Having generally experienced and appreciated services from all walks of life, from charismatic to retired, I am referring less to the form of worship than to its content, so I would like to make one observation: the Psalms, the hymn book found in The Bible itself, has been almost entirely neglected by the contemporary Western Evangelical Church. I don’t know why, but I have an instinctive feeling that it has more than little to do with the fact that much of the psalter is made of regrets, of feeling sad, unhappy, tormented and broken.
In modern Western culture, these are simply unbelievable emotions: of course, people feel these things, but to admit that they are part of everyday life is to admit failure in today’s society of health, wealth and happiness. And, of course, if someone admits them, you shouldn’t accept or take responsibility for them: you have to blame your parents, sue the company you work for, take medication, or go to a clinic to ward off those dysfunctional emotions and regain the image of yourself.
- You see.
- No one expects the world to have much time for the weakness of the Psalmist’s cries; however.
- It is very disturbing to see these cries of mourning disappear from the language and worship of the Church.
- Is there no need to cry? but this would be sadly deceived by his health in terms of number.
- Influence.
- And spiritual maturity.
- And I think that’s more likely? She has drunk so much from the sources of Western materialism that she simply does not know what to do with such claims and thinks they would in fact be somewhat embarrassing.
- But is it the human condition misery?.
Does an uninterrupted regime of joyful hymns and songs inevitably create a horizon of unreal expectations that regard ordinary Christian life as a long triumphal celebration?A theologically incorrect and pastorally deastrous scenario in a world of fallen human beings. Is there an unconscious belief that Christianity is, or should it be?Did righteous health, wealth, and joy corrupt the content of our worship?Few Christians in areas where the church has strengthened in recent decades?China, Africa, Eastern Europe? They would consider moments of emotional well-being as the normal Christian experience.
In fact, biblical portraits of the lives of believers do not give rise to such a notion. See Abraham, Joseph, David, Jeremiah, and detailed accounts of the Psalmists’ experiences. So much agony, so much regret, occasional despair? And joy. In itself, when it manifests itself, they are very different from the ephemeral triumphalism that has spread much of our modern Western Christianity. In the Psalms, God gave the Church a language that allows her to express even the deepest sufferings of the human soul in the context of worship. Does our language of contemporary worship reflect the horizon of expectations about the experience of the believer that the psalter proposes as normative?Have the comfortable values of Western middle-class consumerism quietly infiltrated the Church and led us to consider such irrelevant and shameful protests and signs of total failure?
Have I ever suggested in a church leadership meeting that the Psalms should have a higher priority in evangelical worship than they usually have?And an outraged person told me in terms not too kind that such a vision showed a heart with no interest in evangelization. on the contrary, do I think it is the exclusion of the experiences and expectations of the Psalmists from our cult?and therefore our expectations are largely responsible for the paralysis of the Church’s evangelizing efforts in the West and have made us spiritual dwarves.
By excluding the cries of loneliness, disappointment and desolation from its worship, the church has effectively silenced and excluded the voices of those who are alone, disappointed and repentant, both inside and outside the church. In doing so, he implicitly supported the worldly aspirations of consumerism, begat a triumphant Christianity of bad taste, insignificant and unrealistic, and confirmed his impeccable references with a club of complacents.
I recently asked three very different types of evangelical audiences what wretched Christians could sing in the church. Every time, my question provoked great laughter, as if the idea of a desperate, repentant Or just so absurd Christian would even be comical. Although I asked the question quite seriously, is it surprising that modern evangelism, from charismatic to retired, is practically a comfortable middle-class phenomenon?