Friends
I was talking to a friend of mine last week who was passing through on her way from another part of the country. She was speaking of the palpable sense of the Holy Spirit that she had felt when visiting a particular church which she has since joined, and I came face to face once more with that particular thing that I have found which is that for many of us, the moments when we truly feel the Spirit moving are when we are really singing praise to God in a community of people who are also singing praise. I have often worried about this, because I usually associate that with really great church musicians, and we are not overly blessed with those at the moment. However, it came to me last Sunday, that although the musicians help, it is the whole-hearted singing that gives the real sense of God’s presence. Can we, I wonder, still achieve that without a top-flight organist or a talented band? Is it a requirement for us to have those in order to sing, or are we able ourselves to sing with such joy to the Lord that the accompaniment doesn’t matter?
I think of moments when the style of accompaniment has seemed irrelevant and we have really rocked them in the aisles. Of course, it helps if the songs are known, I do recognise that, and sometimes I think you will know a hymn because I know it and after all, you don’t. However, I wonder also if there is something about our natural reticence that stops us really singing out. Miriam in her time and David in his leading the people in a processional dance of praise feels a little awkward to many of us. Yet we are the people of God whose desire is to praise him. I wonder, even backed by the hymnal as many of us are nowadays, whether we can’t find that place where the praising of God seems to flow through us and join with the rest of the congregation in something that is greater than the sum of its parts?
Walter Brueggeman, the great contemporary theologian, suggests that worship is after all performance, but it is not the performance of the minister, readers or choir to the congregation, rather the whole of the worship is a great oratorio performance to and for God, with the minister as both conductor and soloist, the worship leaders and readers as principals and the whole of the congregation as the choir. I wonder what difference thinking in those terms might mean to our worship?
God bless
Vicci