Coloring and Constructing Worship
Open the Doors by C. Harry Causey, Music Revelation, $7.00
Worship Is a Verb by Robert E. Webber, Word, $12.95
Reviewed by David Shelley, pastor of worship and adult ministries, Sun River Church, Rancho Cordova, California
Increased interest does not automatically produce increased ability. Protestant worship illustrates the point.
The concern for genuine and significant worship has risen like helium the last few years. Thanks to burgeoning resources, we know more about worship, yet all the information has made us more willing than able. Few babies learn to walk by being convinced they should.
Harry Causey’s Open the Doors and Robert Webber’s Worship Is a Verb are good news for turning intentions into actions. Given the diversity of worship practices, these authors have taken on no easy task. Not every church will immediately build its services directly from these books. Many, however, will find their perspectives and suggestions practical.
Open the Doors suggests that churches develop a worship team, plan services unified around a theme, involve the congregation, and exploit the creative potential of every element of the service, directing the attention to God.
Causey calls himself a “free-lance minister of music.” Prior to developing his speaking and consulting interests, he was with Richard Halverson at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., and spent the previous eleven years at College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati.
Causey wrote the book to help worship leaders “think creatively about what they are doing, to avoid the ruts,” he said in an interview.
Sunday morning can provide “either a most fulfilling activity-or perhaps, the longest, dullest hour of their entire week if they’ve come just to ‘play church,’ ” writes Causey. “In a society dominated by television and computers, people come into the local church conditioned by high-speed lives and slick presentations. … Often the local church does not measure up to what they hear and see in the world.”
The answer, Causey said, is not to compete with the mass media. “Often we concentrate on the horizontal. We make announcements to one another, sing to one another, pray at one another, all in the name of worship. It’s no wonder people get bored. You could do that at the Kiwanis club. But if we focus their attention on the Lord, not on people, the power released in worship is more than enough to satisfy.”
Open the Doors reflects College Hill’s experience when God-centered worship became a top priority. What he called “a fairly traditional evangelical church” developed a worship that attracted people. Charismatics and noncharismatics “were able to worship together without tension,” Causey said.
Over years, he said, people became accustomed to creativity. “The trust level has to grow. When a congregation is conditioned to go by an order of worship, they end up worshiping the order. If you make changes without warning, they don’t like it.”
The book, therefore, first lays out a process of implementing creativity, beginning with the selection and preparation of a worship team that eventually plans the services.
Among the biggest obstacles to worship is lack of preparation. It is unrealistic, Causey said, to expect people to suddenly switch their thoughts to worship at a given hour on Sunday morning. If people gather to do worship, not merely to observe it, that necessitates preparing them and developing an understanding of the significance of worship.
Causey offers ideas on the atmosphere of the sanctuary, lighting, the use of the bulletin, the organ, the choir, silence, congregational singing, prayer, creeds, offering, preaching, and processionals. He provides insight for helping churches think through their present reasons and methods for worship.
Open the Doors is available only through Music Revelation, 7 Elmwood Court, Rockville, MD 20850.
Robert Webber’s Worship Is a Verb also aims to get the whole congregation actively participating in worship. Like Causey, Webber considers it a shame that the encounter with the Almighty is too often turned into boredom. Both want to balance freedom and order in worship.
They communicate their goals, however, with strikingly different emphases. Causey speaks of color to people dulled by the drabness of formality. Webber emphasizes structure to people whose freedom has produced only a sickly shapelessness.
Webber, a theology professor at Wheaton College, has written extensively on worship. This is possibly his most practical book, particularly because of the excellent study guide to help a church bring its practice closer to its theology. “Reading the book apart from the study guide,” Webber said, “largely misses the point.”
The worship structure Webber considers so important is fourfold: We prepare to worship, we hear God speak, we respond to God, and God sends us forth.
The preparation moves the worshiper to a point of readiness to hear the Word of God.
The reading and preaching of the Word are essential because that is how the worshiper hears God speak. Contrary to much contemporary practice, Webber suggests preaching precede the actual worship. “Throughout history,” he writes, “God revealed, then the people responded.”
