Churchy Searchy Heart

Doin’ That Old Church Hop

Christian musician Ray Boltz had a hit, an up-tempo swing ditty called “Church Hop”. It’s still fun to listen to that little number occasionally on YouTube as he takes a swipe at the seekers who never seem to land anywhere. We’ve all met them. They’re “nice” folks. They sound good. Yet they perpetually “aren’t being fed” or disappear after a few visits. Later you hear they had some problem with this or that element of the churches they visited but never joined. 

Reading Book IV of Calvin’s “Institutes” recently at the prompting of my pastor and elders had me thinking about the paper-thin theology and soon to be sun-dried, withered faith of these shallow-rooted folks. I’ve begun using the term “apparent Christians” for the 21st century folks doing that old church hop. They think it’s ok and probably don’t know any better than to look at the world solely as consumers, including when they look at the Church. In their minds, the best church is the best “product” with the features they find most desirable, including criteria they’ve absorbed from both sacred and vulgar sources. They think the Corpus Christi is something you shop for or join, you know, like the Rotary or Kiwanis Clubs. They certainly don’t see themselves as Calvin puts it: “Ambassadors of Christ sent from the Embassy of Reconciliation, namely the Church.”

Leaving a church body in your rear-view mirror is not trivial; it is a grave moment. John Calvin ominously summarized the problem after extensive treatment, “Abandonment of the Church is always fatal”.

Living out a healthy ecclesiology when circumstances pull you up by the roots and suddenly plant you away from your beloved local fellowship is a grave moment of truth. You now must do that old church hop yourself and your convictions must be lived out. 

For me, it was easy to pontificate about such matters ensconced on the session of a sound CREC fellowship until rather unexpectedly, we were suddenly in the Bible belt where you can’t throw a rock without hitting a Baptist church of some variety. They range from little ones with seemingly paper mâché’ steeples to the New Hope, No Hope and Beyond Hope Baptist churches. The first, second and 23rd Baptist churches are also here; curiously, sometimes on opposing street corners.

As protestant Christians, we’ve never viewed corporate worship as our Catholic upbringing classified, “A holy day of obligation”. Obligation doesn’t seem to describe it at all. Yes, there are days when I’ve been up too late on Saturday or when the Maine weather made me hope I could roll over for a church “snow day”. But a mature person dispenses with those fleshly temptations and gets on with it. God will meet us, and He will feed us, and we will grow, and we will love Him and worship Him afresh. We are richly blessed by Him yet again, and again.

Thus, choosing a church becomes an opportunity to walk faithfully and dependently into another valley overgrown with vines, weeds, twists and turns in the prayerful hope we can be a blessing somewhere and find a church home that will have all, or most, of our theological boxes checked. Which boxes are inviolable? How many non-essentials can we swallow? Do we smell any “woke”offering burning near the altar? Are they overtly Feminist? Egalitarian? Complementarian? (Spoiler alert) Or are they Biblical?

My own journey as a worship leader/musician, deacon and elder in multiple churches on both American coasts, as well as a stint as a mariner/missionary in the Pacific has presented me at least some experience with church selection. At the time of writing this essay, I have recently had 2 major shifts in my own theology and had to come to grips with a radical (for me at least) shift in worship styles and my own understanding of what it is we do as God’s people on Sunday morning. 

Context Bestowed While Stuck in an Elevator

It began in an elevator in an old church building overlooking the Maine coast. The church is lovely and had been equipped with a handicap elevator years ago. This mechanical affair was more like a freight lift you’d see in the back of an opera house, complete with finger-pinching iron gate, plywood floor, a flashlight attached to a cable which was locked to the wall (presumably to restrain errant Baptists from becoming mendicants) and an emergency phone used to call the deacon in charge when the thing broke down between floors. This was something most long-term members had experienced, their Bibles in hand prayerfully considering whether to scream or not if the worship services had already begun just a few inches above their suddenly tenuous sanctification.

