick God off (I’m paraphrasing) whenever someone walks by the color purple and doesn’t notice it. How do you think he feels when people phone in their worship, people who are capable of far better?

Hebrews 12:28-29 says “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” If we are told to offer to God acceptable worship, that means that some worship is unacceptable to God. The verse tells us what kind of worship God finds unacceptable: worship that is not characterized by reverence and/or awe. Phoning it in is not reverent. “It’s for Jesus so it doesn’t matter” is not awe-inspiring.

You’d think people would get that, wouldn’t you?

Living in the Southern U.S. of A. as we do, most of the Christians we know are of the Southern Baptist variety, or of some Evangelical offshoot thereof. (Most of the non-denominational or independent churches around here are splits from Baptist churches. A lot of the non-denominational churches near us really are Baptist churches but don’t want to include the word “Baptist” in their name, because they fear it may scare away the unchurched.)

If you are a Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed (incl. Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, and UCC), Anglican/Episcopal, or Lutheran Christian and you live in the South, you have at one point or another had a “discussion” with someone else about the subject of infant baptism vs. “believers’ baptism.” (Disclaimer: what I am about to say does not apply to the Baptist readers of this blog, each of whom is a very respecful, open-minded individual.) They will often want to tell you that you haven’t really been baptized because you haven’t been baptized “the right way” and at “the right time.” Many delight to use the term “Christening” to describe an infant baptism, using the term pejoratively to connote “a ritual that isn’t really baptism, but that some people only think is a real baptism.” (In fact, “Christening” is a synonym for baptism, not something different from baptism. Every baptism is a Christening, because through baptism a person becomes a part of the visible Church. Through baptism, we take up the Name of Christ. A feature of infant baptism, traditionally, is the child’s receiving his/her forename, which is why your first name is also called your “Christian name.”)

Within the PCA, many (if not most?) of our membership have come to us as transfers either from Baptist churches or from one of the aforementioned non-denominational/independent churches, so infant baptism is always a new and strange thing. Because the PCA is so small, and in the South, any Christian church that is not Baptist is in a decided minority, both Baptists and non-Baptists alike may very easily be led to believe that “believers’ baptism” is the norm among Christians, with infant baptism being a curiosity, practiced by only a handful of churches.

Indeed, one commenter on a blog recently, who had joined a PCA church from one with a believers’ baptism orientation, referred to allowing his/her children to receive covenant baptism as “going with the PCA thing.” No, infant baptism isn’t just “the PCA thing.” Neither is it just “the Presbyterian thing.”

Let’s look at the numbers:

Churches that practice infant baptism (with approximate membership, stats from adherents.com):

Roman Catholic - 1.5 Billion

Eastern Orthodox - 240 Million

Reformed (incl. Presbyterian, Congregational, UCC, etc.) - 75 Million

Anglican - 73 Million

Methodist - 70 Million

Lutheran - 64 Million

New Apostolic Church - 10 Million

Churches that do not practice infant baptism:

Pentecostal = 105 Million

Baptist - 70 Million

Jehovah’s Witness* - 14.8 Million

Latter Day Saints* - 12.5 Million

Adventist - 12 Million

Campbellite (”Restoration” Churches, incl. Church of Christ) - 5.4 Million

Brethren - 1.5 Million

Mennonite - 1.25 Million

*Although many Evangelicals, including most Baptists, would not accept JW or LDS baptism as valid (as these are not Trinitarian churches), I included their numbers lest I be accused of short-changing those who do not practice infant baptism.

Totals: Approximately 2,032,000,000 (Two Billion, Thirty-two Million) Christians worldwide who practice infant baptism. Approximately 222,450,000 (Two hundred twenty-two million,four hundred fifty thousand) Christians who do not practice infant baptism, and that’s if we count the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. That means over 90% of the world’s Christians practice infant baptism. Infant baptism is hardly just “the PCA thing.” Looks more like infant baptism is, for the largest part, “the Christian thing.”

If we look only at Protestant groups, and leave out the LDS, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the New Apostolic Churches, we see that appoximately 61% of Protestants worldwide practice infant baptism, while only 39% do not. Again, hardly “the PCA thing.”

I do not say this to denigrate my friends who believe in believers’ baptism. This is just to put things into perspective. I would, however, issue a plea to those of you who do not practice infant baptism and like to make an issue out of it (usually those of the “Fundamentalist” stripe): do not denigrate my baptism or my children’s baptism, because I certainly don’t denigrate yours. Don’t call it a “Christening” in that condescending way. If you routinely refer to all baptisms (regardless of the mode or timing of them) as Christenings, then fine. But most of you don’t. You distinguish a “Christening” from a “real” baptism (i.e. a baptism done your way). Those of us who practice infant baptism accept that others practice baptism in different ways, and we accept your believer’s baptism as valid. We are respectful of your traditions: show a little respect for ours. The same goes for putting baptism in scare quotes when referring to infant baptism, thusly: infant “baptism.” I see this all the time on the blogs. It’s pugnacious and rude.

