Dear Liturgical Experimentalists:
The quest of the “now generation” for experiences that overwhelm the senses is gaining momentum in our swinging churches. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, located in the shadow of the U. S. Capitol, last month staged a “Total Environment Eucharist.” So bombarded were my senses by the service’s sight-sound-smell-taste-kinesthesia stimuli that after I left the church bright and noisy Pennsylvania Avenue seemed like a soothing tranquilizer.
Patterned after pseudo-psychedelic light and sound shows, the service was highlighted by brilliant projections on a large screen behind the communion table. A succession of flickering, luminous images—superimposed, in and out of focus—of religious and abstract art, nature scenes, and spattered colors floated before one’s eyes as the magnificent communion liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer was read. The auditory sense was excited by sacred and profane music wafting from loudspeakers. All the while a heavy smell of incense flooded the nostrils. Taste buds were innervated by the elements: brown bread and dry wine. Kinesthetic feelings were aroused as people followed the rector’s suggestion to dance in the aisles during the offertory (three Beatle numbers). I don’t know how many people concentrated on the Eucharist, but the consensus seemed to be that St. Mark’s avant-garde churchmen had put on a kicky, mind-expanding show.
To observe the cultural force that had shaped the Episkies’ luminoptic spectacle, later that night I visited Washington’s only rock ’n roll light show. This environment was even more total than St. Mark’s, as undulating colors on all sides mesmerized the eyes and the driving cacophony of amplified guitars produced pain in the inner ear. The frugging to the live “U. S. Mail” rock group there was less hectic, however, than that done to the Episkies’ Beatle records.
I mention these experiences to all ecclesiastical aesthetes to spur further liturgical renewal. Relevant churchmen must strive for “total environments” and boldly implement the divine command, “Let there be light.” To really be “where it’s at,” we should trade in flannelgraphs and chalk-drawing easels for color wheels and a dozen slide projectors and also inject some “soul music” into our services. It all else fails, we might even sound forth the Word to see if it will generate light.
An “angel of light” sounding off,
EUTYCHUS III
FINDING A CURE
To your editorial “We Are Sick” (Sept. 29) I say, “Me too!” It encourages me to see more and more responsible people voicing this attitude. Our “Big Brother” government will not solve our problems in civil rights, poverty, or foreign policy with give-away programs, as is being witnessed on every front.
ROBERT E. BLAZEK
Parker Heights Christian Church
Odessa, Tex.
If “We Are Sick” is an accurate reflection of the way the editors understand life in the ghetto, they are much sicker than they know.
FRITZ GUY
Chicago, Ill.
Thank you! Thank you! I had lost hope that ever again would a voice be raised for the majority.
JOHN B. EBERHART
Vista, Calif.
When I read your editorial, my brother, I wanted to put my arms around you to comfort and assure you, for I know how frustrating and frightening the forces of evil can be.…
You and I and all the rest of God’s people certainly must work and suffer with him at the frontier line of his ever-advancing Kingdom. We must live in this world and be his agents of projection, for surely we are part of the means through which he makes his Kingdom secure; he has called us to be. We must live the task.…
We need to be reminded that we have that which the power of evil force can never have: through Jesus Christ we have assurance of victory; we can know that our labor, our pain, is not in vain.…
We need to withdraw, if only for a moment, to hear our Lord say, “Fear not, for I am with you,” that we may be revived and strengthened in our witness to the absolute truth that God will prevail, … that his goodness and his love triumph over all evil, that it is evil that will perish, not God—to proclaim with much joy the good news that “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved”!
J. B. SCEARCE, JR.
Clark Memorial Methodist Church
Houston, Tex.
You have expressed rhetorically and literally what I feel so deeply. May God help us to lay aside every weight and open the door to the Great Physician who can heal of illness.
LANEY JOHNSON
First Baptist Church
Throckmorton, Tex.
HOW TO SUCCEED
The poem “And to the Church at Laodicea, Write …” provided a good supplemental thought to the excellent article, “Did Success Spoil American Protestantism?” (Sept. 29).…
Until the Church makes the effort to put the Christian love it so often talks about into practice in this love-starved world, its message will be spewed out of the mouth of those who may be led to taste it as well as out of the mouth of the One it claims to represent.
EUGENE LINCOLN
Editor
The Sabbath Sentinel
Berrien Springs, Mich.
I was delighted to read the article on American Protestantism. Many of us are struggling to find ways of communicating with suburban culture without conforming to it and without truncating the Gospel. And too often we feel stymied. A clear understanding of where we stand and how we got there is a must. Mr. Marsden’s article has helped me appreciably in this, and will continue to help me in defining and working out my task in Christ our Lord.
EDWIN WALHOUT
Webster Christian Reformed Church
Webster, N. Y.
SORRY, WRONG NUMBER
Your statistics about evangelism in the Presbyterian Church, U. S. (“A Call to Southern Presbyterians, Sept. 29), are grossly incorrect. Instead of having “only 4,000 additions by profession of faith” in 1966, our General Assembly’s minutes (p. 138) show that we received 25,532 on profession of faith and had a net gain in membership of over 5,000. We are not at all proud of these figures, but at least they are over six times the number you gave us credit for having received.
J. MALCOLM MURCHISON
First Presbyterian Church
Concord, N. C.
