Keith Drury, "Why I like Catholics"

(via Brad)
I couldn't agree more with Drury!

Thanks, Keith, for verbalizing all the things that I've felt for over 40 years. My Dad was Catholic and my mom was Southern Baptist; they married before Vatican II and they each loved their church and attended faithfully. We kids were brought up Baptist.

I have fond memories of mealtimes reminisicent of Acts 2, where simultaneously the Lord was beseeched: "Bless us O Lord and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Through Christ, Our Lord, Amen” and "Come Lord Jesus Be our Guest May our daily food be blest Amen." No wonder I grew up to be Evangelical Covenant. I thank God to have experienced the best of both worlds.

"Here are seven things I like about you:

1." I appreciate how you preserved Christianity

....Thanks for keeping the Christian torch burning for all those years, even if it flickered at times. We Protestants have been around only half that long and frankly, the torch were carrying today is flickering too.... "

2. "I like how you stand firm

... You don’t set church policy by taking a poll or having a vote of “the people,” pandering to the common denominator of the masses’ desires..."

3. "I like how politically balanced your pope is

...We Protestants always seem to wind up on one side or the other politically. Your pope scolds conservatives and liberals alike..."

4. "I like how you emphasize the Lord’s Supper

...Many Protestants treat Communion like it is a pain in the rear and something to get over with quickly so we can fill up the service with our own words. You Catholics really take this Sacrament seriously and I admire that..."

5. "I like how you kneel in worship

....When I was a kid we “holiness people” were always kneeling in worship too, but we don’t do that anymore since we moved to the suburbs...."

6. "I like how you emphasize confession

...You’ve kept the idea of sin and confession in your worship all the time we Protestants have been manufacturing a sinless religion which has no sins at all to confess or we lightly dismiss our daily habitual sins through “spiritual breathing.” I respect how you treat sin seriously..."

7. "I like your confidence

...We Protestants are always running around like the church is about to go out of existence if we don’t hurry up and adapt to the culture. You guys don’t seem to worry about being “kewl.” Your cardinals wear those pointy hats and bright red get-ups and march around like you are the kewlest folk of all and it is the world that is out of touch. I admire you for ignoring the world and having confidence in the supremacy of Christ’s church over the world’s styles and values. You guys even act like sooner or later all we Protestants will realize you’ve been right all along and we’ll all come home into the mother church. That’s confidence!"

Spiritual Personalities: Cornerstone, 6/10/07

So I finally got to do Corinne Ware's spirituality inventory with the Cornerstone class yesterday. I thought it would provide a good way to wrap up our yearlong study of great OT characters. http://www.fullerseminarybookstore.com/search_results.php?id_author=15061 I took great pains to point out that it is not the Gospel, just a tool for helping us understand some of the things we've been reading and studying and experiencing.

Initial defensiveness from M. and L, (M. came in late and missed my caveat; L is in his down cycle) but the kids seemed to respond. I made a masking tape cross through the middle of the room, and numbered the quadrants. The kids took the inventory, then I invited them to stand in the quadrant in which they had the most hits. Not suprisingly, most fell into #2; Joanna, Will, Aaron were in #1, and Kaylee stood alone in #3. No one stood in #4.

I asked them to recall all the different OT characters we've studied this year, and give an example of one for each quadrant. "Moses!" for #1. "David!" for #2. "Daniel!" for #3. "Joseph!" for #4. (Joseph? Hmmn. I would have said Samson...) Then I asked them to consider Jesus, who stands at the still point of the cross, spanning all quadrants and inviting us all into a deeper knowledge/love of Him. In so doing we will draw closer to one another.

Finally, we stood in our quadrants and held hands, making a circle, and thanked God for giving us our different personalities and gifts, and for allowing us to enter into the Story He has been telling, from OT through NT through the history of the church to this very moment to eternity. It was my small effort to remind the kids that Christian life is not just a matter of their individual experience, or even their experience in the VCC youth group, their experience at CHIC, their experience as 21st century Gen-X American Protestants--muchless their experience of Velvet Elvis.

Then it was time for worship. Steve gave a great sermon on creation ex nihilo:

"God takes nothing and fills it with something. He takes death and turns it into life. He can fill the nothingness in your life and in mine. God changed the world’s nothing into something. And when through our sin the nothing snuck back into His creation, when our lives and our relationships and our hearts got holes in them, God came to us. He came into the world Himself to feel our emptiness. He filled peoples’ stomachs and healed their bodies. Then He let us hang Him up on a Cross and make holes in Him. He took all those holes, all that emptiness, and filled it with grace. As Philippians 2:7 says, Jesus Christ emptied Himself, made Himself nothing, so that we, so that His world could be something again.

God calls you by name and raises you out of nothing into someone. His grace is there for you. If you feel like your heart is empty, then it’s ready for God. If you feel like you’ve got nothing to offer, then He has something for you. In Jesus the power and grace that made a universe out of nothing are ready to make something out of you."

I can't wait to see how Jesus is going to resurrect us. Maranatha.

Of cups and choruses

Brad mentions's Michael Spencer's blog, http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/five-post-evangelical-answers-for-todays-evangelical-crisis in which Spencer writes,

"we need to find a way to simply have less music in evangelical worship. I don’t say that out of any distaste for art or from a lack of appreciation for the need to reach musicians and people with musical gifts. I mean exactly what I mean: in the typical evangelical church, there is simply too much music, too much attention to music, too much judged by music, and too much attributed to music."

"Beyond Words" has this comment:

I think the downfall of evangelical musical worship is that electronically amplified music divides the music experience between the performers and the congregation even more than elevated choir lofts and organs did in the past. Praise is not a corporate act when you can’t hear yourself think, let alone hear the voices next to you. Also, Pop/rock band music requires a particular set of skills that marginalizes the participation of otherwise musically gifted people and creates a sort of celebrity clique.


I think Beyond Words has a point, and it is an ironic one. One of the Protestant gripes about Catholics during the Reformation was that the chalice was restricted to the officiating priest. Article 30 of the Anglican Church's 39 Articles of Religion is entitled "Of both kinds" and states:"The Cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the Lay-people: for both the parts of the Lord's Sacrament, by Christ's ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike."

While music is not a sacrament, in my lifetime, I think it has gone the way of the 13th century chalice. Music is less and less a corporate act; and yet it is more and more the focus of our attention. Is church music the evangelical equivalent of the priesthood? Hmmm.