I was also surprised to find that, worldwide, the Reformed Churches outnumber the Baptists and the Methodists. Growing up Reformed in the Southern U.S. means you’re always in a decided minority!

As anyone can tell from reading this blog, I have close relationships with many Baptists and have worked closely with them over the years. Most of them, I know, find the kind of attitudes I’m describing just as horrific as I do. St. Paul said there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” Why some people want to make it something that divides us rather than unites us is beyond me.

We often use this Post-communion Prayer in our worship, from the Liturgy of Lima:

“O Lord our God, we give you thanks for uniting us by baptism in the Body of Christ and for filling us with joy in the Eucharist. Lead us towards the full visible unity of your Church and help us to treasure all the signs of reconciliation you have granted us. Now that we have tasted of the banquet you have prepared for us in the world to come, may we all one day share together the inheritance of the saints in the life of your heavenly city, through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.”

That’s what baptism is there for. Uniting us in the Body of Christ. The visible unity of the church. A sign of reconciliation. That we would be one is Jesus’ prayer (John 17). That we would bite and devour one another is not Christ’s idea, but someone else’s entirely.

The theology of and historicity of infant baptism is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say, however, that we who believe in and practice infant baptism do not practice it because we think it’s cute. We don’t practice it simply because it’s traditional. And we don’t practice it because we think it’s like a magic trick or a good luck charm. We have convictions about infant baptism that are derived from Scripture every bit as much as your convictions about believers’ baptism are. A little tolerance, please. Look at the numbers: if you lived somewhere else besides the Southern U.S., you’d be in the decided minority, and you’d want that same tolerance shown to you, wouldn’t you?

Tent meetings were once common in the U.S. They were a product of the Second Great Awakening. A tent meeting (or “tent revival”) was usually a two-week long affair, with singing and evangelistic preaching every night. In small towns across the U.S., a tent meeting was a big deal. Many of us have heard older people tell stories about “walking the sawdust trail” in response to an evangelist’s invitation at a tent meeting.

The tent revival was pretty much long gone in the U.S. by the time we were asked to help with them in Germany, but the German churches were still holding tent meetings, with great success. (They Germans have since moved on to other methods of evangelism, but in the late 1980s the Zeltmission was still a big deal in the small towns of Germany as it had once been in our own country.)

Sarah Groves wrote and recorded a song called “Tent in the Center of Town,” which vividly recounts the excitement associated with those tent meetings long ago here in the U.S. The song is, for me, extremely evocative of our experience with the Zeltmissionen in Germany.

My good friend, Chip Colee, is Minister of Music at the First Baptist Church of Montgomery. Chip was involved in the 1988 and 1989 Zeltmissionen. He has taken Sarah Groves’ song and paired it with footage of us from the Zeltmissionen in Ingelheim and in Bebra. He did a great job. Here’s the link to the video.

Well done, Chip.

(Note: the “ß” in some of these German words is an ess-tzett. It is equivalent to a double “s” and is pronounced as a double “s.”)

Here is another song we used in 1988 in the Zeltmissionen in Stolberg, Borken, Ingelheim, and Bebra. We also used it (along with the others I’ve posted) in 1989 in Westerstede, where our Aachener friends Angie and Trippi joined us for another Zeltmission!

This one is very much like the typical “Praise and Worship” (Lobpreis) music used in most American Evangelical churches today. The text is a paraphrase of Psalm 148. (Hier gibt Psalm 148 auf Deutsch.)

Sonne, Mond und Sterne,
Wellen, Meer und Sand
sind Zeugen seiner Herrlichkeit,
seiner Schöpferhand.
Jeder kleine Kieselstein, jeder Tropfen Tau
preist Gottes Größe und Macht!

Refrain:
Laßt uns loben unsern Gott und Vater,
laßt uns preisen und anbeten den Herrn!
Seine Liebe endet nie, jetzt und ewig währet sie.
Laßt uns preisen und lobsingen dem Herrn!

Vögel, Bäume, Blumen,
Himmel, Erde, Land
sind Zeugen seiner Herrlichkeit,
seiner Schöpferhand.
Jeder Regentropfen, jedes Schneekristall
preist Gottes Größe und Macht! (Refrain)

Wir als seine Kinder
wissen uns geliebt;
sind sicher, daß er an uns denkt,
unsre Schuld vergibt.
Er kennt uns mit Namen, weiß, wie es uns geht.
Treu und gerecht ist der Herr! (Refrain)

Sun, moon, and stars,
Waves, ocean, and sand,
Are signs of his glory,
His creative hand!
Every little hailstone, every drop of sleet,
Worships God’s greatness and might!

(Refrain:)
Let us praise our God and Father,
Let us worship and adore the Lord!
His love never ends: it keeps us now and forever.
Let us worship and sing praise to the Lord!

