Editor's Bookshelf: Survival Through Community
An interview with Charles Colson, author of Being the Body
David Neff | posted 5/01/2003 12:00AM
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Churches have to experiment with worship forms as the culture around them changes. Of the various trends you see in our worship practice, what encourages you most and what worries you most?
What encourages me most is the commitment to biblical teaching, which remains the great strength of the evangelical movement. What discourages me most is the failure to make people in the pews understand that worship is a participating community experience as opposed to entertainment.
In the book I describe going to a particular church in which I felt like I was being ushered into a theater. In and out in 42 minutes, with incredible music and everything done perfectly. In the 22-minute sermon, the pastor really taught the Bible. But it was like buying a ticket to a show.
On the one hand, I went away discouraged because I didn't feel like I had participated in a worship service. On the other hand, I realized that all of those boomers—and the pews were just jammed full of boomers—were getting a good solid dose of the Scripture. I saw both the good and the bad, and I saw the thing that worries me the most and then the things that encourage me the most, in that one service.
I just wish we could make it what poet Allen Tate called "knowledge carried to the heart." We have to do more than just give people biblical knowledge. We have to figure out how to carry it to the heart.
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Related Elsewhere:
Being the Body by Charles Colson is this month's selection for the Christianity TodayEditor's Bookshelf. Other sites of interest include:
Read our review by David Neff
Buy the book online
Buy other books of Charles Colson
BreakPoint Online offers transcripts, articles, and columns by Colson. Listen to Colson's daily or archivedBreakpoint broadcasts at oneplace.com.
Charles Colson's other books include (available on Christianbook.com): How Now Shall We Live?, The Body, Against the Night, Justice that Restores, Science and Evolution, The Christian in Today's Culture, Why I Believe in Christ, Life Sentence, The Problem of Evil, Loving God, and Born Again.
Christianity Today printed a profile of Colson in 2001 called, "The Legacy of Prisoner 23226." Colson is also a regular columnist for Christianity Today
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