It was wicked cold, one of those “styrofoam snow” days where the snow just squeaks underfoot. I opened the church’s back door just after sunrise as I loaded into the old lift my guitars, Fender amp, mic and music stands, music book and iPad with loaded songs, my Bible, a half-eaten pastry and, that most precious of morning commodities, a hot coffee. The closing of the gate with the coffee still un-spilled had always been a thing for which I gave great thanks to the Lord. God is good, all the time.

When the lift stopped, I stood there for quite a while in the cold, unmoving elevator, my imagination suddenly carrying me back to my boyhood in New York City. I was an 8-year-old kid getting up at dawn on a Sunday morning to go sing in the Catholic church boys’ choir. Alone in the old Baptist church in a daydream, the sound of pre-adolescent boys singing beautiful 4 part harmony was almost audible. As the old lift had slowly scraped its way upward to the second-floor sanctuary it had dawned on me: I had been doing this for over 50 years. Five zero?! How did I not notice these decades of Trinitarian worship rolling on? It was comforting to reflect that yes, God has a plan for your life.

As a bona fide graybeard, it’s clear to me that we develop unique preferences for worship styles that atrophy, sometimes to our detriment. They become as hardened as whether or not you drink your coffee black, whether or not you love or hate cats, or whether you can honestly say you prefer grape juice to real wine.

A long and winding road it is. It can seem static, as week after week we are presented with a same-ness of musicians and a seemingly intractable preference for this or that type of music. The Gettys or Kari Jobe? Trinity Psalter or Celebration Hymnal? Piano only or a full complement of studio-level musicians. You get the idea.

Style and Substance in Worship

I have seen a lot of worship styles. From the boys’ choir chants echoing off the marble of an otherwise silent Catholic altar to guiding a long-haired Christian alternative rock band into becoming a sensitive, capable group of church musicians in Los Angeles. (That was in a church where charismatics fell on the floor during prayer lines, sometimes sleeping there all afternoon. The band was supposed to hang out as long as possible. Like 10,000 times of 10,000 Reasons.) 

I’ve seen a bunch of styles in between and, more recently, some very old styles of worship that are infused with a Spirit-filled dynamism that makes them seem like fresh, newly minted forms of Christian worship. Perhaps this is because they represent choices rooted in a more deliberate attempt to discern what covenantal worship is from both testaments. These ancient forms are what I would term “directional” and have a “destination”. The destination I would summarize as becoming aware that we are literally “receiving”. We are receiving from God the gifts of His Word and culminating at His banqueting table: The fulfillment of God feeding me on the body and blood of His Son Jesus Christ. He has come in and dined with me and I with Him.

Since this essay is not about modes of Christian worship per se, I will only venture here that culture and context seems to have something important to do with it and, in my opinion, when a service attempts to be Biblically informed and based on a love for God and a love for his people, you’re at least on the right road. Of course, those are sweeping generalizations and my theologically analytic buddies are writhing in restraint at such a trivial summary. But therein lieth the rub old boy. Yes, much else matters, but that’s not what this is about.

Nonetheless, style matters and in fact played a big part in my family’s shifting of churches and an ultimate resettlement in the “free-state” of Florida. Christian gatherings, especially singing in particular was violently threatened during the Covid-19 debacle. Churches here and elsewhere on the planet were suddenly shuttered or harassed for that most grievous of offenses: Singing praises to God. 

The period was difficult for church leaders, especially during the first few weeks. But Christians should always smell a rat when someone or some agency starts yelling “silence” at the church. (Just a pinch of incense to Caesar and we promise we won’t kill your family). I’ve had this happen on a smaller scale with cranky folks who hated seeing guitars or (horrors!) drums inside a church. One man stormed into a worship band practice one Sunday morning and blew up at me and our band shouting about how horrible it all was. No matter that we were there by the board and pastor’s direction. He was used to being large and in-charge and this just would not do. With my unfortunate reputation as “elder pug” at stake, I promptly pulled him aside and respectfully told him he must never do that again. He has since gone on to glory, and is likely in the a cappella section.

Our worship is a vital, potent force for good in the world and for that reason it is also hated. The apostle John tells us Cain killed his brother “….because his brother’s deeds were righteous.” Don’t be surprised brothers, that the world hates you.