The worship response is centered around the Communion table. Webber emphasizes the significance of the symbolic messages in the Lord’s Supper: “We tend to acknowledge the verbal, analytical side of our being-the left brain-but pay little attention to the subjective, aesthetic side-the right brain.” By ignoring the visual media, Webber says, we severely limit our worship experience.
Finally, Webber’s service ends with God sending people forth with renewed spirits to their mission in the world.
Webber has experienced excellent results from his method, but he admits that worship renewal in a local church will take “at least five years.”
He also encourages adherence to the church year. “I have found that the church year organizes the interior spiritual journey throughout the year, defining every day in relationship to Christ,” Webber said. “Rejecting the church year flattens out everything in a way that denies true variety.”
Aware that his ideas are sometimes perceived as too “high church,” Webber argues that his structure is flexible. “You cannot have worship renewal that runs counter to the personality and history of the congregation,” Webber said, “but an understanding of worship will help churches of all kinds do what they do much better.”
Webber clearly emphasizes the need for the structural elements; Causey emphasizes the need for creative expression. But both are concerned essentially that worshipers maintain the right focus.
At first glance, both might make the reader uncomfortable. But both exercise the thought processes, and nobody gets in shape without working through the discomfort.
The Ultimate Emulation
The Jesus Style by Gayle Erwin, Word, $9.95
Reviewed by Van Campbell, pastor, Calvary Evangelical Free Church, Indiana, Pennsylvania
“It was only one of the many placards we saw wielded by the protestors of the sixties, but it arrested me. The sign simply said, ‘Jesus-yes! Christianity-no!’
“I pondered, Why, through all these years, has the reality of Jesus remained innately attractive while our interpretations of him have proved less captivating?”
With these statements, Gayle Erwin introduces us to his search for an intimate acquaintance with the Jesus who so captured the attention of his contemporaries. Erwin, now engaged in speaking, writing, and counseling pastors after nearly twenty years in the pastorate and seven in college teaching, explores Jesus’ nature, especially as seen in his greatest-in-the-kingdom declarations.
When I asked him to summarize the book’s message, he responded, “To communicate that Jesus was the one totally other-centered person.”
Chapter 2, “The Jesus Approach,” is particularly stimulating. Through examples drawn from Jesus’ life, Erwin shows how drastically God’s methods differ from ours, thus demonstrating our often dim insight into God’s nature.
Referring to the way Jesus arrived, Erwin writes, “If God would have consulted with me, I would have recommended that he make the announcement with a little more flair. Perhaps he could stand on the moon with an expensive microphone, hang two billion-watt speakers out in space, and then broadcast: ‘Hello-o-o-o-o, Wo-oo-rld. This is Go-o-o-o-d.’
“But no, he persists in picking a desolate spot.”
In Part II Erwin reminds us that Jesus is “Number One” in Christianity, that Jesus’ command to love made him “One for All,” and that by love we serve one another, making us “All for One.” Finally, he points out from John 13 and 17 that corporate love and unity are the best preevangelism.
The heart of the book is Part III, “The Jesus Style,” which consists of fifteen short chapters devoted to statements by or about Jesus that describe his nature.
“At Your Service” (based on Jesus’ statement, “Whoever wants to be first must be slave of all”) carefully articulates how servanthood differs from being manipulated by someone who might impose on our servant’s heart. Not one person who tried to manipulate Jesus got an expected answer, according to Erwin. “All of them received an expression of the true feelings of Jesus. … In each case he protected his ability to choose” rather than be manipulated.
In “I’d Rather See a Sermon,” we are shown from Jesus’ life that “the most effective form of Christian leadership is leadership by example.” Rather than taking unchanged the world’s signals on how to educate, we are encouraged to study and emulate Jesus, who, for example, recognized love as the goal, not knowledge for its own sake.
Based on Jesus’ experience with his disciples, Erwin concludes, “Education in the Jesus style keeps the number of students for any teacher limited to the number he or she can love and closely associate with.” When I asked him how that could be applied to the local church, he replied that though a pastor spends time with large groups, “his major time will be spent with a smaller number whom he is equipping to do the work of the ministry.”