• Mr. Murchison (and others who have written) are wholly right; the statistics from our informant were incorrect, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY apologizes. We editorialized that it took nearly 240 Southern Presbyterian ministers and members to make one convert last year. Actually, it took 37—not a shining record, but considerably better than our editorial indicated.—ED.
CIVIL RIGHTS IN MILWAUKEE
It is easy to write about social justice, and the concern of those in the evangelical movement for racial justice, but you are betraying yourself when you pick out Father James Groppi’s most acute moment of weakness (“Unrest in Milwaukee,” Editorial, Sept. 29) and use this to give him a blanket condemnation; in the process you ignore the basic issues which he is going after. Somehow, I still think that we ought to be grateful that a devoted churchman is leading the civil-rights movement in Milwaukee; if he were to be displaced now, only a more radical and a much more violent leader would take his place. But then that is a pattern which all of us have consistently followed: publicly we disavow the moderate Negro leadership, and then we jump back in surprise when the moderate leadership which was not given a fair hearing by us is replaced by a violent form of leadership. When will we ever learn?
RONALD L. BERGEN
Lutheran Church of the Escarpment
Lewiston, N. Y.
You never even mentioned the fact that the white power structure of Milwaukee won’t listen. You didn’t say a word about the abuse heaped upon the demonstrators for eight nights or more by so-called Christian people. You never even hinted at the fact that these people should love their neighbor like you want blacks to love whites, regardless of how we are treated in America.
JOHNNY K. BRYANT
Gay Street Baptist Church
Columbus, Ohio
JUST THE OPPOSITE
I am pleased to see the first of my series of four articles on “Vatican II and the Ecumenical Movement” (Oct. 13) and I hope that the series will be of value to those who are seeking to assess what has been going on in the Roman Church.
There is, however, one unfortunate error … giving the opposite sense of what was intended. On page 11, column 2, line 48, “without” should be read instead of “with.” Thus amended, the sentence says: “Roman Catholicism conceives its ecumenical task as being, in the first place, renewal of its own image, including the clearing out of the outdated lumber that litters its household, and the reformulation, without dogmatic compromise, of its teachings where this can be done to advantage.”
PHILIP EDGCUMBE HUGHES
Decatur, Ga.
THE GEM’S OTHER FACET
Cary Weisiger’s treatment of “The Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification” (Sept. 1) is a gem in the discussion shaping up around “Sanctification Rediscovered,” as William Horden entitled a significant chapter in his New Directions in Theology Today: Introduction.
If I might be permitted one brief footnote to Dr. Weisiger’s study, it would be at the juncture where he says:
Although these imperatives indicate a moral exertion that makes it impossible to believe that the desire and possibility of sinning are extinct, they rest upon such a complete internal change wrought by divine grace in the baptizand that a liberal response to grace (“let us continue in sin that grace may abound”) becomes impossible.
It is not the possibility of sinning that is excluded in a Wesleyan understanding of sanctification, but its necessity.
Wesleyans attempt to hold in balance recognition of the fact of moral effort, striving, and growing … while taking seriously frequent references to purity, perfection, fullness, and adequacy as an accomplished fact.… This tension between the once-for-all and the moment-by-moment is what Daniel Steele called “the Wesleyan paradox,” the paradox of a love that is both perfected and growing, a purity “as he is pure” combined with unceasing effort in the developing arts of saintliness, to borrow William Sangster’s eloquent phrase.
The Wesleyan asks only that the distinction between sinfulness and humanity be kept clear, a distinction forced upon him by the fact of the Incarnation. Holiness, as he understands it, is not dehumanizing, and sinfulness is no essential part of humanity.…
W. T. PURKISER
Kansas City, Mo.
We agree that the word “sanctify” means to consecrate or to set apart for a sacred use. However, the fellows on the Wesleyan side of the fence say that it has another … meaning in the New Testament … more prominent than the above definitions. They say it also means to cleanse or purify. Why is it that our Calvinist friends do not mention this meaning when they are expounding their doctrine of sanctification by growth?
The Amplified New Testament and several other recent translations support both meanings of the word. Consider Acts 26:18. There is mention of those “who are sanctified by faith in me” in the RSV. In the Amplified it is “those who are consecrated and purified by faith in me.” There are other references in which the word “sanctification” also means cleansing or purification.
Is there any chance in the world that sanctification means an instantaneous cleansing from all sin?
JOHN R. FERGUSON
First Church of the Nazarene
Cheyenne, Wyo.
SCHEDULING A STAR
It seems very unfair to both American and German Christians to publish such a misinformed review of Kirchentag as that of Mr. Montgomery (Current Religious Thought, Sept. 1). He is entitled to project his own opinions into the complex problems currently plaguing German Protestants, but statements such as Ralph Bunche being one of two “stellar speakers” who participated in the Kirchentag program lead me to question whether Mr. Montgomery even attended. All that we participants heard from Mr. Bunche was a letter regretting that he could not come to Hanover because of the Near East crisis.
GARY A. MARSHALL
New Haven, Conn.
• Our reporter inadvertently dropped the word “scheduled” before “some stellar speakers.” Dr. Bunche’s speech may yet appear in a published report of the Kirchentag program.—ED.