Thus, it was no surprise to us that illegitimate civic leaders pounced on Covid-19 as a weapon of bioterror against Christ’s Church. As a former Californian, I was particularly impressed with Dr. John MacArthur’s unwillingness to bend the knee to the state’s chief health officer and Governor Gavin Newsom. The church closed for a few weeks so the leadership had time to get a handle on what was really happening. Then they re-opened in defiance of the governor’s order and won their freedom of worship in court, twice in fact. Mega-churches can have amazing resources and when I read the plaintiff and defendant briefs in this case, I could only be impressed with what Grace Community church had done to coalesce such a cogent response based on both sound science, constitutionally based jurisprudence and a lovely obedience to God over man.

But this essay is about selecting a church. After seeking a church with a commitment to historical, Reformed theology (a.k.a. Calvinism), one element my wife and I did use in our selection of churches was whether Covid precautions were still being stressed and/or over-emphasized. We reasoned that any serious Reformed approach would understand historical Christian dissent and be worshipping freely regardless of the chagrin and saber-rattling of overweening bureaucrats. After that, we considered worship style and structure.

Worship styles and forms (or structures) are usually at the base of most of the Evangelical church searching in current times. I wish it were not so. I wonder if it really isn’t the love shown by members to visitors that make the choice under the surface. 

Beautiful Distractions from Deity

Watching the recently released film, “Jesus Revolution”, I was reminded how my own encounter with God’s grace on the California beach was so deeply entangled with the idea that there was good contemporary music to be had in worshipping Christ Jesus. Whatever your views on Calvary Chapel, my own encounter with that and other similar movements in the late 1970s was used of God to bring me in from the cold. The Lord had sent missionaries to the culture, and they were speaking our language with guitars, drums and defensible truth, something we hadn’t seen from the host generation.

Honestly, the presence of contemporary, high-quality music when selecting a church has diminished significantly in my life, but I can’t presume to impose that on others. That’s something that occurred for me by a developing ecclesiology which acknowledges other life-giving forms of corporate worship that clearly emerge from the pages of Scripture. I was guilty of the “chronological snobbery” noted by C.S. Lewis which sees only the period in which we live. Thus, I have preached madness. I have dissed on liturgical churches and was humbled to realize how small that attitude really is. I realize now we must give much credit to our Christian ancestors who thought deeply and well as they wrestled these life giving forms into manifest church-life throughout the history of Christendom.

Enter the Heretic

Parsing our recent (A.D. 2022-2023) experiences of visiting several churches, we’ve recently landed on one that was not fully aligned with our views. I’ll explain below but first, I’ll introduce you to a heretic I know. He leads something he calls, “A True Church”. He offers a weak attempt at humility saying he doesn’t think he’s the only one on the planet who leads a true church and knows what the truth of Scripture really is. He just hasn’t found that other guy yet. And he quickly disses everyone you can think of from Calvin to Dobson to Oswald Chambers to John MacArthur to Spurgeon and…..you get the idea. They’re all headed for Hell as he puts it. He’s  spent his life beating up the sheep, slamming the Lord’s servants, and basically becoming more reprobate as his arteries progressively and proudly harden.

I mention the heretic because I see the potential for a smaller, less lethal perhaps ,tendency in our hearts to mimic his error as we evaluate other churches. Our intentions are good. We know sound doctrine matters and rotten things emerge out of rotten theology. Indeed, on a personal level, my heart breaks for what could have been a life of joy in the Lord as my heretical friend descended into becoming a literal fountain of bondage and death for himself, his followers, and his family. All because he made the prideful mistake which Calvin beautifully exposes in his reference to Paul’s handling of the Corinthian church. In this section of his Institutes, Calvin points out that the virtually apostate Corinthian church was still worth his affections, time, and effort, in spite of its awful condition. Its theology and its practices were abhorrent; but Paul loved them. This treatment by Calvin also informs those who search for a new church home and contains sound practical guidance for that journey of choosing. It also provides grave warnings against diminishing the church’s authority, stature, and purpose and mistreating its shepherds and members. No question there are deal-breaker issues, but Corinth gives us some perspective to consider in this matter of “what’s a church worth”.