Of particular use to younger pastors is Erwin’s observation about Jesus’ authority. He cautions Christian leaders not to demand submission from those they lead, but to follow the example of Jesus, who earned the right to have a following by being, as Erwin described it, “followable.”
His concluding sentence sums up the book well: “Give yourself away and keep growing!” At least on the level of experience, many of us will concur with Erwin’s comment: “I think Jesus is still to be discovered.”
In less than two hundred pages, Gayle Erwin has provided much food for those hungry for intimate fellowship with Jesus.
Windows on the Preacher’s Craft
Fundamentals of Preaching by John Killinger, Fortress, $9.95
Reviewed by Timothy K. Jones, pastor, Christ Our Peace Church of the Brethren, The Woodlands, Texas
In Fundamentals of Preaching, John Killinger writes that every preacher sooner or later has “the preacher’s dream,” haunted with visions of lost metaphors and manuscripts Even the most eloquent occasionally feel anxious at presuming to speak for God.
Killinger therefore sets out to offer more than a simplistic catalogue of speaking techniques. Digesting “literally hundreds” of books on preaching and rubbing shoulders with preaching’s greats has not blunted Killinger’s sense that proclaiming God’s word is an awesome task. Nor has teaching homiletics at Vanderbilt Divinity School for fifteen years.
Killinger nevertheless has a great deal to say about great preaching. He penned the book’s first draft during his last semester of teaching. Then he filed the manuscript for two years while he settled into his new pastorate at First Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. It is, as he writes, “a book by a professor of preaching, who is supposed to know all there is to know about such things, revised by a parish minister, who knows what it is really like to be on the firing line every Sunday.”
Indeed, when interviewed by phone for this review, Killinger observed, “I’ve spent the last forty minutes working on my sermon. I’m sitting here thinking of people I know-how this will wash with them.”
Such experience injects a freshness into the book. Killinger walks the reader through the actual process of sermon construction. On the first stage, getting “the germ, the idea,” for example, Killinger explains why preachers “lose 90 percent of the best sermon ideas they get.” They miss recording fleeting insights from daily life. Killinger gives remedies-for example, the trick of Ernest Campbell, for years minister at New York’s Riverside Church. Campbell always keeps a pocket notebook with him. He can be seen, Killinger notes, “making entries while riding a bus, reading a book, or chatting with friends at lunch.” Once filled, the notebooks are filed. Then, from time to time, Campbell spends a couple of hours thumbing through the notes, grabbing the “keepers.”
Killinger’s next step: the “brainstorming” method for generating an outline. This procedure requires pausing with the text or germ idea at the outset and jotting down random thoughts or anecdotes that bear on the sermon’s theme.
When writing a sermon, Killinger explains, the shortest distance between two points is not always the straight line of cool logic. “Often it is the most meandering, leisurely line that can be imagined”; there must be space for unhurried reflection. Killinger reprints some of his own jottings to show how such early brainstorming adds to a final outline.
Killinger then moves through the actual writing. He looks at ways to make a sermon unroll itself “like a ball of wool which has no knots or tangles in it.” He asks, “Will it sweep people along with a sense of its movement?” He aims for a sequential sermon, where “one point follows another in ascending fashion” to give the feeling of going somewhere.
Killinger advises writing a sermon in an oral, conversational style rather than as an essay or dissertation. There may well be-perhaps should be- broken phrases, sentences ending in prepositions, and colloquialisms. The best way to inject such hallmarks of extemporaneous speech is to simply talk the sermon while we write, he suggests.
There is also ample advice on illustrations: “Arrange the illustrative material so that the emotional level is ascending, not descending. … Avoid using powerful illustrations early in the sermon or weak ones late in the sermon.”
“Real preaching,” writes Killinger, “grows out of the counseling session, the board meeting, the parish call. … If only we learn to listen to people, we shall find they have many stories to tell . . . and that these become almost instant fodder for sermons.”
Proclamation, Killinger insists, must be rooted in the Bible. Otherwise sermons are “like cut flowers that fade before the evening.” He recommends a minister live in the Bible’s pages “day by day and year by year, until it fairly saturates his or her being. Pour over it the way people review old family albums, looking for their roots of existence in the faces and environments of days gone by.”