Birds, trees, flowers,
Sky, ground, land,
Are signs of his glory,
His creative hand!
Every raindrop, every snowflake,
Worships God’s greatness and might! (Refrain)

We, as his children,
Know we are loved;
We are confident that he is mindful of us,
And he forgives our guilt.
He knows us by name, knows how we are (knows what concerns us),
Faithful and righteous is the Lord! (Refrain)

I’ve been writing a few articles about some of the songs I sang as a part of the Zeltmission Group in the summer of 1988. (See the last few entries.) Obviously this series has been staggeringly popular, due to the innumerable comments that keep pouring in on an hourly basis. OK, enough facetiousness. But for those of you who are bored to tears by this, just bear with me.

In the 1980s and well into the 1990s, Contemporary Christian Music in the US was mired in Sandi Patty/David Clydesdale hell. Long on bombast, short on content. The music that wasn’t of the “let’s see how many times I can change keys in one song and how high of a note I can end on” variety was of the “sounds just like” variety. (I’ve written before about the charts youth leaders used to give out: “If you like Journey, listen to Petra. They sound just like Journey!”) Glitzy, superficial, derivative, vague. In 1998, when musician Steve Camp posted his 107 Theses lamenting the state of CCM, I knew whereof he spoke.

The songs we encountered in Germany were different. Musically speaking, they weren’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea, but lyrically they went places that American CCM wouldn’t have dreamed of going.

One such song was “Wir wissen so wenig.” I can’t find all the lyrics, but it began . . .

Wir wissen so wenig von den Dingen
Und von den Sachen die uns gelingen . . .

(We know so little about the things at which we will succeed.)

The second verse began . . .

Wir können nur rätseln wo der Grund ist,
Und ob was runde auch wirklich rund ist . . .

(We can only guess where the ground is, and whether something round is really round . . .)

In 1988 I had not heard of postmodernism, but here was a song that took postmodernism on directly. It spoke to the postmodern way of thinking. A far cry from the standard CCM fare back home, which at the time was of the “Love Will Be Our Home” ilk.

There is so little we know for certain, the song says. We deconstruct everything now. We can’t even be sure that something round is really round. But, the song says,

Doch wir sind sicher daß das was keine gehört und gesehen hat,
Gott unser Herr denen schenkt die ihn vertrauen und ihn lieben.

But we are sure of that which no one has heard and seen,
That God, our Lord, gives to those who trust and love him.

We can’t even be sure which way is up sometimes, but we can be sure of things that no one has ever heard or seen. Isn’t that what we hear about every Sunday in the Benediction?

“The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord . . .”

Wir wissen so wenig. We know so little. Ah, but what we do know more than makes up for it!

The text and music of this song were written by the great Protestant theologian, Lothar Gassmann. Unlike my translation of das Vaterunser, this is a literal one, not a poetic one.

Kommt zum Fest des Lebens

Refrain:
Kommt zum Fest des Lebens!
Jesus lädt uns ein.
Lasst euch Leben zeigen,
das mehr ist als Arbeit und Angst und Schein!

1. Kommt, ihr Traurigen, kommt, ihr Fragenden,
Jesus Christus ist die Antwort, die ihr sucht! (Refrain)

2. Wo Verzweiflung ist, da wird Freude sein,
Jesus lebt und nimmt der Dunkelheit die Macht. (Refrain)

3. Der, der Jesus liebt, ihm sein Leben gibt,
baut auf festen Fells und nicht auf losen Sand. (Refrain)

Refrain:
Come to life’s feast!
Jesus invites us.
Let us show you a life
That is more than work and anxiety and appearances.

Come, you who are sorrowful,
Come, you who are questioning;
Jesus Christ is the answer you seek. (Refrain)

Where there is despair,
There will be joy,
Jesus lives and takes away the power of darkness! (Refrain)

The one who loves Jesus,
who gives Him his life,
builds on the solid rock and not on loose sand. (Refrain)

I’ve been working on a reunion of the group with whom I spent the summer of 1988 in Germany. Fifteen American students from Samford spent over two months in Germany, spending two weeks each in four cities doing evangelistic work. In each city, we were paired with a Jugendchor of the same size as ours (or slightly larger) with whom we sang in the streets and in schools during the day, and in the Zelt at night for a two-week tent meeting (Zeltevangelisation). We were helping to plant and/or strenthen churches belonging to the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland. [Read more →]

We finally got back from Dallas last night. More on the General Assembly later.

Living out of a hotel room for seven days is a pain.

It’s so nice to be home and not to have to go out to eat every meal! It was very nice being in the same hotel as the meetings (that was not the case last year) but in some ways I’d rather have been at a Residence Inn or some other place with a kitchen so we could cook some/most of the meals instead of eating in restaurants.

And the restaurant prices at this particular hotel were ridiculous. Even for hotel restaurant prices. Absolutely ridiculous.

Anyway, it’s good to be back. My apologies to my loyal readers for the paucity of interesting things to read this past week. I’ll try to make it up to you.

I’ve had a cold this week and haven’t felt like doing much of anything, hence the silence on here.  I think I’m feeling a little better, I guess.  Stay tuned.

When Nixon made his famous “I am not a crook” statement, he was standing in the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World.