Holy Mother Church

The Bible makes it clear that we are to regard the Church as a Mother, the Bride of Christ, His Body on Earth. I love how my own Maine pastor will refer to the Church on occasion as “Mrs. Jesus”. It puts a spin on it that should make one think twice about our criticisms of her. When my earthly mother spoke, I believed her. Question or criticize her irresponsibly, I might get a well-deserved smack. John Calvin makes a big deal about our not just believing in the church, but believing the Church. Yes, churches make mistakes. That’s why leaders who love Jesus first and his wayward flocks second are so vital. By loving Christ first, we may confidently impose His perfect Word. By keeping the love of our people and others in its proper place, namely a close but clearly distinct second, we lead by example. This creates a sense of spiritual health that we can palpably feel when we enter a church. “God consecrates temples by His Word”. This essentially is Calvin’s two factor litmus test of legitimacy if you will. If the Word and the Sacraments are held at least in verbal and practical regard, there is hope. Conversely, based on God’s command to worship and love Him, institutions that have no regard for God’s Word and His Sacraments can never be considered a “church”.

Thus, in the case of someone searching for a new church, we must look beyond the first blush. Soon enough, there will be warts either in the form of church practice, some point of theology, or a church bully still being tolerated by “nice” elders. Regardless of our individual gifting and personality, all of us will have our work cut out for us in any church. That is by our Lord’s design.

So where did we land here in the Bible belt? Our criteria of visiting only those gatherings who hold Word and Sacrament in highest regard led us to a smattering of churches that were Reformed in their orientation. 

A Minimum of Compromise-Some Church Reviews

Of course, there are denominational and localized differences. Ultimately, we realized we’re in a situation whereby we are seeking a minimal amount of compromise. Any whiff of fundamentalism would have us headed for the doors; we interpret that as a major offense to the Cross. But in visiting a Lutheran and an Anglican (both named Christ the King, ironically the name of our church home in Maine), two Presbyterian churches, two reformed Baptist congregations and two modernized SBC churches, we didn’t get many whiffs of odiferous legalism. That was refreshing.

We did however find churches that were proud of their lady elders and almost pushing that to the forefront as something we must certainly be looking for. We weren’t of course. We also attended more lightly egalitarian churches that were operating under what they believed to be earnest theological conclusions. All the churches we attended asserted a full commitment to inerrancy.

The SBC churches had a “fun factor” for the consumer. Great bands, movie set backdrops and high energy guys up front. Clocks with big digital timers were on the walls for the leadership and worship bands to see. Two of them had timers running down so the services would begin with military precision. In one of them, I got the sense of a NASA Space-X launch: Three-Two-One and here’s Pastor Bill…boom!

It’s kind of a “thing” these days that people have purpose-built meeting rooms. They are dark, often windowless places designed with acoustics and utility in mind. Thus, they have sound systems engineered by JBL or Bose along with the initial architectural considerations and the gathering hall can also be a basketball court, a theater for performances, or a large dining hall. Much of this can certainly be justified economically. The downside is that the longing for something beautiful and pregnant with some sacred story and eternal mystery is not satisfied in any way. The best I can say about this approach is that it relies completely on good technology to create a utilitarian environment with extraordinarily good sonic possibilities for the band, singers, preachers, and basketball games. Otherwise, it’s a dead zone for the eyes.

I’m hoping this trend will be interrupted by an awareness that a well built room with light and high ceilings can deliver amazing acoustics and visual glory that will put these highly engineered soundscapes into the past. As Sir Roger Scruton famously preached, “Beauty matters!”.

One gorgeous Lutheran church had a beautiful, light-filled sanctuary-bright colors, great naturally occurring acoustics and a high glass window in the shape of a cross. It too is “purpose-built” for Trinitarian Christian worship. The congregation literally sings the entire liturgy and there are shape singing aids available. It was a lovely and friendly place. We considered it but the leadership was in transition and the sermons were all about application. Over the past decade or two, systematic, exegetical preaching has become so life giving to us that we can’t spend too much of the remainder of our lives focusing on application. Our daily bread is the Word of God and while I believe God uses application style preaching mightily, a steady diet ultimately amounts to spoon-feeding.