Killinger calls preachers to work on sermons “the way great novelists work on their novels or great poets at their poetry.” His book revolves around the skills and tools needed for that important weekly task. It aims not to be a theology of preaching as much as a first-hand tour of the craft.
NEW AND NOTEWORTHY
Multiple Church-Staff Handbook by Harold J. Westing, Kregel, $10.95
“It is not biblical to think of ministering alone. The New Testament is the history of men and women working side by side in ministry,” according to Harold Westing. Teamwork is essential not only to ministry but to the proper functioning of the church. Westing believes a church staff should be balanced by taking into account the variety of gifts and strengths individual ministers possess. He presents a systematic analysis of how team ministry can be so enhanced.
Chapters cover such areas as goal setting, role expectations, hiring staff, and conducting retreats. At the end of each chapter are projects and exercises that can be used to build team ministry. To those who find themselves part of a multiple-person staff, this book offers new and practical advice.
Comforting the Bereaved by Warren Wiersbe and David Wiersbe, Moody Press, $4.95
Warren and David Wiersbe, father and son, bring forty years of combined pastoral experience to this tightly written book. The Wiersbes’ message is that the pastor has a vital ministry of comfort to the bereaved.
They point out the pitfalls of an oversimplified theology which instructs mourners to “be happy because God had a good reason for calling a loved one to heaven.” They give practical advice on how to deal with the grief-stricken family, the visits to the home, the funeral service, and the lengthy follow-up pastoral care that is inevitably needed.
Building Community in Youth Groups by Denny Rydberg, Group Books, $11.95
Have you ever wished for a book that consisted almost solely of practical exercises aimed at building a Christ-centered youth group? Denny Rydberg has put together hundreds of such strategies, as he calls them, carefully designed to develop a sound youth program. He presents a five-step approach toward group building: bond building, opening up, affirming, stretching, and deeper sharing and goal setting.
Rydberg describes this vision for his own youth group: “I’d like to see the body of Christ, the ‘forever family of God,’ become a reality in my group. I’d like a ‘family feel’ to characterize my group. I want everyone to feel cared for and loved.”
Lyman Coleman wrote the foreword, and Rydberg’s style is similar to the Serendipity series. Any youth pastor could benefit from these ideas.
Speaking His Peace by Laura J. Crowell, Morehouse-Barlow, $8.95
“Read this book aloud,” writes Laura Crowell, professor emeritus of public speaking at the University of Washington. She approaches preaching not only from a speech professor’s point of view but as an experienced lay Christian. Her advice to read the book aloud makes sense, as each chapter contains exercises meant to improve sermon preparation and delivery.
Crowell presents chapters on many aspects of sermonizing-from structure to gestures to the use of voice. Each chapter includes quotable excerpts from literature, Scripture, famous sermons, and speeches.
New Models for Financing the Local Church by Raymond B. Knudsen, Morehouse-Barlow, $8.95
When a budget committee writes the budget relying solely on last year’s figures, little thought is given to significantly increasing church funds-and ministry. Raymond Knudsen offers a vision of how church income can be radically increased.
He skewers the myths that surround church fund raising and gently leads the reader into proven ways to raise money in a “cashless society.” The author examines a wide range of fundraising strategies from the “every-member canvass” to grants, trusts, and annuities. His book offers practical help and hope.
Do You Mean Me, Lord? by Robert G. Cox, Westminster, $8.95
Consider this book a primer for anyone approaching ordained ministry. It tackles that oft-cited but seldom-understood concept of “the call to ministry.” Robert Cox covers a variety of aspects, including such issues as college preparation, seminary family life, and alternatives to parish ministry.
Writing with flair and humor, he examines the demands placed on the pastor of the eighties. He cautions would-be pastors to consider seriously their qualifications and the fact that, at least in the mainline denominations, there is a clergy surplus. He also addresses the issue of women in ministry, citing the statistic that soon women will constitute half of all seminary students.
For a person in seminary or anybody interested in the nature of the call to the pastorate, this book offers solid information.
-Reviewed by Fritz Newenhuyse
Wheaton, Illinois
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
