Monday, September 01, 2014

 

Not So Sure That Is The Problem

I found this post from Seedbed Blog fascinating:
Many forget (or don’t know) that “contemporary” worship was inextricably linked to the Charismatic Movement of the 1960’s and 70’s. This connection forged a musical style that was rooted in a particular understanding of the Spirit in worship....

The answer is found in looking at what happened when “praise and worship” was adopted by mainline denominations. During the 1990’s many mainline congregations began to import the songs, sounds, and some of the sights (like hand raising and clapping) of the praise and worship style. In many cases, what got lost was the robust pneumatology behind this approach to worship.
There is an enormous amount of wisdom here and also an incredible mistake. The wisdom is that the worship style and charismatic pneumatology are inextricably linked. The mistake is that charismatic pneumatology is somehow more "right" or better.

Charismatic pneumatology holds that the presence of the Holy Spirit must be accompanied by the ecstatic and the miraculous. A more traditional view would be that the presence of the Holy Spirit CAN be accompanied by those things, but it will not always be accompanied by them. While the apostles certainly engaged in the miraculous, I find it hard to believe that it happened EVERY time they got together. And so the question arise what do we do when the Holy Spirit chooses to speak to us in His still, small voice.

What more, what do we do when the Holy Spirit is interacting with Fred by shouting and Joe in meditation? And what is accomplished when Fred shouts at Joe that he is "missing" the Holy Spirit when the Holy Spirit is deep in Joe's heart hard at work?

I cannot help but note that miracles add veracity to the truth of God, but they are not of themselves that truth. Once we have grown to a point in our lives where we have a deep and hard-to-break understanding of that veracity that perhaps the Holy Spirit will begin to work in our lives on levels less prone to ostentation. I wonder if in it should not be Joe shouting at Fred, in Fred's 10th year of shouting at him, "perhaps it is YOU that is missing what the Holy Spirit is doing."


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