The Good New Baptist Thing

A large, Reformed Baptist congregation with a Classical Christian Academy was our initial finalist. The lovely hallways were graced with a rich gallery of museum quality paintings of Calvin, Luther, Spurgeon, Hus, and others along with explanations of their legacies. Other frames contained interesting excerpts from the “Gun-wad” Bible, Native American translations, and other important Christian artifacts. The preaching was outstanding, albeit fully Baptistic with few if any elements of the preaching that I’d take much exception to. Vital preaching is had there. The band was fabulous and the worship pastor was sensitive to good theology in his selection of songs and hymns, both modern and ancient. He, on occasion, did something I think every worship leader today should do, namely cut the music, and do extensive a Capella singing. We are in a spectator culture now and this moves people out of the problem of “vicarious worship”, i.e., letting the professionals worship in place of us.

But we opted not to make this a church home either. Though the theology was solid and our exceptions to the theology were easily bearable, the format was not liturgical in the historic sense, and we found ourselves longing for forms of corporate worship we would call “life-giving”. The basic elements of this service were:

• Welcome and announcements

• Worship music/corporate singing

Preaching

• Close

• Using a broad brush, the largest gap we felt was not hearing other Christians actually participating in this gathering. I’m sure many were singing but it was a large group and the band up on stage was the only audible source of worship. In the end, we need to hear other Christians doing things corporately, things we didn’t hear or see in this particular church. What were those missing things we felt impoverished without?

Impoverished without Liturgy?

First, approaching the Lord without corporate and individual repentance made us seem like we were being presumptuous. That important step has become a bright indicator of a church’s self-awareness in my mind. God is holy and I need to be reminded of that regularly and this by individual and corporate repentance, particularly corporate repentance. Pastors — sorry but it’s not enough for you to open it up for corporate repentance either; you should be the Repenters in Chief. People will follow.

Secondly, we need the communing of other Christians’ voices mixing with our own in statements of faith, such as the Apostles or the Nicene Creed. Particularly in places where cultural Christianity is deep, the recitation of our core beliefs is a major opening for us to commune together in confession of these eternal truths (You believe what exactly?!). By hearing the voices of our friends, neighbors and strangers as they acknowledge these ancient and agreed upon truths, we are again “grounded” in them. We are refreshed in our awareness that we are trodding the ancient and received paths of Life itself; others walk this trail with us. We are not alone.

Thirdly, as a former contemporary worship leader I am of the persuasion we entered a golden era of worship music back in the 1970s and some enduring gems are still being written today. True, there’s a lot of self-centered nonsense being sung, but it would be trite and incorrect to claim there’s nothing good happening in Christian worship music today. 

However, even in churches with a high regard for good, Reformed theology and artistic excellence, there can be an undue dependence on technology that actually obscures worshipping as a community. The surround sound is so . . . well . . . surrounding . . .  that I’m suddenly only a passive observer. A good measure of whether we’re encouraging passive or vicarious worship is whether or not one believes one’s own voice is making any difference at all to the singing. If I can silently mouth the words and my neighbor still thinks I’m really singing, perhaps my singing doesn’t really matter to the collective effort. Yes, I still should sing, but folks can feel like they’re competing with professionals and shut down their own active participation. 

Fourthly, the dark, engineered environment shows a strong emphasis on teaching the Word but not on beauty, form, or reverence. As such, it’s hard to envision the smoke of our songs and prayers rising in a pleasing sacrifice, an incense perfuming the throne of God as they could. It is a weekly Christian conference in what looks like a Christian conference center. Great coffee, music and vibes do not necessarily a sacrificial offering make.

Fifthly, I have come to believe that Christian worship should not disregard ancient forms simply because of the errors of high church culture throughout the ages or because, as Jeffrey Meyers has pointed out, “Christian leaders often only look to the New Testament for models and insight into Christian worship”. As a result, most of the Christian services I’ve attended in my four plus decades of Christian experience have not moved in any logical way towards a climax. 

Every church has a liturgy, whether they acknowledge it or not. And as Meyers deftly points out, “Liturgical churches are the ones who have thought about those (liturgical) elements and their proper order”. There must be thoughtful movement and direction in our times of Christian worship. Yes, the perfect Sacrifice has been given once for all and we no longer sacrifice animals rendering them into savory smoke offerings, but the New Testament uses this same language of sacrifice, priesthood and smoke offering imagery to describe our worship. Quoting Anglican scholar Philip Carrington, Meyers points out, “The old religion died in A.D. 70 and gave birth to two children. The elder was modern Judaism without temple or priest or sacrifice. The younger was Christianity which was proud possessor of all three. What links Hebrews and Revelation is its insistence on this fact. Christianity is the true heir of the old faith. To it have been transferred the priesthood and its sacrifice.”

Conclusion

All this is to say something’s lacking in Evangelicalism and I’d propose that my recent experience of searching for a church has led me to believe this lack is a big deal. It is contributing to spiritual anemia, and it lives at an intersection of faith and practice. Good preaching and great worship music are important as elements, but they are not the totality of Biblical Christian worship. Disembodied from a specific end point, these isolated elements can be experienced on a groggy, Sunday morning as dream states or extra-corporeal journeys if they’re not directed at something beyond mere scholarship and application. Our corporate worship must lead us to the mount of God where he calls his people upward-together, with all decorum and prepared hearts, to be fed by Him on His perfect Word and the Sacrament of His banqueting table.

So, where did we land? Our church-search dilemma originated from having to be away for most of the year, a circumstance we will likely face again next year. Thus, I make it clear I’m able to contribute and participate in another fellowship, but we are members of a CREC church in Maine, one which we hope to return to and still rely upon.

We have landed at a conservative Anglican Church in Florida. I sought out the counsel of my elders in Maine and they were gracious in their prayers and insights. I presented them the dilemma of “great preaching and music versus the things we otherwise find important too”. One of our elders asked, “Can you access good teaching during the week? If so, it seems that being with God’s people experiencing meaningful, directed forms of worship would be most life-giving to you and your family”. Well, with podcasts and books and even live radio we have access to an embarrassment of riches when it comes to good teaching in America. We concluded that we needed those life-giving forms and if the Anglican church here provided them, we would put a stake in the ground there and serve as God enables us. It didn’t hurt that the preaching at this Anglican assembly is excellent and the head shepherd, like our pastor in Maine, is a guy who is at home with people and loves them.

We had to get over the “deal breakers” before even considering it. Historic Trinitarian Reformed theology, a commitment to inerrancy and the authority of Scripture, recognition of God’s design for human sexuality as being solely male and female and a muscular opposition to the slaughter of unborn children. All this was cleared early on, and deep devotion was evident in the leadership. Ultimately, that sense of shalom and God’s rest whenever we attended supported those more easily measured things.

The main exception is that the church appears quite egalitarian, though this does not extend to the pastor’s role. In the coming weeks, I anticipate a gracious discussion with the pastor about it but, while some will differ with me, I see it as a place with far less trouble than Paul faced in Corinth and therefore still worthy of my love and support. When there may be an Anglican woman filling the pulpit, I likely will not be in attendance. But I will not commit the sin of schism where schism is not called for. This may be a personal threshold different from others and must be considered carefully in whatever context you find yourself; but for now, Anglican it is.

All of us should realize we have important theological work to do yet ahead to deal with this and other errors we ourselves aren’t yet aware of which we may be still holding. I don’t see this as trivial. The egalitarian scholars have done their work infecting many churches but I remain unconvinced that they’ve done anything except take people on high-sounding journeys of many, many words that ultimately result in a text somehow meaning the exact opposite of its plain meaning. And, in most cases, their conclusions are also in direct opposition to plain readings of many other texts. Still, if you immerse yourself in that kind of reading without going to the counterpoints, the seduction of egalitarianism may grab you since you likely grew up in a culture whose waters have been treated for a long time now.

Flagler Beach, Florida

March 2023